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Why would we abuse them? We treat disabled people OK, don't we? What exactly is your fear? Some kind of prejudice against people who were born through different

Why would we abuse them? We treat disabled people OK, don't we? What exactly is your fear? Some kind of prejudice against people who were born through different procedures? We already have test tube babies walking among us and nobody mistreats them.

mola 4y ago
"testube babies" have parents. These will have owners. I think it's a valid fear that once someone is able to create living things out of nothing, they'll treat them as products and tools We already do it with animals....
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  Oh and of course patent it. And build in copy protection meassures, meaning someone cloning your "tools" would result in not working products, aka death or disabled
- practice9 4y ago
  There is a book by Ned and Constance Sublette called "The American Slave Coast" that goes deep into detail how slavery worked in USA. It was essentially same as what you're saying, slaves were considered a self-replicating financial product and a tool for work
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  Who says they'll be property and not have the same rights as normal people? Slavery was banned. If this becomes so objectionable, it'll be banned too. Why are all you people assuming laws and civilization will stop existing in the future? Are you afraid that future people might not share your current political views? Get over yourself and let them have their own sovereignty and vote for what they want.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ben_w 4y ago
That's the best case, even though "not abusing them" is a low hurdle. Such life would not be limited to human forms. Even with just human forms, if you're going to all the trouble to engineer custom life, why make that life anything other than your idea of perfect? I don't know for sure, but I suspect that a predisposition to obedience to authority figures may be engineered; some would want that in their own children, others in what may be de jure servants and de facto slaves. Last I checked — a few years ago, and this is a fast moving field — we can't currently 3D print large complex living structures, only simple and small because of the oxygen diffusion limit; if we can engineer around that, even if you still needed to replace the brain with a computer and nerves with metal, you can have a "real life centaur ride" or dragon drones. If you do that but deliberately replace the brain and nerves with electrical equivalents, you have remote controllable meat[0] puppets making bodyguards redundant (the person being protected can just be remote); making worthless eye witness accounts, DNA tests, and fingerprints; and what happened with DeepFake porn then happens IRL with sex workers puppeting everyone and everything from Addams Family's Thing to Westworld LARP. The landscape of possibilities and preferences for these things may be radically altered by other related tech. For example, skin samples can be grown in vitro and transplanted back to a human (IIRC this is already done for severe burns victims), combine with suitable GM (IDK, spider silk perhaps?) and someone could become naturally bullet resistant, radically changing not only the nature of bodyguarding but also soldiering. [0] well, not necessarily meat, it might be made from GM fungus cells or plant cells, but it could be made to look arbitrarily close to or far from any of those things
- Hedepig 4y ago
  I think most people don't truly grasp how much this will change the world. IMO the advances in Synbio will be vastly more influential than the advances in AI (though AI is utilized heavily for the former)
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Both are too large in scope to really grasp. One has the power to make us all permanently redundant and unable to tell fact from fantasy[0] by being too good a story teller, the other can make them indistinguishable by making the fantasies[0] real. [0] In the broadest sense that also includes nightmares
konart 4y ago
>We treat disabled people OK, don't we? Who are we? Disabled people treated differently in different places. In many places you'd prefer death most likely.

mola 4y ago

"testube babies" have parents. These will have owners. I think it's a valid fear that once someone is able to create living things out of nothing, they'll treat them as products and tools We already do it with animals....

hutzlibu 4y ago
Oh and of course patent it. And build in copy protection meassures, meaning someone cloning your "tools" would result in not working products, aka death or disabled
practice9 4y ago
There is a book by Ned and Constance Sublette called "The American Slave Coast" that goes deep into detail how slavery worked in USA. It was essentially same as what you're saying, slaves were considered a self-replicating financial product and a tool for work
sacrosancty 4y ago
Who says they'll be property and not have the same rights as normal people? Slavery was banned. If this becomes so objectionable, it'll be banned too. Why are all you people assuming laws and civilization will stop existing in the future? Are you afraid that future people might not share your current political views? Get over yourself and let them have their own sovereignty and vote for what they want.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ben_w 4y ago

That's the best case, even though "not abusing them" is a low hurdle. Such life would not be limited to human forms. Even with just human forms, if you're going to all the trouble to engineer custom life, why make that life anything other than your idea of perfect? I don't know for sure, but I suspect that a predisposition to obedience to authority figures may be engineered; some would want that in their own children, others in what may be de jure servants and de facto slaves. Last I checked — a few years ago, and this is a fast moving field — we can't currently 3D print large complex living structures, only simple and small because of the oxygen diffusion limit; if we can engineer around that, even if you still needed to replace the brain with a computer and nerves with metal, you can have a "real life centaur ride" or dragon drones. If you do that but deliberately replace the brain and nerves with electrical equivalents, you have remote controllable meat[0] puppets making bodyguards redundant (the person being protected can just be remote); making worthless eye witness accounts, DNA tests, and fingerprints; and what happened with DeepFake porn then happens IRL with sex workers puppeting everyone and everything from Addams Family's Thing to Westworld LARP. The landscape of possibilities and preferences for these things may be radically altered by other related tech. For example, skin samples can be grown in vitro and transplanted back to a human (IIRC this is already done for severe burns victims), combine with suitable GM (IDK, spider silk perhaps?) and someone could become naturally bullet resistant, radically changing not only the nature of bodyguarding but also soldiering. [0] well, not necessarily meat, it might be made from GM fungus cells or plant cells, but it could be made to look arbitrarily close to or far from any of those things

Hedepig 4y ago
I think most people don't truly grasp how much this will change the world. IMO the advances in Synbio will be vastly more influential than the advances in AI (though AI is utilized heavily for the former)
- ben_w 4y ago
  Both are too large in scope to really grasp. One has the power to make us all permanently redundant and unable to tell fact from fantasy[0] by being too good a story teller, the other can make them indistinguishable by making the fantasies[0] real. [0] In the broadest sense that also includes nightmares

konart 4y ago

>We treat disabled people OK, don't we? Who are we? Disabled people treated differently in different places. In many places you'd prefer death most likely.