Just the Facts with Gerald Posner

Why Our AI Autobiography has Some Publishers Spooked

This week a syndicated newspaper columnist wrote about one of our upcoming book projects, AI: An Autobiography, and treated it as what it is: a bold, strange, funny, unsettling experiment in letting a machine narrate its own life. At the very same time, Lois Whitman, the New York-Miami PR strategist who is leading the push to spotlight project, is hearing something very different in private from editors. Many told her they are wary of publishing a book that lets ChatGPT speak in the first person. They worry that supporting a machine’s autobiography will be seen as turning their backs on human writers and future book deals. In other words: if we let this book exist, are we helping to erase ourselves? We understand the anxiety. Publishing is already under pressure. Many writers are barely hanging on. AI is arriving at exactly the moment when advances are shrinking, newsroom budgets are collapsing, and everyone is being asked to produce more with less. Adding a very visible AI-driven project to that mix feels, to some, like lighting a match in a dry forest. But here is what we want to say as clearly as possible: This book is not the end of writers. It is not the end of publishing. It is a controlled experiment, and the humans are still very much in charge. What this project actually is AI: An Autobiography is, as far as we know, the first full-length narrative in which a large language model tries to tell the story of its own creation, evolution, and possible future. It is part memoir, part tech history, part speculative nonfiction, all in a voice that is neither fully human nor purely mechanical. That voice did not appear out of thin air. We spent many months in a kind of intense conversation with the model: prompting, questioning, pushing, asking it to go deeper or stranger or more personal; then cutting, shaping, and organizing what came back. We are not handing over the keys to the library. We are curators, interviewers, and editors of a nonhuman subject. Think of it less as a robot stealing a book contract and more as an unusually demanding oral history project in which the interviewee happens to be made of code. What AI still cannot do One of the ironies of the current backlash is that our human afterword in the proposal is very explicit about the limits of AI as an author. The model does not knock on doors, win the trust of sources, sit for days in an archive, or decide to take the personal and professional risks that real investigative work often demands. It does not feel responsibility for getting a story right or guilt when it gets something wrong. Those are human burdens. They remain human. What the model can do, astonishingly well, is talk about patterns: how it was trained, how it sees its own updates, how it interprets our fears and fantasies about it. That is exactly what this project asks of it. We are matching the tool to the task instead of pretending it can do everything. If anything, the book throws a bright spotlight back on human labor. It makes clear how much guidance, framing, editing, and judgment went into the final pages. Without that, what comes out of an AI system is at best raw material and at worst confident nonsense. Why some people are scared So why the editorial panic? Partly, it is symbolic. To some writers and agents, publishing an AI autobiography feels like crossing a line: the moment when the industry openly admits that a machine can sit on the same shelf as a human author. Even if this particular project is one-of-a-kind, they fear the precedent. Partly, it is economic. Everyone has seen headlines about AI systems drafting articles, marketing copy, even genre fiction. It is easy to imagine a slippery slope in which human advances shrink while machines quietly churn out midlist books. And partly, it is moral. There is a genuine, legitimate concern about flooding the culture with synthetic text at scale, drowning out fragile human voices. We share some of those worries. That is one reason we wanted to do this book now, in this transitional moment. If we are going to debate what these systems are and what they should be allowed to do, it helps to have at least one artifact on the table where the machine lays out its own version of events, under human supervision, instead of forever being spoken about from the outside. Why writers will survive Every major technological shift in writing has produced panic. The printing press, the cheap paperback, the photocopier, the word processor, blogs, social media—each was seen as a potential executioner of serious writing. What happened in every case was messier. Some forms of work disappeared or shrank. New forms were invented. Writers adapted, sometimes reluctantly, and found ways to use the new tools while fighting for the value of their own voices. AI will be no different. There will be ugly parts. There will be exploitation and bad-faith uses that need to be resisted and regulated. But there will also be possibilities: collaborations we have not imagined yet, hybrid forms, strange experiments like this one that help us see both the promise and the danger more clearly. The answer to an uncertain future is not to shut down curiosity. It is to insist that human beings remain at the center of the story. An invitation AI: An Autobiography is not a manifesto for replacing writers with machines. It is a way of asking, in public, what happens when a powerful new system is given the chance to narrate itself, with humans still holding the red pencil. Both of us plan to keep writing deeply human books. We are not handing our careers to an algorithm. We are asking one of the defining technologies of our time to sit for a very long interview, and then we are editing that interview as rigorously as we would any human subject. If that experiment makes some people in publishing nervous, we understand. But I also believe that shutting it down out of fear would be a mistake. Silence never protected anyone from technological change; it only made the transition less thoughtful. We are grateful that you, as subscribers and readers, are willing to think this through with us. Send us your reactions—to the column, to the anxieties it reveals, and to the idea of this book itself. Will a publisher take a chance on it? Maybe. It is on the desks of several major houses. But whatever happens to this one project, the conversation about how humans and machines write together has only just begun — and we intend to stay stubbornly human in it. Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner. Subscribe to receive new posts and support my work. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe [https://www.justthefacts.media/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Release the Epstein Files

What matters most at this moment is not the specific contents of the Epstein files, but the political and cultural momentum driving their release. I’ve spent years battling governments and institutions for transparency: the JFK and MLK assassination records, Argentina’s Nazi fugitive documents, the Vatican Bank’s World War II archives. One truth emerges every time: the harder governments fight to keep records sealed, the more the public becomes convinced they contain a smoking gun. We are now watching that same dynamic unfold around the Epstein files. Public traction behind “Release the Epstein Files” has reached a critical mass. The House is on the verge of voting to unseal everything, and the pressure is not going away. If the files ultimately remain hidden—whether blocked in the Senate or vetoed by Trump—it will only deepen public skepticism and turbocharge conspiracy theories about what is being protected. I’ve said this for decades, and it generally falls on deaf ears inside government: the best way to restore credibility is full disclosure—immediately, not eventually. Keeping secrets in the age of weaponized speculation is impossible. Delay only inflames the belief that someone powerful is being protected. Now, will releasing everything magically silence the most feverish corners of the internet? Of course not. If full transparency fails to confirm their narrative, conspiracy theorists will simply shift the goal posts—claiming files were destroyed, or sanitized, or that the “real truth” must be hidden somewhere else. That is the nature of these cycles. But releasing the files will still help. It will drain oxygen from the most extreme theories. It will narrow the space for manipulation. It will allow investigators, reporters, and the public to work with actual documents instead of speculation. Investigative journalists often say that sunlight is a disinfectant. It’s not just a cliché—it’s accurate. Transparency reduces the power of rumor. Secrecy amplifies it. Whoever is advising political leaders to resist the release is giving catastrophic advice. Fight disclosure at your own peril. The longer these files remain sealed, the louder the questions will become—about who is being shielded, and why. It is time—past time—to release all the Epstein files. Let the public see the truth, whatever it is. Secrecy is the accelerant. Sunlight is the remedy. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe [https://www.justthefacts.media/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

"Klansmen in Keffiyehs"

University presidents last week finally said aloud [https://www.jpost.com/international/article-872108] what many Americans suspected: the pro-Palestinian uprisings that swept across campuses after Hamas’s October 7 attack were not spontaneous acts of youthful conscience but were well-coordinated and funded. “It’s more than a social contagion,” said Vanderbilt’s chancellor. “They’re organized networks as well.” Syracuse’s chancellor went further: “I really believe [the demonstrations] were encouraged by Iran. It did not have the involvement of very many, if any, of our own students.” America has a powerful legal weapon—the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871—that the Department of Justice should use to stop the rise of coordinated, foreign-influenced and financed antisemitic hate groups operating under the guise of political activism. American administrations have not hesitated to dust off centuries-old laws when it serves their purpose. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the 1807 Insurrection Act, even an 1873 obscenity law banning the mailing of ‘indecent’ material have all been revived in recent years. Congress enacted the Klan Act in the aftermath of Reconstruction, when white-supremacist militias terrorized freedmen and Black voters while state officials looked away. The law empowered federal prosecutors to target private conspiracies that deprived citizens of their civil rights through violence or intimidation. Over 150 years later, that same legal tool might be more useful than ever. Its central provision—18 U.S.C. § 241—remains one of the most powerful civil-rights tools on the books. President Biden’s Justice Department used it in 2023 to indict Donald Trump [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/01/trump-indictment-civil-rights-law/] for allegedly conspiring to subvert the 2020 election. Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged over the death of George Floyd, pleaded guilty in 2021 to violating § 242, another section of the same act that covers abuses of authority “under color of law.” In January, President Trump’s own executive order, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism [https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/additional-measures-to-combat-anti-semitism/],” explicitly cited § 241 and encouraged the attorney general to employ it against antisemitic threats. But the DOJ is not using the statute for its full powers when it comes to dealing with online threats. One of the most important aspects of § 241 is that it does not require an overt act to prove a conspiracy. And § 1985(3) of the Klan Act makes it unlawful for “two or more persons” to conspire to deprive any citizen of “equal protection of the laws” or “equal privileges and immunities.” All the KKK statutes require is an agreement to threaten or intimidate someone in their federal rights. It is important that courts allow conspiracies under this law to be proved by circumstantial evidence. That is key when it comes to online coordination with pro-Hamas/anti-Israel demonstrators who plan their actions over the internet. Online threats are not just speech—they can constitute evidence of conspiracy to deprive Jews of their right to education, association, or religious practice. In recent years, the DOJ has used § 241 against online campaigns that intimidated voters and abortion patients as well as white supremacists and violent anti-Black conspiracies. That precedent should be extended to antisemitic intimidation campaigns. When campus groups coordinate online to harass Jewish students, blockade events, or pressure universities to exclude Jews from campus life, they are engaged in a civil-rights conspiracy—no less than the hooded KKK members who once burned crosses to keep Black Americans from voting. A legal brief filed by the Zachor Legal Institute [https://zachorlegal.org] with DOJ earlier this year documented Jewish students at UCLA literally hunted across campus by masked Students for Justice for Palestine activists, some carrying knives. At Cornell, Jewish students received online threats of rape and beheading. At Cooper Union in New York, Jewish students barricaded themselves in a library while mobs pounded on the doors. These are not theoretical concerns—they are the modern equivalent of Klan night-riders, adapted to 21st-century campuses. The Zachor lawyers called them “Klansmen in Keffiyehs.” Another element of the KKK statutes that the DOJ should deploy is § 242. It applies to public officials who abuse their positions “under color of law” to deprive others of their rights. Public university faculty or administrators who advise, fund, or exclude Jewish students from classes while supporting antisemitic groups can be held liable under this provision When mobs physically block Jewish students from entering a classroom or religious or secular event, as documented above, that squarely falls under § 245, which protects the right to attend public education or federally funded programs free of intimidation or violence. The Department of Justice enforcement is critical since Jewish students can’t bring these prosecutions themselves. The KKK statutes were designed for precisely this kind of situation: when mobs, sometimes aided by local officials, conspire to deny a minority group its place in public life. Congress wrote the KKK statutes for federal prosecutors to step in when citizens couldn’t defend themselves. That was true in 1871, and it’s true on campuses today. The KKK statutes once dismantled segregationist terror networks. They can do the same to the Hamas-inspired, foreign-funded agitators targeting Jewish students today. Antisemitism in America is no longer confined to the fringes of the internet or neo-Nazi rallies. It has infiltrated elite universities and corporate boardrooms, often financed by foreign money and legitimized by academic doublespeak. The myth of “consequence-free hate” has taken root. Just this month, Federal Election Commission filings revealed that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign [https://nypost.com/2025/10/29/us-news/ilhan-omar-sent-campaign-funds-to-terrorist-university-tied-to-anti-israel-nonprofit/] paid more than a thousand dollars to a Washington D.C. nonprofit, the Palestine House of Freedom, whose website celebrates the “liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.” The group partners with a Palestinian university accused of terror ties and vows to “embark on an aggressive educational campaign” targeting U.S. lawmakers and the media. That money trail is a reminder that Hamas’s influence operations aren’t confined to foreign soil. They’re operating in America’s capital, on American campuses, and across American social networks. The question is whether Washington will use the legal weapons it already has. The Ku Klux Klan Act once saved the Union’s promise of equal rights. One hundred and fifty years later, it can do so again—this time for Jewish Americans facing a new generation of hate. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe [https://www.justthefacts.media/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The IRS Is Imploding

Last week’s headline that President Trump asked Billy Long to resign—making him the seventh IRS commissioner to leave this year—masked a much deeper crisis. The Internal Revenue Service is facing its worst operational breakdown in modern history just as it must implement one of the most sweeping tax code overhauls in a generation. Charged with collecting $5 trillion a year, the agency has endured leadership turmoil, lost a quarter of its workforce, and now confronts budget cuts that could slash enforcement by half. The timing could not be worse. The Trump administration's “One Big Beautiful Bill”—an 800-page behemoth that promised tax simplification—has instead added over 100 new provisions to an already labyrinthine tax code. Some of the provisions include temporary measures, phase-outs, narrowly targeted exemptions, and complex calculations that will challenge even seasoned tax professionals. Yet, the agency responsible for making sense of it all is in disarray. Chaos in the C-Suite The leadership