Imagine that you had god-like powers of creation. You could create living organisms with any properties you chose. You could make them eternally happy and fulfilled. Or you could make them periodically depressed, anxiety-ridden, and bored. You could genetically preprogram them to love each other madly, deeply and uncondionally. Or you could make them quarrelsome, jealous and mean-spirited. You coud endow them with powerful illusion of free will. Or with the knowledge they are neurochemical robots. You could put them into states of sublime mystical rapture or ordinary. You could control how often, if at all, they reproduced, and Would you make them suffer and allow them to hurt thmelves? How much and often? Would you allow them to breed children who could suffer. Would you ake them compete against each other for resources? This scenario is fanciful. But soon we wwill be able to rewrite the revetrate gemome We will be able to choose how much suffering we want to exist, in what form

ABSTRACT