{"id":95854,"date":"2025-08-26T00:04:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T00:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/95854\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T00:04:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T00:04:13","slug":"eugenics-is-more-dangerous-with-musk-and-noor-siddiqui","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/95854\/","title":{"rendered":"Eugenics Is More Dangerous With Musk and Noor Siddiqui"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last weekend my colleague, John Authers, argued<\/a> that George Orwell\u2019s 1984 (1949) is the most prophetic novel about our era. I would suggest that an earlier book written by another Old Etonian deserves to share the palm: Aldous Huxley\u2019s Brave New World (1932). Brave New World envisions a future in which genetic engineering has become so advanced that human beings are designed as cogs in the great industrial machine that is modernity: rulers (Alphas), middle managers (Betas) semi-skilled workers (Gammas), low-skilled workers (Deltas) and menial workers (Epsilons).<\/p>\n

Everywhere I look these days I am reminded of Huxley\u2019s world. The latest Silicon Valley fashion is for tech investors to fund fertility start-ups such as Orchid Health, which proclaims, \u201cSex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies.\u201d The latest billionaire status symbol is a quiver full of children: Elon Musk has more than a dozen and Peter Thiel, a late starter, reportedly has four. The plot of a new science-fiction series, Alien: Earth<\/a>, features trillionaires, ensconced in rival territories, who compete to produce the best super-humans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last weekend my colleague, John Authers, argued that George Orwell\u2019s 1984 (1949) is the most prophetic novel about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":95855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[64,63,53114,41268,336,70612,4273,36204,70613,128,670,69251,26847,12632],"class_list":["post-95854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-genetics","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-elon-reeve-musk","tag-genetic-engineering","tag-genetics","tag-george-wogan-bernard","tag-liberal","tag-national-security","tag-peter-andreas-thiel","tag-science","tag-sydney","tag-university-college-london","tag-view","tag-women"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}