Part of Genetic Frontiers Season 2: Genetics in American Politics & Culture, Sue Currell, PhD, discusses the disturbing echoes of eugenic thinking in American politics today. She calls eugenics “the backbone of political control and a progressive meritocracy,” and argues that “grip of eugenic ideas on American politics today is a political failure to imagine a world where value is not profit.”

Visit geneticfrontiers.org to hear more episodes on the promise, power, and perils of genetic information.

KEY TOPICS

• Reading of excerpts from “This May Be the Most Dangerous Thing Donald Trump Believes”: Eugenic Populism and the American Body Politic.

• How should we understand the administration’s agenda to “forge a society that is colorblind, merit-based, and only has two genders” in light of the eugenic history of the United States?

• How are you making sense of this focus on the gender binary, and whether it has a relationship to eugenic ideologies?

• From what you know about the history of efficiency in the United States, how are you thinking about the new Department of Government Efficiency?

• What is the story we're being fed by politicians? And what is the real story?

• How would you describe Trump's relationship to disability rights?

• Can you talk about the complicated histories of eugenics and abortion rights and how you think this is influencing America today?

• How do you think clinicians and scientists should be thinking about the role of science, in particular genetics, in America today?

Read full transcript of this episode here.

Timnit Gebru, PhD, AI expert, advocate, and founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and Émile P. Torres, PhD, a philosopher, discuss how eugenic ideologies are influencing Silicon Valley and driving the push for artificial general intelligence. They talk about how eugenic thinking pervades American culture, including Big Tech and medicine, and is foundational to the worldviews of some of the powerful people in the United States today.

KEY TOPICS

• Introduction to main idea of TESCREAL paper: the cultural push to develop artificial general intelligence is undergirded by eugenic thinking

• Dr. Timnit Gebru discusses her intellectual journey of tackling bias and discrimination in technology and becoming a vocal critic of Big Tech

• Review of the core ideas of the philosophies in the TESCREAL bundle (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism)

• Concrete examples of how TESCREALism is playing out in the United States today

• Why is it important to interrogate “the why” in our efforts to build artificial general intelligence?

• How does the TESCREAL framework serve as a jumping off point for taking a critical eye towards genetics and genomics research?

• Dr. Timnit Gebru & Dr. Émile P. Torres discuss their greatest fears about the future of eugenic thinking in American culture

• Thought experiment: how could knowing our likely date of death and cause of death from birth change our relationship to mortality?
  

A conversation with an award-winning science journalist and author, Angela Saini, about the alluring but dangerous pursuit of “improving” the human species through genetics and how it's driving American politics and policy today.

TOPICS

• The ideology of eugenics is fundamentally driven by a pursuit that can seem deceptively desirable: the “improvement of the human species.” What does it really mean to “improve” people?

• How does the pursuit of perfection drive eugenic thinking?

• How are you thinking about efforts today to scrub scientific research of engagement with gender and race?

• Across human history how have people thought about biological sex gender and social roles?

• What did DNA testing bring to the conversation about how patriarchy spread?

• What do you think medical and genetics professionals should really be paying attention to in terms of how science, in particular genetics, is being discussed today culturally and politically?

• How does taking a long view of human history inform how you're thinking about the political moment we're living through right now?

• Do you think the left / progressives have a cohesive story that people want to hear?

For episode show notes and resources go to: https://www.geneticfrontiers.org/episode9-angela-saini