A Vox article examines the implications of recent advances in human embryonic gene editing and artificial intelligence, exploring societal readiness for these transformative technologies and raising questions about how we recognize and respond to major technological breakthroughs.

How do we know when the world has changed?
On June 1, a team of scientists published a preprint scientific paper claiming they had edited human embryonic DNA with more precision than any previous attempt. As a technical achievement, the work is undoubtedly impressive, largely avoiding the errors that had accompanied earlier efforts to gene edit embryos. With further development, such embryonic editing could free future children from fatal or debilitating genetic diseases, but as the veteran scie