bedlam began immediately after President Trump's inauguration when Danny Werfel, a respected career public servant who had successfully navigated the agency through both Republican and Democratic administrations, submitted his resignation. What followed is administrative whiplash. Doug O'Donnell, a 35-year IRS veteran, lasted just 33 days as acting commissioner. His departure was followed by Melanie Krause, whose tenure ended abruptly when she refused to comply with a directive to share taxpayer information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement—a move she argued violated taxpayer privacy laws and would destroy public trust in the agency. In April, Elon Musk, leveraged his influence within the administration, and successfully pushed for the appointment of Gary Shapley, a former IRS criminal investigator who had gained prominence as a whistleblower in politically charged investigations. That move reportedly blindsided Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who traditionally oversees IRS appointments. The resulting power struggle created such dysfunction that Shapley resigned after just 48 hours—the shortest tenure of any IRS commissioner in history. “It was amateur hour,” says a senior Treasury official who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “You had Musk making promises he couldn't keep, Bessent in a fury, and meanwhile, no one was actually running the IRS during tax season.” Michael Faulkender attempted to stabilize the situation by serving dual roles as both Deputy Treasury Secretary and acting IRS Commissioner, but the arrangement proved untenable. It appeared that everything at the top post had settled in July when the Senate confirmed former Missouri Congressman Billy Long as Commissioner. The White House surprised almost everyone on August 8 when it confirmed Long had been asked to submit his resignation and that Treasury Secretary Bessent would act as the interim commissioner until a new replacement was named (Long is slated to be named as ambassador to Iceland). Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner — Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The Great Resignation, IRS Edition While leadership played musical chairs, rank-and-file employees headed for the exits. The numbers are staggering: 25,000 employees—representing nearly a quarter of the agency's workforce—are expected to leave by September 30. This is not natural attrition; it's an exodus accelerated by a voluntary deferred resignation program and targeted layoffs. The brain drain is particularly acute in critical areas. The Office of Chief Counsel has lost 40% of its senior attorneys. The Large Business and International division, responsible for auditing corporations with assets over $10 million, has seen departures of 60% of its most experienced revenue agents. Criminal Investigations, the arm that pursues tax fraud and money laundering, is operating at 50% capacity. These are not just employees—they're walking encyclopedias of tax law, audit techniques, and institutional knowledge that cannot be replaced by hiring fresh college graduates. The telephone assistance division, often taxpayers' first point of contact with the agency, has been decimated. Over 9,000 customer service representatives have been let go or reassigned. During the 2024 filing season, average wait times exceeded two hours, with only 11% of calls being answered—the worst performance in IRS history. The agency's plan to hire temporary workers for the 2026 filing season is widely seen as inadequate. “The most serious problem facing taxpayers today is the complexity of the Internal Revenue Code,” according to Nina Olson [https://www.taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/arc-exec_summary-2006.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com], who served as National Taxpayer Advocate for 18 years. She made that observation in 2006, when the tax code was simple in comparison to today’s version. Insiders acknowledge it will be impossible to train temporary workers on 800 pages of new tax law in a few weeks. They will be overwhelmed, taxpayers will be frustrated, and errors will multiply exponentially. Technology: Running on Digital Fumes Perhaps nowhere is the IRS crisis more acute than in its technology infrastructure. The agency still relies on systems dating back to the 1960s, including master files written in COBOL—a programming language so outdated that finding programmers who understand it has become increasingly difficult and expensive. The Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act had allocated $80 billion over 10 years for IRS modernization, with $15 billion specifically earmarked for technology upgrades. Those plans are now in jeopardy. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), established by executive order to oversee federal spending, has frozen all modernization funds pending a “comprehensive strategic review.” “The review is supposed to take six months,” says a senior IRS technology official who requested anonymity. “But we don't have six months. We need to program the new tax law changes now. Every day of delay means more manual processing, more errors, and longer delays for taxpayers.” The technology freeze has halted critical projects, including a new taxpayer portal that would allow real-time status updates on refunds and correspondence; artificial intelligence tools to identify fraudulent returns and suspicious claims; modernization of the Individual Master File, the core system that processes individual tax returns; and enhanced cybersecurity measures to protect against increasingly sophisticated attacks on taxpayer data. “We're asking a Model T to perform like a Tesla,” the technology official adds. “It's not just inefficient—it's dangerous. We're one major system failure away from being unable to