OK, so let's think about this. Here are some types of powerful people:
Heh. We do have a major mismatch :-) Your list I would call "people you're likely to see on TV". Let me offer you a few other examples.
Your neighborhood cop is powerful. He can kill you and stands a good chance of escaping the usual consequences. He can easily make your life very unpleasant and painful, if only for a while, and have zero consequences for that.
Rich people willing to use their money can be powerful -- and these are not usually the celebrities you've mentioned. Some guy who ran some unknown hedge fund for a while, invested his money into a private equity deal, sold it successfully, and is now a multimillionaire living in a nondescript mansion in Connecticut -- he's never been on TV and outside of his circle of friends no one would recognize his name -- he could be powerful if he wanted to.
Unelected bureaucrats are very powerful. Politicians in democracies come and go, but civil servants stay and build their influence and their networks. They are the professionals of governing (politicians are professionals of marketing).
Warlords are powerful. Power still comes out of a barrel of a gun and you don't need to be a politician to run a place. Mafia/cartel/gang/etc. leaders are here as well.
Social groups ("tribes") can be powerful -- or powerless. These, by the way, tend to have long-term interests.
you are rounding to the nearest sci-fi cliche here instead of thinking things through logically.
Not a sci-fi cliche, but real human history. The ruling classes have always preferred a docile population and I see no reason for that to change. The traditional way to enforce docility was to kill all the troublemakers, but unless you do it on a sufficiently massive scale to impact the gene pool, it only lasts for a generation. A population with forced permanent docility -- guess whose dream would that be?
"Docility" has connotations of trust, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness in my estimation. Our dicussion might be simplified by tabooing this word, since it's actually a bundle of a bunch of concepts.
Sure. My connotations of "docility" differ (what are altruism or modesty doing in there??), but let's just taboo the word.
What I mean is basically obedience to authority plus willingness to please. When told to sit down and shut up you say "Yes, sir", sit down, and shut up -- and you like it. When told "Go do this" you go and do this. It's the difference between wolves and dogs.
Its times like this that i find what certain subgroups of LW dont find 'political' fascinating and hilarious. It says everything about the bubble from which they come.
I previously wrote a post hypothesizing that inter-group conflict is more common when most humans belong to readily identifiable, discrete factions.
This seems relevant to the recent human gene editing advance. Full human gene editing capability probably won't come soon, but this got me thinking anyway. Consider the following two scenarios:
1. Designer babies become socially acceptable and widespread some time in the near future. Because our knowledge of the human genome is still maturing, they initially aren't that much different than regular humans. As our knowledge matures, they get better and better. Fortunately, there's a large population of "semi-enhanced" humans from the early days of designer babies to keep the peace between the "fully enhanced" and "not at all enhanced" factions.
2. Designer babies are considered socially unacceptable in many parts of the world. Meanwhile, the technology needed to produce them continues to advance. At a certain point people start having them anyway. By this point the technology has advanced to the point where designer babies clearly outclass regular babies at everything, and there's a schism between "fully enhanced" and "not at all enhanced" humans.
Of course, there's another scenario where designer babies just never become widespread. But that seems like an unstable equilibrium given the 100+ sovereign countries in the world, each with their own set of laws, and the desire of parents everywhere to give birth to the best kids possible.
We already see tons of drama related to the current inequalities between individuals, especially inequality that's allegedly genetic in origin. Designer babies might shape up to be the greatest internet flame war of this century. This flame war could spill over in to real world violence. But since one of the parties has not arrived to the flame war yet, maybe we can prepare.
One way to prepare might be differential technological development. In particular, maybe it's possible to decrease the cost of gene editing/selection technologies while retarding advances in our knowledge of which genes contribute to intelligence. This could allow designer baby technology to become socially acceptable and widespread before "fully enhanced" humans were possible. Just as with emulations, a slow societal transition seems preferable to a fast one.
Other ideas (edit: speculative!): extend the benefits of designer babies to everyone for free regardless of their social class. Push for mandatory birth control technology so unwanted and therefore unenhanced babies are no longer a thing. (Imagine how lousy it would be to be born as an unwanted child in a world where everyone was enhanced except you.) Require designer babies to possess genes for compassion, benevolence, and reflectiveness by law, and try to discover those genes before we discover genes for intelligence. (Edit: leaning towards reflectiveness being the most important of these.) (Researching the genetic basis of psychopathy to prevent enhanced psychopaths also seems like a good idea... although I guess this would also create the knowledge necessary to deliberately create psychopaths?) Regulate the modification of genes like height if game theory suggests allowing arbitrary modifications to them would be a bad idea.
I don't know very much about the details of these technologies, and I'm open to radically revising my views if I'm missing something important. Please tell me if there's anything I got wrong in the comments.