Near Future Technologies and the Political Ramifications They will have

[hyperspacewizard]

This thread is for talking about such tech as designer babies artificial wombs neuralink and really anything in that vein. Tech that is just out of reach for now but could majorly impact everyone in the near future. I hope this is the correct spot for this.

What laws will be made how will certain political factions and philosophies react to them. How will the tech force the philosophers and politicians to change.

I change positions on being optimistic and pessimistic about these advancing fields frequently so I’m hoping a discussion can lay out what we think the pros and cons will be.


I personally see nothing morally wrong with gene editing your baby for better health and even making them as smart or as strong as can be. My main fear is something being screwed with that shouldn’t be screwed with like what if something we think now has no purpose or is bad turns out to be majorly important and we deleted or change it for the worse for an entire generation. Also what if governments or other groups try to force you to gene edit your kid like some do with other meds and vaccines. I can already imagine the arguments they would have.

On the artificial womb again I basically don’t see anything wrong with it in a vacuum but I wonder about the psychological impact on men and women when men don’t need women anymore and I can only imagine the pushback it would receive. I feel the artificial womb will be the final death blow of the family unit as we know it. On the other hand I feel it could also destroy the pro abortion argument because the fetus could be moved to the artificial womb and the mother could leave while the father could still have the kid.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I'd be very cautious of manipulating babies in the womb. It's dangerous to presume to think that you know how to make things "better", when in reality we know so, so very little about biology. Yeah, we know generally which side of the brain is responsible for what, but we still don't know how neurons work. And so on. As for the whole "design what your baby will look like!" thing, if that does happen... I don't know. I think God created a unique look for everyone and I'd be hesitant to presume I know better to change it.

 

[Terthna]

I'd be very cautious of manipulating babies in the womb. It's dangerous to presume to think that you know how to make things "better", when in reality we know so, so very little about biology. Yeah, we know generally which side of the brain is responsible for what, but we still don't know how neurons work. And so on. As for the whole "design what your baby will look like!" thing, if that does happen... I don't know. I think God created a unique look for everyone and I'd be hesitant to presume I know better to change it.

So hair dye, tattoos, and anything else than can be used to alter one's physical appearance are blasphemous then? Seems more than a little presumptuous; especially considering that it's just as possible that God doesn't care what you look like. After all, it's not like we get to keep these bodies forever.

 

[hyperspacewizard]

Yeah in general I’m more for removing obvious physical diseases I’m more cautious about anything that would mess with the brain. The effecting your child’s look I don’t think is morally wrong as long as it’s more symmetrical features and natural colors of eyes or hair I feel purposeful giving your child albinism or the look of such or something similar is wrong like giving your kid a super weird name is wrong. It could lead to social ostracism.

I do wonder how a world of beautiful people would view beauty though it’s a thought experiment worth exploring

 

[Bassoe]

I'm less worried about the creation of a genuinely biologically superior master race of transhuman übermenschen, more about the possibility of inescapable slavery.

Imagine a world where the standards of employment have been artificially raised by competition with specialized posthumans. No need for 'forcible' assimilation through laws mandating everyone gets augmented or cybermen/borg style warfare against baseline humanity in a world where if someone isn't willing to buy augmentation, they can't get a job. And of course, said augmentation will contain all kinds of backdoor overrides, spyware, planned obsolesce, engineered metabolic dependencies, etc, keeping its users permanently indebted to the megacorps selling and maintaining it. Company scrip that just barely pays for maintenance, a spyware link behind everyone's eyes and a remote shutoff for voluntary musculature to maintain monopoly of force. Or being perpetually unemployed and unemployable and starving to death. An inescapable totalitarianism. The end of history.

 

[hyperspacewizard]

While I think that level of cyberpunk is far off I still wouldn’t trust anything like neuralink unless there was no wireless connection. I’ve seen the crazy crap bored hackers get up to having a access point into my brain seems like a bad idea.

On a separate note with the advancements in tech in the 3d printing market I wonder when something like a home bio printer will come out I saw a video talking about infohazards by Kyle hill and he brought up the point what if we reach a level of tech where people in their own homes could start doing gene editing and such on the cheap and in their own homes that’s going to lead to both amazing and horrifying things.

Like with the tech now we can do this


Imagine what he could do when tech gets even better and imagine what other people could do both good and bad

 

[Bassoe]

While I think that level of cyberpunk is far off I still wouldn’t trust anything like neuralink unless there was no wireless connection. I’ve seen the crazy crap bored hackers get up to having a access point into my brain seems like a bad idea.

On a separate note with the advancements in tech in the 3d printing market I wonder when something like a home bio printer will come out I saw a video talking about infohazards by Kyle hill and he brought up the point what if we reach a level of tech where people in their own homes could start doing gene editing and such on the cheap and in their own homes that’s going to lead to both amazing and horrifying things.

Like with the tech now we can do this


Imagine what he could do when tech gets even better and imagine what other people could do both good and bad

 

[The Whispering Monk]

So hair dye, tattoos, and anything else than can be used to alter one's physical appearance are blasphemous then?

I've no problem with people doing that to themselves. I have an issue with altering a child before it's even born.

I'm OK with the idea of altering to remove defects such as disease, but not much beyond that. 'Course, who gets to decide what 'disease' means?

 

[Terthna]

I've no problem with people doing that to themselves. I have an issue with altering a child before it's even born.

I'm OK with the idea of altering to remove defects such as disease, but not much beyond that. 'Course, who gets to decide what 'disease' means?

As long as it's for the better, I don't see why we shouldn't. Make them smarter, faster, stronger, less prone to ailments; give them every genetic advantage possible.

 

[strunkenwhite]

neuralink

Brain tattoos are risky business

 

[Iconoclast]

I'd be very cautious of manipulating babies in the womb. It's dangerous to presume to think that you know how to make things "better", when in reality we know so, so very little about biology. Yeah, we know generally which side of the brain is responsible for what, but we still don't know how neurons work. And so on. As for the whole "design what your baby will look like!" thing, if that does happen... I don't know. I think God created a unique look for everyone and I'd be hesitant to presume I know better to change it.

After having studied a little bit of biology during my COVID freakout, I can say that you're 100% right about this. More than you know. We have over 20,000 genes that code for proteins, and all of those proteins have unique, interrelated functions, like a giant logic circuit, or a Jenga tower. Pull out one block, silence or edit one gene, and you really have no way to predict with complete accuracy what will happen. You can make a few educated guesses by looking at what those variations do to health and phenotype in living people, and they've gotten pretty good at tracking down the genetic basis for various illnesses, but really, they're only just scratching the goddamn surface.

Living organisms are highly complex chemical computers. The Life Sciences break down into a multitude of specialized fields, and most PhDs only really ever bother with unveiling the secrets of a couple different kinds of tissue. Even if you studied all your damn life, you'd be lucky to know what a few hundred different genes actually do, and there are thousands.

The true holy grail is simulating a complete organism on a supercomputer, down to determining what the addition of a single designer protein might do. Modern supercomputers struggle to do molecular dynamics simulations for, like, a few proteins, to say nothing of a whole goddamn cell, let alone some tens of trillions of cells. It's a very, very big computational problem.

Just going "lol, Gattaca babies", is kind of a pipe dream, sort of. There are a few things you could do, genetically, to prevent disease or enhance human capabilities, but they're unethical and risky.

 

[DarthOne]

Just going "lol, Gattaca babies", is kind of a pipe dream, sort of. There are a few things you could do, genetically, to prevent disease or enhance human capabilities, but they're unethical and risky.

As if ethics and risks have stopped humans in the past if they're amoral or greedy enough...