Hey science and math anons.
I'll be up front. I first posted this to LULZ but it archived after only a handful of responses. It's probably my fault for only posting the OP and then going outside to water my tomatos and pet the stray cat for 20 minutes. Maybe LULZ isn't the venue for an intelligent discussion so here I am.
--------------------------
I didn't see anybody talking about the 'entity' that's being lab grown to replace us. Lets observe.
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/scientists-create-human-entity-has-no-mother-or-father
TLDR is that they made a lifeform without a sperm or an egg or a womb.
My take on it is that we live in the Blade Runner timeline now. Synthetic lab grown people for the purpose of space engineering and war.
What are the political implications then of fully lab grown synthetic people in our society? Do they have rights? Are they human? Can a corporation own a genetically engineered organism and does that make them a product or do they have human rights?
--------------
Hopefully it generates more discussion this time around. I'm here, I'm bored. Lets debate the costs and benefits of lab grown robo-waifu's.
Just to prove I am a human bean, here is a 2nd posterino to verify my fleshiness.
>What are the political implications then of fully lab grown synthetic people in our society?
You are ultimately discussing slavery, can one human own another own another human being, imposing their unrestricted will onto another human being.
>Do they have rights?
If we begin to segment the human population into 'artificial embryonic growth' and 'natural in utero' births, we will quickly blur the lines of who gets certain rights and who does not.
> Are they human?
What is a human? Is a Neanderthal human? Are all Homo Sapians on earth Human? At which point in DNA evolution do we separate natural human from rapidly evolving embryonic humans?
>Can a corporation own a genetically engineered organism and does that make them a product or do they have human rights?
Corporations already own patents for Genetically Modified organisms, plants and crops, why wouldn't this translate into other life forms?
Here becomes a complex question, what defines as human being of natural being as being a product?
>Produced to reproduce DNA and genetic material for various lifeforms that comprise the human body, iterate and adapting over time.
I have moral objections and believe that no, no Corporation will be able to claim 'ownership' over another human being, but I also tried to provide objective questions and responses irrespective of my opinions.
Another way to phrase my last question
>why don't you consider humans already as products?
Yep. I was mostly asking the question to raise awareness like it's rhetorical. I was aware that corporations like monsanto already claim ownership over organisms that are genetically modified. It makes sense when you are just patenting a new kind of tomato but when you could apply the same rules to a lab grown human, it get's a lot more complicated.
I think we might be covering old ground all over again. There is a theory that in the remote past, aliens visited earth and engineered the natives into a more capable slave species. It's possible that we are still just fulfilling our original purpose to harvest and process the natural world. Maybe we were already seeded here to put the resources to use and someday there will come a harvest. Just wild speculation though.
>initial post offered a decent thought experiment
>second OP reply is about aliens and shit we will never be able to confirm or deny
Sigh
OK I am back. I like Sci, my posts stick around longer than 15 minutes. Sometimes to carefully consider an idea takes days. The format here is better for deep thought analysis.
I have some hot takes. I think the government should be a military dictatorship built around meritocracy and abortion should be banned so the military can confiscate all the unwanted children. They go into a special education program outside of culture. Safely secured and prevented from access to the internet or pop culture that could poison their developing minds. They would be trained from birth to be perfect soldiers while applying all of the most advanced medical science to optimizing their development to make perfect super-soldiers. I'm talking a full array of ehancements. Growth hormones. Nootropics. I want these to be the perfect humans. Then you apply a level of genetic engineering on top of this so not only are you getting the best of organic biology and the best of pharmaceutical enhancement, but you also apply cutting edge gene modification to splice in all sorts of enhancements like regeneration. You could also turn off the aging process, making an immortal soldier. We should be trying to make a human so superior to ourselves, so godlike, that it surpasses us instantly. Then within the military dictatorship I described, they would quickly rise to the top since it would be a meritocracy and they would by default be the best of the best.
Eventually you could develop some advanced AI and integrate the silicon superintelligence into the perfect biological immortal shell. You would make a hybrid cyborg of unlimited potential. We would quickly dominate this sector of space.
Holy schizophrenia,
I'm not reading this shit anon
>literally-who schizo with no idea what he's talking about outrageposts on his schizosite under a fake schizoname about how scientists are going to replace people with stem cells
>also the idea of doing experiments on human embryos consisting of a few hundred cells makes the schizo want to vomit
>i'm supposed to take this seriously
>pet the stray cat
>Is it bad?
