Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
Preimplantation polygenetic testing. The idea is that, when doing IVF, you sequence the genome of all the embryos and implant the ones that you predict will have properties that you like.<p>This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don&#x27;t want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes, you can make predictions for things that start to be very relevant to parents, like attractiveness or height or intelligence.<p>I don&#x27;t think people understand how important this is going to be. If the process is expensive, it will only be available to rich people. In a generation, maybe they&#x27;ll have children that are more intelligent or more attractive than average.<p>If that starts happening, I think it would have pretty negative effects on society, but there&#x27;s no way to really prevent it (rich people will just go to Singapore if you ban it in the US). So the only reasonable option is to have the government subsidize it and make it affordable to everyone.