The “Smarter” Babies of Silicon Valley
© Annie Stachura 2026
In tech hub Silicon Valley, rapid innovation offers cutting-edge solutions to “optimize” our lives. Fully autonomous vehicles, drones that make home deliveries (Amazon packages, groceries, even prescription medicine), brain-computer interfaces—the list of eccentric solutions to earthly obstacles goes on and on. Perhaps it should not be a real surprise then, that when it comes to the difficult task of raising children, Silicon Valley parents are in the market for out-of-the-box ideas.
Enter: embryonic selection
Landmark tech now offers prospective parents the ability to have “smarter” babies. Through various costly rounds of IVF and genetic testing, these parents not only can screen for potential genetic diseases and cancers; they can also select embryos for high-IQ. Indeed, this option has become popular particularly among tech moguls and venture capitalists, many of whom are concerned with breeding successful offspring.
While similar technologies that screen for diseases (like Huntington’s and Tay-Sachs) have existed for decades, the ability to select for IQ is still new and quite controversial, despite outspoken (and oftentimes financial) support from prominent figures like Elon Musk. But in Silicon Valley, where high expectations abound, many tech-obsessed parents aren’t exactly put off by a little controversy, so long as it promises results.
Understanding the culture in Silicon Valley
Tucked into the southern sweep of the San Francisco Bay, this region is home to major tech companies like Apple, Meta (parent company to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.), and Alphabet (parent company to Google), as well as countless variously successful start-up businesses.
Characterized by fast-paced technological advancement and bold financial risk-taking, this community valorizes tenacity (often described as “hustle culture”) and pushing boundaries in remarkable ways—sometimes incredible, sometimes disturbing. Mike Robbins, an executive coach for Google, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, and the NBA once said, “Silicon Valley’s biggest export is the collapsing barrier between work and life,” (Pardes). 70+ hour workweeks may sound like a stiff price, but in Silicon Valley, the winners win big. According to the 2023 Silicon Valley Index, the area’s total household wealth that year added up to nearly $1.1 trillion. Yet importantly, nowhere in the United States is wealth distribution more disparate. In the same index report, it was revealed that the top 1% of Silicon Valley households owned 36% of the wealth, with nearly a quarter of the resident population living below the poverty line.
No doubt, Silicon Valley is for dreamers—to survive its fiercely ambitious and competitive landscape, you must buy into at least a few fantasies of capitalism, while disregarding its more unpleasant consequences and contradictions. And above all, you must subscribe to the belief that all the world’s problems can be solved—sooner or later—using technology.
In such a culture, decision-making requires attention to data, even beyond the workplace. Biofeedback devices, nootropics (cognitive-enhancing “smart drugs”), blood tests—the personal health and wellness space is cluttered with attempts to “hack” or optimize the human experience. In theory, once personal health and wellness routines are perfected, one can focus one’s attention on more important professional achievements.
Understanding the psychology of Silicon Valley parents
Simone and Malcolm Collins photographed by Hannah Yoon
Most parents want the best for their children—hope they will be happy and healthy, excel in school, make good friends, discover their passions and pursue them successfully. But some elite Silicon Valley parents would prefer a guarantee. Rather than trading on the stock market, these parents invest in the genetic lottery.
They shell out for testing services like Herasight, which allow them to screen embryos for IQ, among other traits. Breeding smarter, higher-performing babies is the goal of this craze, but its followers often cite even loftier expectations, perhaps as a way to vindicate themselves: Their chosen embryos, they maintain, will someday save the world from the dangers of AI and climate change.
Take, for example, Simone and Malcolm Collins—a prototypical pronatalist couple (with links to the current White House administration) who gained significant media attention for endorsing and using this controversial technology. The Collins family started testing to select “desirable” embryos after their second child. In a recent interview for the Wall Street Journal, they expressed excitement about a recently selected embryo. This child, who would be their fifth, has a low risk for cancer and is in the 99th percentile per his polygenic score (a statistical measure that estimates genetic predisposition for a trait or disease) in likelihood of having “really exceptionally high intelligence.” The Collins say they only wish these genetic tests could predict for traits like grit, ambition, and curiosity. (You might note, these are not social traits like helpfulness or kindness.)