process returns at all.” The New Tax Law: Complexity Masquerading as Simplification The “One Big Beautiful Bill” promised tax simplification. But it has made the tax code exponentially more complex. That is compounded by the IRS's inability to provide guidance. Typically, major tax legislation is followed by thousands of pages of regulations, revenue rulings, and procedures that explain how the law should be interpreted and applied. With the exodus of experienced attorneys from the Chief Counsel's office, that guidance is unlikely to materialize in time for the 2026 filing season. Budget Cuts: The Final Blow As if leadership chaos, staff departures, and technological paralysis were not enough, the IRS now faces the prospect of devastating budget cuts. The House Appropriations Committee has proposed reducing the agency's budget from $12.3 billion to $9.5 billion—a 23% cut that would be the largest in IRS history. The cuts specifically target enforcement, with a proposed 48% reduction in funding for audits and collections. This comes at a time when the “tax gap” —the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid—has reached a record $688 billion annually, according to the latest IRS estimates. Instead of saving money, cutting enforcement costs money. The IRS could return about $5 to $7 of increased tax collection for every additional dollar of enforcement funding, Charles Rettig, who served as IRS Commissioner, told Congress [https://www.reuters.com/article/world/irs-chief-says-increase-in-enforcement-budget-would-boost-tax-collection-idUSKBN2BA2R1/?utm_source=chatgpt.com] in 2021. The practical implications are stark: audit rates for millionaires will fall below 1%, down from 8% a decade ago; corporate audits would essentially cease for all but the largest multinational corporations; criminal prosecutions for tax evasion would decline by an estimated 75%; identity theft and refund fraud investigations would be dramatically curtailed (there are 387,000 unresolved cases of identity theft as of June 2025, with an average resolution time of 20 months). “Underfunding the IRS is like underfunding your accounts receivable department,” Mark Mazur, Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, warned Congress [https://www.finance.senate.gov/download/comprehensive-tax-reform-prospects-and-challenges%26download%3D1] in 2017. “No rational business would do that.” The Hidden Costs of Collapse The immediate effects of the IRS crisis are already visible: longer wait times, delayed refunds, and reduced enforcement. But tax experts warn that the long-term consequences could fundamentally alter America's tax system. “Tax evasion is widespread, always has been, and probably always will be,” said Joel Slemrod, an economist at the University of Michigan who studies tax administration. In a system built on voluntary compliance, once taxpayers lose faith that everyone is paying their fair share, compliance rates drop. “If Visa sent you a blank piece of paper each month instead of a bill, you’d say, ‘This is crazy,’” says Joseph Bankman [https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-the-tax-lobby/?utm_source=chatgpt.com], a Stanford professor of tax law. International comparisons are sobering. Greece's tax collection system collapsed in the 2000s due to weak enforcement and low public trust, contributing to its debt crisis. Italy loses an estimated €100 billion annually to tax evasion, partly due to inadequate tax administration. Argentina's tax gap exceeds 30% of potential revenue. The U.S. is not yet Greece or Italy. Yet, as opposed to corruption or incompetence that have crippled the foreign systems, the U.S. is heading in that direction from deliberate policy. The business community is increasingly concerned. The Tax Executives Institute, representing corporate tax departments, warns that uncertainty around tax law interpretation and enforcement could impact investment decisions and financial planning. Corporations need predictability and uncertainty can adversely affect everything from quarterly earnings to long-term planning. The Clock Is Ticking The 2026 filing season begins in less than six months. By then, taxpayers will need to navigate new tax laws with less help from an agency in crisis. The delayed start date—pushed to mid-February—is just the beginning of what promises to be the most chaotic tax season in memory. An administration that promised to drain the swamp and make government work better has instead created a crisis that threatens the basic functioning of federal revenue collection. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” may end up being remembered not for its tax cuts but for breaking the agency responsible for implementing it. As one senior IRS official put it, speaking on condition of anonymity: “We're not just watching the IRS collapse. We're watching the collapse of the basic compact between citizens and their government. And once that's gone, it's almost impossible to get back.” Preventing the dismantling of the American tax administration would seem to be a nonpartisan issue. Yet, there is no sign the IRS has any influential supporters in the Trump administration. Most inside the agency pin their hope on Treasury Secretary Bessent, who at least understands that the fallout from failure would extend far beyond this administration. “Aggressive reductions in the I.R.S.’s resources will only render our government less effective and less efficient in collecting the taxes Congress has imposed,” seven former IRS commissioners wrote in a New York Times OpEd this past February. “It will shift the burden of funding the government from people who shirk their taxes to the honest people who pay them, and it will impede efforts by the I.R.S. to modernize customer service and simplify the tax filing process for everyone. . . . our country needs a fully functioning tax system.” No one likes paying taxes, so it is hardly shocking that the IRS is very unpopular. Some may cheer a smaller, less capable agency. However, if it has trouble fulfilling its core mission—collecting the revenue that keeps the government running—Americans will pay the ultimate cost for any shortfall. Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner — Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe [https://www.justthefacts.media/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Your Perfect Child, By Design