Not when I do it, is for everyone else.
Just remember that everything these people do, is done in the interest of those who fund them, and all of it will be used against you at some point.
Look at the other article about Moral enhancement killing an individual
>Ernest Jones, in 1913, was the first to construe extreme narcissism, which he called the "God-complex", as a character flaw. He described people with God-complex as being aloof, self-important, overconfident, auto-erotic, inaccessible, self-admiring, and exhibitionistic, with fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience. He observed that these people had a high need for uniqueness.
>What are the political implications then of fully lab grown synthetic people in our society?
Our society doesn't allow lab-grown people. The implications of a society that allows the creation of people in a lab have been thoroughly explored in dystopian sci-fi fiction. How is this LULZ?
>playing god
what does this mean?
It means fucking with things way, waaaaaay above your paygrade and foresight capacity.
My OP is straight forward. News article about science. Discussion about the implications to follow. Insert hypotheticals and theories. Suggest methodology for future progress.
While some people would say STOP we have to go back, I say step on the gas and see where we end up. Star Trek says we get a Khan who wages war on humanity because he is genetically superior, or a Borg that says you will be assimilated. That's fiction made dramatic for views, it's not representative of the real world, only our fears about a possible future. It doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia, it could all turn out fine. Maybe our current crisis is simply the inability of people with a current level of intellect, to solve the problems of our current level. We need people of a higher intellect to solve these problems and if those people don't exist yet we need to make them.
>While some people would say STOP we have to go back, I say step on the gas and see where we end up.
And I say step up everything around it so that your nightmare dystopia collapses before it starts making golem armies.
It's going to be a tough sell to suppress this technology. Imagine you want to have children but you know your family has a history of certain medical conditions. The temptation to edit your baby is going to be big. And what if you have a normal child and it has a terrible defect that you could have edited out in vitro? Is it fair to give your offspring a disadvantage that you could have avoided? And what if you have a Gattica situation where edited humans become the norm and people with natural defects become an anachronism on the fringes of society. A certain level of genetic perfection might become mandatory to achieve anything in the society of the future. It's a complex issue.
I'm sort of straying from the topic, but it's related. The same technology that will make edited children possible, would be used to make these designer humans with no parents. In a way you could develop my idea for super-soldiers, exclusively using these lab grown, parentless entities. You wouldn't have to end abortion and conscript the orphans, which society might frown on (but not abortion, for reasons)
I'd also like to point out that if we wish to colonize distant worlds without FTL technology, we will probably have to send robotic ships that will grow their own crew from scratch once they arrive in several hundred years. Something like the movie Moon.
>It's going to be a tough sell to suppress this technology.
No, it isn't. It's going to be a tough sell to convince normal people to agree with you, but that's what the brainwash industry is for.
Well my family has a history of back problems and if I could pay some money to have that defect removed from my own babies, I would do it. Other families have mental illness that is hereditary or blood disorders like black folks have (sickle cell anemia). If you can fix something and prevent suffering, isn't it almost something you are obligated to do? Could you live with yourself if you made your own offspring suffer when you could fix it before it's a problem using genetic engineering?
Where is will get squirrelly is when every mom is like, "I want my baby to be 7 ft. 9 inches and hung like a stallion, with blue eyes and a chiseled jaw and abs with cum gutters. And then everyone in society will look like gigachad for real.
How do you get from "it would be nice to fix my genetically deformed babies" to "it would be nice to let government and corporate labs create human fetuses out of stem cells and experiment on them"?
It's an extension of the same technology. It's not exactly the same thing but it's like a parallel branch on a tree that comes from the same branch of science.
It's not that they are being experimented on so much, it's that they are the experiment. They did it to see if they could. In fiction, lab grown people are often used to do dirty jobs but in reality they just have regular people slave away in dirty jobs they hate. They don't need high end clones for that. If they do end up building synthetic people, they will be built for purpose. Built to be better than people in some way or better adapted for environments people can't normally survive well in.
>It's an extension of the same technology.
That doesn't answer my question in any way.
>It's not that they are being experimented on so much
No, the literal, explicit pretext for their creation is to circumvent ethical limitations imposed by civilized society on soience psychopaths.
