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Who are you to define what counts as correct use of this technology? What's immoral in my book is slowing the deployment of this extremely beneficial technology

Who are you to define what counts as correct use of this technology? What's immoral in my book is slowing the deployment of this extremely beneficial technology on specious ethical grounds. If you don't get to decide for other people the criteria for pairing up and having children, why should you get to decide for them which fertilized embryos they choose to implant and raise? As for genetic engineering of food? All domestication is genetic engineering. GMO just accelerates the process, and it's allowed us to maintain extremely high yields that feed the world population. Would you kill half the people on the planet to undo the green revolution? Is biotechnology that much of a moral offense to you?

program_whiz 7y ago
No biotech isn't a moral offense to me, I see the usefulness of it. I'm just pointing out that we don't view the natural state of things as sacrosanct -- once given the tools we will attempt to engineer ourselves into a new vision of perfection. The most likely outcome is total disaster (see almost every bioengineering attempt around the world by introducing or modifying species). There are 99 ways to fail for every 1 that improves the situation (and most of the "improvements" are short-term and from one limited perspective e.g. GMO corn prevents short-term starvation, but has other unexpected consequences on water / land / politics). Given our lack of moral / ethical maturity as a species in general (just look back at the early days of any tech and the experiments on humans), I'm just projecting out the likely outcome of having this at hand. While most of us wouldn't abuse this, you're giving the tools to do this out to a species with 7 billion members, so even if 1 smart person in 7 billion or any person in the future decides to abuse this tech to harm humanity somehow, then it can / will happen. And even if every single person who ever uses it only tries to "improve things", then at best we can expect something like our current environmental engineering efforts (e.g. some good, mostly disaster).

program_whiz 7y ago

No biotech isn't a moral offense to me, I see the usefulness of it. I'm just pointing out that we don't view the natural state of things as sacrosanct -- once given the tools we will attempt to engineer ourselves into a new vision of perfection. The most likely outcome is total disaster (see almost every bioengineering attempt around the world by introducing or modifying species). There are 99 ways to fail for every 1 that improves the situation (and most of the "improvements" are short-term and from one limited perspective e.g. GMO corn prevents short-term starvation, but has other unexpected consequences on water / land / politics). Given our lack of moral / ethical maturity as a species in general (just look back at the early days of any tech and the experiments on humans), I'm just projecting out the likely outcome of having this at hand. While most of us wouldn't abuse this, you're giving the tools to do this out to a species with 7 billion members, so even if 1 smart person in 7 billion or any person in the future decides to abuse this tech to harm humanity somehow, then it can / will happen. And even if every single person who ever uses it only tries to "improve things", then at best we can expect something like our current environmental engineering efforts (e.g. some good, mostly disaster).