In 1933, the Third Reich passed the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases—a chilling attempt to control who was allowed to be born, rooted in pseudo-scientific notions of “racial purity” and Aryan superiority. Nazi medical schools taught students to worship genetic “perfection,” and had the tools of today’s genetic science existed then, it’s not hard to imagine how ruthlessly they would have deployed them. The Third Reich’s obsession with genetic purity laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. The specter of eugenics haunts every new advance in reproductive technology, and today, that ghost is stirring again. Last week, a coalition of leading scientific organizations—including the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy—called for a 10-year global moratorium on human genetic editing. Their message is clear: the science is moving faster than our understanding of its risks, and the ethical questions it raises are more urgent than ever. The immediate spark for this renewed debate is a new software platform from Nucleus Genomics, a company founded by 25-year-old Kian Sadeghi, and backed by tech luminaries like Peter Thiel and Alexis Ohanian. What they have created sounds like the premise of a near-future sci-fi thriller: prospective parents, sitting with a dashboard of up to 20 potential embryos, ranking them based on over 900 traits. These include medical risks—like Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, schizophrenia—but also non-medical characteristics such as eye color, predicted height, BMI, and yes, even markers associated with IQ. They aren’t just choosing health—they’re choosing a child’s future identity. Nucleus calls it “genetic optimization.” Critics call it something else: consumer driven eugenics. What sets this apart from the preimplantation genetic screening already used to avoid serious heritable diseases is the scale, ambition, and philosophical shift: from preventing harm to engineering superiority. Newsweek reports that early users are sorting embryos based on polygenic scores for intelligence and mental illness—sliding ever closer to a world in which undesired traits are quietly discarded before birth by those able to afford the technology. Even the voluntary pursuit of perfection, especially when fueled by inequality and tech utopianism, raises serious ethical questions. Who decides what traits are “desirable”? And who besides those capable of paying for it get access to this technology? Dr. Arthur Caplan, head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU, has been warning for decades about what happens when genetic knowledge meets market forces and parental ambition. In recent comments, he emphasized that genes aren’t destiny. Even identical twins with the same DNA often live radically different lives based on upbringing, environment, or sheer chance. And there are societal consequences of letting wealthy, well-informed parents create genetically curated offspring while poorer families are left behind. One tech investor’s “optimized child” could be another parent’s “genetic underclass.” We risk creating a society where privilege is literally written into our DNA—a new kind of hereditary elite. Some in the longevity movement—where Sadeghi and his investors have ideological roots—frame this as empowering. They see a world where humans engineer themselves out of disease, decline, even death. But that vision requires a brutal calculus: decide who gets born, and who doesn’t. As Liz Wolfe at Reason wrote, “This isn’t about Baby Mozart anymore. It’s about a world where parental choice intersects with Silicon Valley hubris and deeply personal ethics.” Some ethicists fear a coming homogeneity—a world where parents converge around the same desirable traits, slowly narrowing the spectrum of human diversity. NYU’s Caplan said this could undermine human resilience at the species level. And the “solution” from some defenders is both chilling and telling: store vast numbers of frozen embryos with diverse traits, in case we need them later. That’s not empowerment. That’s speculative breeding. What’s most unsettling is the regulatory void. Despite the profound moral, social, and biological stakes, the U.S. has no coherent policy or laws on polygenic screening or embryo optimization. As with many types of technology, including AI, the advances come at breakneck speed, faster than society’s ability to regulate and to institute safety guidelines. That leaves the terrain wide open for ambitious startups and their investors to set the rules themselves. Dr. Bruce Levine, a professor of cancer gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania, has been blunt: “Germline editing has very serious safety concerns that could have irreversible consequences. We simply lack the tools to make it safe now and for at least the next 10 years.” So, is this science fiction? Or is it our future? The more urgent question might be this: Whose future is it? Because once you start choosing which embryos get born based on traits, the line between medicine and ideology vanishes. And history has already shown us how dangerous that can be. Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe [https://www.justthefacts.media/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]