• Humans to be genetically-modified in Europe for the first time this year using g
    65 replies, posted
If people don't think this is going to be abused by the 1%, then you're fucking dense.
Make sure it isn't privatised tbh
That doesn't mean it can't be abused and actually probably makes it more prone to abuse if our current society is anything to go off. I don't know how you would regulate it but you would have to for sure.
First step towards the fight of making sure this technology isn't abused or hoarded is to have legal precedent to not be able to patent genes and have it be under the watchful eye of a federal watchdog. Someone with more pharmacetical / medical industry knowledge will have to speak up, but part of me feels that this will follow somehow with the model of brand name versus generic drugs.
I mean the problem is that it doesn't matter what regulations and laws and restrictions you lay out. There are people who simply lack the ethics and have the power to do it anyway. That has always been the way, trying to hide things in the dark. You don't make it better, you don't prevent the worst, you just make it hard for the layman to comprehend and deal with and prevent better paths from being taken. You can't prevent it, you have to adapt to it.
So... because some rich people will find a way to get the best, don't even try to regulate it and just let all rich people and corporations price the shit out of it and basically turn into a genetic uberclass?
No, don't try to just prevent it like every other dumbass attempt at controlling scary things. Drugs, alcohol, firearms, basically half of everything. You have to make it available, you can't stop it. So you adapt to make sure it's something approachable even by a layman. Something they can understand and work with.
AND make sure it isn't made only available to the rich and powerful
Yeah, because like I said they'll still do it if you try to prevent it entirely. Blanket bans won't help. You have to integrate. As I said, adapt to it.
Designer babies are going to be a thing some day before too long. When the rich can have children that are better, literally, better than us, that's a threat to the continuations of our existences and should be recognized as such.
I think the desire to use this for anything other than medical purposes is extremely shortsighted. The last thing the world needs is an upper class that is actually genetically superior to the lower class, or effectively immortal dictators. Everything that lives must also die. The sooner you accept that, and stop rabidly trying to cling onto this development without even thinking about its implications, the less disappointed you'll be when the end finally comes.
This tech is so readily available that I don't think gatekeeping it will be feasible. That is if there's even benefit in doing that. How would you even make better humans? As far as I know there's no simple genes to make someone stronger, faster or smarter, at least not without drawbacks. Besides, if you can make better humans I'm fairly sure many nations would jump at the chance more eagerly than individuals. Imagine making your people and society actually superior, instead of merely pretending it is. Maybe it'll fuel nationalism, maybe not. After all people will intermingle in a globalized world, national pride or not. One thing I wonder is why haven't the 1% gatekeeped vaccines to control the masses, and why would this be different? That's literally what happened in Deus Ex.
How is it a threat to the "continuation of your existence"? Unless we make absolutely insane leaps and bounds in many fields, including neuroscience, and somehow don't change sour society at all, we have literally no idea what will happen. Not even remotely.
I think one of the aspects of how it becomes a threat to society is due to all the other things that we're figuring out or are completely broken. Compared to say Star Trek, we don't have replicators or atleast automated farms to everyone is fed. Clean water is still (unfortunately) a challenge for even some first world countries because of human nature. And the right to shelter or just some place to sleep isn't guaranteed. Universal medical care isn't a guaranteed right, its a privilege. Ironically we're able to fufil the human right of communication (through the internet) better than we're able to fulfill basic physiological needs. When our society is built around capitalism that requires the best, those left behind be it from automation or people who are genetically superior in some aspect (I know that education/training plays a role here, b/c nature vs nurture etc etc) won't have income to feed themselves, get shelter, or proper medical attention, etc. Thus it literally boils down to artificially accelerated Darwinism. Again, as with any new tech, its not the tech that's inherently the problem, its flawed human nature and our flawed systems that will exploit the technology. I'd be game for genetic enhancements beyond just preventing/curing inherited diseases so long as there's some safeguards in place to prevent hoarding or exploitation. I don't have the answers of how we could solve that, but that's atleast my take on it.
... I never said blanket band, blanket anything, or bans at all
Well thats good, but you chose to respond to me first, not the other way around, so maybe keep that in mind.
yeah i want wait until people live forever so that ppl like jd rockefellar can live until the end of time
The thing to remember is, that quality of life is, on a global scale (even more aggressively in non-developing countries), increasing. Yes, humans are flawed. Yes, we are still bound by our instincts that make us do shitty things, and we still live in a consumer society. The world isn't perfect. But technological developments notwithstanding, human suffering is declining. It's not declining rapidly in all areas, in some areas (especially in the short term) it may appear that the suffering is increasing, but on a larger scale (multiple generations), it's night and day. We don't have replicators, but we have a hell of a lot of other improvements that have the ability to address or have already addressed problems in ways that would appear "magical" to somebody only several hundred years ago. We have genetically modified crops that have the ability to eradicate world hunger, we can prevent a huge litany of diseases that used to plague the earth, and more. To assume that the world will be in the same place it is now when such tech comes to fruition doesn't make any sense to me. Even if it were to be more or less the same as it is now, I just don't see it being used to enforce stark inequality in that way. Paradigm-shifting technologies have a tendency to trickle down to even the most destitute parts of the world, whether it be faster or slower or to greater or lesser effect. I'm not saying that it won't have social implications. It will. I just don't think that they're going to be more stark than the ones that already exist, I.E. access to high quality nutrition, vaccines, guaranteed completely safe water, etc (speaking in global terms here). Somebody who has had high quality nutrition, who doesn't catch XYZ disease, and who doesn't get sick from their water ever will quite objectively be a "superior person" compared to somebody who has not, there have been a lot of studies on that, and we don't have a pantheon of super-persons that hoard good food/vaccines/water to suppress the proletariat eyet. tldr; it may result in inequality issues but based on historical tech developments it will contribute to the global decline of suffering and the betterment of humanity, as have all paradigm shifting technologies (war-exclusive tech excluded) after an adjustment period.
Oh wow, this kinda just says it all.
Let's just genetically modify ourselves to be able to vore the rich, problem solved.
Lol, it's exactly what pushes companies to spread out advances to milk tech for money, as well as to collectively charge for high demand things. It halts progress, and facilitates inequality
he pretty much said "wealth trickles down" if you think about it
The whole trickle down concept is and has always been silly. I really hoped people here would see that
Huh, I would have expected all the talk of furries to have been started in hard to decipher english written by chadmcgoatman
I absolutely did not say this. I said that technology spreads to even the most destitute regions, which it unarguably does. If you want to argue that the average working person on earth leads just as good of a life as they did 500 years ago then that's your argument to make but you're also completely wrong.
How about the fact that the disparity between the rich and the middle class is growing larger and larger?
I'm not talking about short-term things like where wealth happens to be in a particular country, I'm talking about the topic at hand; how technology proliferates and how it makes the world as a whole improve, and how it decreases overall human suffering. Yeah, that's not good, but we're leaps and bounds ahead of where we were when dukes lording over the peasantry was the norm. You're completely ignoring the point of my posts, which is that tech has a history of improving all rungs of society, which it is. If you want to talk about our country in particular, how about you realize that even the poorest in our country aren't starving to death en masse? Technological developments hit the entire planet, even if they hit certain places faster. I'm not saying inequality exists. Of course it does. I'm talking about the kind of grand-scale issues that new tech like this could bring. I even addressed the particular class issue that you're talking about up in my big post.
Do we need to post the Felinid video again?
until some retard makes up some bullshit and creates a stigma that makes people think gene splicing is dangerous/bad/
If only they could clone me a girlfriend.
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