If this new option gives you pause—an eerie feeling, a dose of dystopian dread—you’re not alone. Beyond some striking parallels to the plot of the science-fiction film Gattaca, embryonic selection for traits like IQ is troubling to many people for many different reasons, including biological risks, ethical implications, and long-term societal consequences.
To name just a few commonly cited concerns:
Selecting embryos for IQ sounds to many like a repackaged version of eugenics, defined as “the scientifically inaccurate theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations,” (National Human Genome Research Institute).
Some ethicists, scientists, and policymakers worry that if traits like IQ can be selected for, parents may soon be able to select for other traits (appearance, sex) which would have long-term effects on population, human diversity, and social biases.
Also from a social justice and human rights perspective, if the wealthy elite are the only people who can afford to access this type of technology, this would result in exacerbated social inequalities and systemic discrimination.
Geneticists and neuroscientists warn that this technology may not be totally safe to use due to the unpredictability of genetic outcomes—leading to unintended genetic consequences (i.e. increased risk for diseases, unintentional narrowing of genetic diversity).
Religious voices across many denominations critique and accordingly dismiss embryonic selection for IQ as a way of interfering with “natural” human conception.
Wall Street Journal coverage of the pronatalist movement
When considering this new reporting about Silicon Valley parents and their obsession with high-IQ babies, I shared some of the concerns listed above. Even at its most effective, embryonic testing for IQ could breed uncertain results—and quite possibly dangerous social and ethical consequences down the line. But in reviewing more of the testimonies and literature surrounding the practice, I often returned to the same (perhaps less existentially threatening, but still bleak) conclusion: For all their apparent IQ, their wealth, their optimized daily routines, their entrepreneurial spirit, their “move-fast-and-break-things” mentalities, these Silicon Valley parents are buying into a misguided, miscalculated pursuit—one could even call it a bad investment.
Considering the worries listed above, it’s important to mention here that the actual efficacy of genetic testing for IQ is dubious. At present, our ability to measure the genetic predisposition of an embryo is still limited. On average, when embryos are selected using this technology, they gain only 3 IQ points compared to randomly selected embryos (Karavani et al.). In a piece written by two professional bioethicists that appeared in Scientific American last summer, the authors express cynicism about this technology.
The real danger is that a bunch of wealthy parents-to-be who are too eager to control their children’s biological future will shell out $5,999 for a product that offers no such control. Those parents might avoid perfectly healthy embryos, scared of implanting ones that don’t appear to be sufficiently optimized. Or it could result in children being born to those parents and expected to live up to their purchased optimized future, but instead winding up very much like the variety of humans who proceeded them.
(Caplan & Tabery, 2025)
The fallacy lies in the Silicon Valley ethos: the belief that everything can be optimized by investing in and taking advantage of new technologies. In other arenas of these parents’ lives, this simple equation might be enough to guarantee results. But parenting presents a unique and complicated set of problems, individualized to each child. As much as well-intentioned parents might want to believe that they can control for certain variables or eliminate future obstacles for their child, embryonic selection can’t and won’t provide such assurances.
Though some might want data to guide them through the perplexing trials and tribulations of parenthood, it is crucial not to confuse a probability with a promise. Children are malleable and subject to the environments in which they’re raised. A high IQ alone does not ensure future prospects or success—never mind happiness. Parents should instead focus on creating a nurturing and enriching atmosphere for their children.
Of course, it's safe to assume that those parents able to drop thousands of dollars on genetic testing can also afford not only to meet their child’s needs (give them the best nutrition, the best education, and so on), but to tailor their developmental environment to “perfection”—whatever that word means to them. The concern then is not that these children won’t have access to plentiful resources or opportunities, but rather that their parents’ preoccupation with IQ will limit their ability to explore beyond the bounds of their parents’ aspirations for them.
