Not that I agree we should bury our heads in the sand like luddites, but to be fair to OP, knives can only hurt or help in a tiny human radius. It's hard to make an extinction-level weapon (or extension level accident) out of them.
Being able to edit genes at will is a different story.
Viruses are an extinction-level weapon. CRISPR? Not so much. (And neither are likely to result in an extinction-level accident; you'd have to deliberately deploy potent bioweapons in multiple places to extinct us.)
Yes but the CRISPR engine is passed on to offspring which raises massive ethical questions.
As I understand it (and hopefully I'm not way off base here) there is a technique that creates a "gene drive" which is kinda like an SDK that is inserted into the patients genome which improves the efficacy of CRISPR.
This code finds its way into the gametes which is then passed on to children. The children did not ask for this SDK, but now they have it and it potentially becomes immortal in human DNA.
On the one hand, cool: the SDK is there and possibly makes it even easier to alter DNA>
On the other hand, holy shit: there's a ticking timebomb in the populations DNA now.
The really great thing about us knowing how to read and edit genes now, is that if that happened we would notice and could switch it off. The stuff we want to wipe out using gene drives — e.g. Malaria — can’t.
There are things to worry about with cheap gene engineering, but that particular possibility won’t affect us.
