I like the idea of using it to increase well-being, but this could be outweighed by the reverse.

Corporations will tear into genetic experiments they think will produce profitable profits. They will probably be as concerned about adverse consequences as the petroleum and coal industries were/are about global warming.

With any kind of major technological development comes the inevitability of it being misused. People with good intentions will make discoveries, craft new technologies, and then try to institute policies that will aim to limit the use of this technology for only benevolent purposes.

The problem is that policies are not enough. The cat is out of the bag. The only thing policies can do is delay the inevitable. There will be consequences, and they will be catastrophic.

The motivations of most scientists and technologists are selfish, though they may pretend to have altruistic motives and may even delude themselves into believing this. If they really did care about the consequences, then they would not participate in the enterprise. The collaborator of a dictatorship may justify their actions by saying that they were "just following orders". Similarly, the scientists may justify their research by saying that they were "just following their curiosity" or that they merely developed the technology, and that they were not the ones to misuse it. Not very convincing.

In the future, there will be genetically modified humans. They will out-perform non-genetically modified humans, and there will be a new hierarchy in which the GM humans are at the top. Those with money will be the first to benefit, as they will be able to afford the treatment. Those at the bottom may never receive the treatment, and it may become a tightly-guarded secret that helps those in power remain in power. If it does become available to everyone, then human reproduction will fully transform into the manufacturing of people, the perfect solution for the population factories called cities. Humans will no longer be the result of a natural process, but rather a product that is manufactured in order to be consumed for its labor by the city.

On the other hand, the idea that ever more people are going to be creating and releasing new life forms is rather terrifying. — Foghorn

I think 'creating and releasing new forms of life' is a bit of an exagerration. I recall there was a Chinese scientists a couple of years back who used CRISPR to alter the genes of human foetuses and was jailed for doing so (ref).

But I agree that the implications are profound and could even be terrifying. If as DB says above, a kind of trans-humanist use of this technology becomes available, it could also have pretty enormous social consequences.

I'm actually a bit nonplussed by how little attention this is getting in the popular media, or at any rate, I haven't noticed a lot of commentary on it. I think there really ought to be a very high-visibility debate on it, mediated by people with expert knowledge of the subject matter, so at least we citizens can arrive at an informed opinion.

//actually a quick search produced some pretty reasonable op-eds, this one in particular.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dark-side-of-crispr/