Hmm. OK well the question is how do I get from A to B in my line of thinking. I'm thinking of the technology as a tool. The same tool can have many uses. Like my claw hammer is good for carpentry but a murderer could put it to another use that I wouldn't. When I say it's an extension of the same technology, I just mean that it's sort of a package deal. You can use the tool of genetic engineering to do good things or bad things and we should try to do good things and a lot of the debate is in figuring out what is good or bad about it and how we plan to use it. It's unexplored territory on the frontier of science. It's just a bit sketchy because technologies this powerful can have serious consequences.
I don't get it. Do you have some kind of disability? Let me phrase it differently: just because you want some goodies doesn't mean you get a license to just do whatever the fuck you want to get there. Once again, the only reason this thing exists is to circumvent ethical limitations society has already agreed upon, so that "tough sell" of forbidding it has already been done and now these psychopaths are just trying to slip through the back door.
It sounds like they want to make parentless embryo's to do experiments on because of how unethical it would be to experiment on real embryo's. So I'm thinking, if they never fully develop into a person, and they never had a parent, then isn't it just a clump of cells for the purpose of testing drugs? Isn't it better than testing on people or animals? It's a very tough moral line to pin down. It sounds wildly useful, wildly beneficial, but the ethics...
A replacement organ is nice but I want a replacement spinal column.
>It sounds like they want to make parentless embryo's to do experiments on because of how unethical it would be to experiment on real embryo's
Ok, but this is completely retarded, because the whole point of this technology is to produce something that's as good as a "real" embryo, so to argue that different ethical standards should apply is (ironically) what's called a genetic fallacy, which brings us back to the point that these people are just trying to loophole-lawyer their way out of ethical constaints. 😐
>if they never fully develop into a person, and they never had a parent, then isn't it just a clump of cells for the purpose of testing drugs?
You could say the same about Stacy's unwanted fetus but once again, we've been there and already decided this is unacceptable.
Well half of society is opposed to abortion and the other half gets furious if you try to stop them from aborting babies. Women have been making the clump of cells argument to rationalize abortion for decades. In this case the argument is even more valid because what is really the likely outcome is that they will take some of your own stem cells and use them to grow you a new heart. It won't have to be a whole clone, so it's a lot more acceptable ethically.
You can't experiment on embryo's because they are going to turn into people. I get that moral code. If the stem cells are tricked into becoming an embryo for science and then discarded after the experiment, then I see no harm. You create something that never would have existed without mad-science and then you do your tests on it and make sure to fully dispose of it so you never get abominations. It would be super unethical to make one of these fake embryo's grow into a full person. What kind of a life would that be? It's a bit of a moral tightrope walk and it would be easy to fall off into corrupt misbehavior, metaphorically speaking.
>You can't experiment on embryo's because they are going to turn into people
Utter nonsense. It won't turn into a person if you simply kill it when you're done but that's still forbidden. It's forbidden for fundamental philosophical reasons that go much deeper than your surface level objections, which we could discuss, but frankly, you don't have to understand or acknowledge those reasons to see the situation for what it is: someone is trying to capitalize on your stupidity and exploit a retarded ethical loophole.
Digging into the comments section I found this
"this appears to be a step towards controlling cellular differentiation in a manner that allows for cellular self-organization into functional organs.
Which means that if we can nail down the in utero difference between a kidney, heart and liver (which won't really take long, honestly) we can make those organs individually, at will, with a stem cell sample from a patient and produce an organ with a perfect match to them because, effectively, it is their organ. We can avoid the problems of growing a whole new person and we can do this quite fast, like maybe within a few weeks. Easily fast enough for it to be a true treatment for a whole host of injuries and other organ dysfunction.
And, as I said, if the organ dysfunction is genetic, like perhaps a ciliopathy or something, it's possible to edit that out in the replacement organ and restore full, normal function. For people with certain disorders that's not just a replacement, it's an improvement. "
So the experiment was a proof of concept for what sounds like a very profitable custom organ growing technology.
its necessary
>What are the political implications then of fully lab grown synthetic people in our society? Do they have rights? Are they human? Can a corporation own a genetically engineered organism and does that make them a product or do they have human rights?
If it can think, and has ~~*free-will*~~ or is very much autonomous, then yes it has rights. A.I. doesn't seem to match that criteria yet.