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With the advent of genetic design and designer babies, I don't see how ethics alone can prevent "soldier" and "assassin" specialists from being born that have a
by airhead969 6y ago
With the advent of genetic design and designer babies, I don't see how ethics alone can prevent "soldier" and "assassin" specialists from being born that have all sorts of enhancements.
- simcop2387 6y agoI think we'll be fine as long as nobody names one of them Khan Noonien Singh. But seriously, I agree, someone will do it and then it'll be another multi-armed race.
- airhead969 6y agoAnti-critters crawling into ears armor. I want a prehensile tail and feet. Maybe some gene therapy can make that happen to grow and remodel existing tissue?
- whatshisface 6y agoA literal multi-armed race.
- mc32 6y agoHow do they ensure being venomous to others while remaining immune themselves?
- etiam 6y agoStart slowly :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20074160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20074160
- ravenstine 6y agoWhat if that's better? Everyone could have a purpose and not need to search for it, often in futility.
- brendoelfrendo 6y agoWhat if they aren't interested in, or worse, resent their "purpose," but can't change it due to some societal and genetic pigeon-holing? That sounds worse than searching for a purpose for myself, tbh.
- sneak 6y agoThere's no indication that someone's genetically-specialized vocation would be something that that person would personally be interested in pursuing. There are numerous counterexamples of a person's choices in life being orthogonal or even entirely opposed to their parents' hopes and desires for their life. I wouldn't be that into assassination as a vocation even if I had superpowers that made me an extremely good assassin, for example. Obligatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
- hayst4ck 6y agoIt sounds like you are very much in the party of nurture over nature. Either could result in a person "being into" something. You are taking your genetics and your upbringing and projecting them onto future scientific possibilities, and I don't think that makes much sense. What if you sequence the great computer scientists and average ones and find some genes that really make a difference? What if you sequence sociopaths and discover a series of genes that correlate heavily with it? Sexuality, flight or flight responses, physical aptitude, mental aptitude. We've spent millennia doing a less advanced form of this on dogs, can you honestly say a lot of these dogs we've bred for specific jobs aren't "into them"?
- sneak 6y ago> It sounds like you are very much in the party of nurture over nature. No, this entirely different to that. I'm saying that a person's physical attributes are orthogonal to that person's personality. I'm not discussing if their personality is a result of nature or nuture, just the fact that if you're, for example, physically predisposed to, say, being able to grow large muscles, that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you are personally interested in, say, competitive weightlifting (regardless of whether or not that personal interest (or lack thereof) is a result of nature or nuture). The fact that you are predisposed to be able to grow large muscles is obviously nature; the circumstances surrounding whether or not you actually do grow large muscles is open to the nature/nurture debate, as well as the psychological manifestations that might lead one to engage in (or avoid) bodybuilding, competition, et c.
- SamoyedFurFluff 6y agoIt would take at least several years of development to create one vaguely effective venomous human assassin, with probably over a decade of development until the human developed vaguely enough dexterity to actually assassinate people. Unless we figure out a way to make humans grow faster at scale? I’ve always felt that enhancing human genetics to make them into weapons strikes me as more expensive and less scalable than inventing machinery that humans can use as weapons. What would be more scalable- a human born venomous or the ability to install a venom gland in a human sinus, replacing at least one tooth?
- SubiculumCode 6y agoyes. And in the meantime, simple drones that fling poisoned darts, or even toss venomous snakes, is much more feasible than mutant ninja warriors.
- jetbooster 6y agoBiting people isn't particularly discreet, and a person that gets captured can't dispose of a gland. A similarly deadly poison in the tip of a mundane item that a person might reasonably be carrying seems much more practical, much more likely to succeed, and much more likely to remain undetected
- 1-more 6y agoGeorgi Markov springs to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi_Markov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi_Markov
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoPoisoned dentures sounds a lot like the fake/apocryphal joke about pens during the space race: > During the height of the space race in the 1960s, legend has it, NASA scientists realized that pens could not function in space. They needed to figure out another way for the astronauts to write things down. So they spent years and millions of taxpayer dollars to develop a pen that could put ink to paper without gravity. But their crafty Soviet counterparts, so the story goes, simply handed their cosmonauts pencils. The soviets? They just gave their agents poisoned dentures and called it a day.
- afarrell 6y agoI think raising a child is a lot more effort than giving a trained operative weaponized dentures.
- pantalaimon 6y agoWhy bother with super soldiers when you can have robots and drones?
- newsbinator 6y agoThat can be taken to its logical conclusion, like that classic Star Trek Episode: Why bother building killer robots and drones when you can simulate the outcome of a battle without having to fight it in meat space. Whoever loses has to line up at the suicide booths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- anonporridge 6y agoSeriously, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg Human 'soldiers' are really only going to be useful in the near future for infiltrating and disrupting social systems, not for dispensing physical violence.
- willcipriano 6y agoI think you are both way off, we can't get a robot to flip a burger[0] it's going to be a long time for a robot to replace a special forces solider. They aren't just dumb manpower, we are talking a strategist, weapons specialist, paratrooper, negotiator plus a dozen other roles all in a 6 foot tall, 200 pound package that can go into a country and forage off the land for months while waiting for the perfect opportunity to complete it's mission. [0] I know you can find something on Youtube but if it really worked at scale McDonalds would be rolling them out yesterday.
- stonogo 6y agoPeople said the same thing on the advent of the Air Force. It turns out there's a lot more involved in winning a war than murdering people.
- msla 6y agoThe only way to weaponize humans is the Red Queen's Race: Make your children better than theirs. Smarter? Less likely to get diseases? Who knows. The point is, now your side has the edge, so they have to keep up. Maybe they get the edge next, so you have to innovate. And so on. Assuming there's sufficient "headroom" to build up these genetic transhumans, and we don't run into some no-free-lunch scenario where improvement is either impossible or comes with unavoidable nasty side-effects, you can't just sit still. You have to continue to improve or you can no longer pretend that all people are created equal in certain important respects. Morally equal, yes, but "morally equal" doesn't get you a leadership position.
- nradov 6y agoThere's no free lunch. Every significant enhancement comes with a corresponding disadvantage. Otherwise millions of years of evolution would have produced something better already. For example, partial genetic immunity to malaria carries an increased risk of syckle cell anemia. Most traits are like that to an extent.
- msla 6y ago> There's no free lunch. Every significant enhancement comes with a corresponding disadvantage. Otherwise millions of years of evolution would have produced something better already. And yet the nerve to my retina is still installed backwards.
- dwaltrip 6y agoHumans can imagine and create things that never had the appropriate conditions under which they could evolve. The possibility space has not been fully explored.