In her 2016 book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik proposes that worried parents often overvalue end-results when it comes to raising their children. “We’re so concerned about how these children are going to turn out that we’re unwilling to give them the autonomy that they need to be able to take risks and go out and explore the world,” she said in an interview about the book (Ingber). In the case of Silicon Valley parents, their anxieties and desire for control may counterintuitively lead them to limit their child’s prospects.
An MI Perspective
Selecting embryos for IQ also demonstrates a reductive view of human potential, which overvalues IQ. Per the theory of multiple intelligences, IQ alone is too narrow a measure when human beings have a number of relatively discrete, observable intellectual capacities. (See the components of intelligence proposed by MI theory here.)
Embryonic selection for IQ typifies how our society prioritizes logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligences over all other intelligences, which could turn into strengths down the line. Artistic ability, social awareness, physical coordination, emotional resilience, moral character—all these qualities represent clear indicators of an intelligent child.
Moreover, diverse ways of thinking and being are critical to our ability to thrive as a species. From a Darwinian perspective, the human ability to adapt and evolve hinges on this diversity—and the complicated issues facing our world today (climate change, economic instability, social injustice, etc.) require people with different strengths and skillsets to address them. Theoretically, if preimplantation genetic testing for traits like IQ were to someday become more effective and more than just another peculiar Silicon Valley fad, the consequences for human diversity are yet to be determined, but this should certainly be a consideration.
In Conclusion
For life’s most perplexing human challenges—e.g., raising children—the answers we seek are not reducible, nor able to be streamlined. Embryonic testing for IQ may provide some with the sigh of relief that accompanies illusions of control, but ultimately, we cannot confidently predict who a person will become. Any temporary reassurance is likely not worth the considerable cost.
Perhaps the “smarter babies” of Silicon Valley sound outrageous to those living outside its technophilic bubble, but the rest of us should keep in mind that we’re not necessarily exempt from adjacent allures. Every day, we hand off more responsibility to “smart” machines. In the push toward experiencing less mundane difficulty, we must be careful not to lose touch with the diverse potentials of our species—indeed, our humanity.
As part of my research on Silicon Valley, I read through a conversation posted by non-profit media platform Unfinished in 2021, called “How the Mindset of ‘Incessant Optimization’ Rotted Silicon Valley.” Midway through the panel, Stanford political scientist Rob Reich makes the following point about optimization’s pitfalls:
Alright, so what’s wrong with optimization? It’s a means to another end. To optimize a bad objective is to make the world worse, not better. And beyond that simple thought, you have to take in mind that what computer science does all the time is to get a problem in some computationally tractable form. You have to reduce the objective that you care about to some proxy that you’re going to measure, and you’ve tried to optimize that measure. And most of the things we actually care about in life are not reducible to easily measurable proxies. So in the optimizing mindset, the technologist then focuses on these imperfect proxies for something that we actually care about.
(Watch the full conversation here.)
If we’re to resist the temptation to optimize the life out of living, our next steps should be thoughtful, far-sighted and well-considered. When it comes to our capacity for innovation, there may not be a limit. So, it’s best to know where we’d like to be headed and to ask ourselves: Just because we can, should we? And not just what are the benefits, but what might be the costs—to ourselves, to those closest to us, and to the wider world?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their thoughtful and incisive comments on earlier drafts, I thank Howard Gardner, Ellen Winner, and Kirsten McHugh.
REFERENCES
Caplan, A., & Tabery, J. (2025, July 28). No, you can’t design your baby-and trying would be a terrible idea. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-genetically-optimizing-embryos-is-misleading-unethical-and-not-even/
Ingber, Sasha. (2018). What Kind of Parent Are You: Carpenter or Gardner? Interview with Alison Gopnik. Hidden Brain. NPR.
Karavani, E., et al. (2019). Screening Human Embryos for Polygenic Traits Has Limited Utility. Cell, 179(6), 1424–1435.e8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.10.033
Pardes, Arielle. (2020) How Silicon Valley ruined work for everyone, everywhere. WIRED.