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[toomanysecrets]

Would this truly be that bad? Would this group become "slaves"?

Yes, it would be a horrible, horrible nightmare world, and they wouldn't become slaves, they would be slaves as soon as you "DESIGNED" them.

[GlyphGryph]

WHY, though? Try to explain it to me so I can understand.

[Descan]

Best I can explain is that by designing them for a certain job profile, you're deciding their lives for them.

If you disagree, perhaps you aren't explaining what you mean well enough...

[Frumple]

Best I can explain is that by designing them for a certain job profile, you're deciding their lives for them.

GG's point, near as I can tell, is that that's, well. Not possible, or at least not efficiently doable. It's really hard to improve something for a specific position doing one thing and not have that skillset/capability expansion not make that thing also better at many other things. And there still doesn't seem to be anything intrinsic to providing a genetic predisposition toward certain skillsets that's stopping the modified from doing something less than optimal. Being really good at something doesn't somehow change the firmament of reality and make it so that's the only thing you're capable of.

Basically, it's really hard to improve something and in the process make it less capable. You'd have to be specifically removing beneficial adaptations and... there's no reason to do that. It's less efficient, notably so. You get more use out of a smart critter with legs, with less infrastructure investment, than you do from ones without. There's no financial (or any other, really -- any control issues can be handled on the social side much more effectively.) incentive to breed a less effective critter, y'know?

Though I guess that's tangential to the slave thing. I'm not really sure about that one, either. It takes more than just "better at deskwork" to turn something into a slave, I'd say, but perhaps TMS can clarify the point.

[Criptfeind]

Also of course you would not seem people at the top making people to be at the top. Because the people who would be making these decisions already are of course perfect for their job.

Anyway. Your thoughts seem irreconcilable to me. At one point you insist people would not do things that hurt others to help themselves, and at another point you seem to be saying that since people already abuse powers over genetics they would certainly not do it more if they were give much more power.

I really don't understand your thoughts at all anymore.

[toomanysecrets]

WHY

Because you are taking away their free will.

You have talked about "designing" a human being to excel at certain things and to enjoy work more.  Therefore, you are taking away his ability to decide if he likes his job.  You are limiting the fields of endeavor this person might experience in their lifetime.  This is taking their free will, which is literally dehumanizing them. From my perspective, these "people" would be abominations.  And if they knew what their creators had done, they would probably revolt.  Unless you "designed" them not to.

[Psyco Jelly]

There is no reason to sterilize people against their will. That won't even eliminate genetic illnesses anyway. There are orders of magnitude more carriers than there are individuals whom express the illness in question, no matter what it is.

This is not always true, Marfan's syndrome and similar fibrilin defects are dominant mutations, though admittedly around 25% of those that have it are an original mutation, so it wouldn't matter anyway. I really wish there was a way to remove it from the human genome, but fibrilin is so damn complex there's no way to do it.

[Realmfighter]

Because you are taking away their free will.

You have talked about "designing" a human being to excel at certain things and to enjoy work more.  Therefore, you are taking away his ability to decide if he likes his job.  You are limiting the fields of endeavor this person might experience in their lifetime.  This is taking their free will, which is literally dehumanizing them. From my perspective, these "people" would be abominations.  And if they knew what their creators had done, they would probably revolt.  Unless you "designed" them not to.

They wouldn't be forced to, from what I understand of GG's scenario. Sure, they're more likely to love their jobs but so what? Their life improves from having a enjoyable profession. Someone made to be literally better in general improvement (Again, I don't really get what GG is saying) would have more opportunities than a normal human going through life and falling where they may.

They would be more inclined to work harder. You're inclined towards eating fatty and sugary foods. Evolution or man made they are equally influential impulses, and if a human creating them means free will is destroyed than nature's hand meant we never had it.

[Criptfeind]

Boom. I actually already wrote a bit about nature taking away free will, but then I decided to wait until someone else posted about it. Short wait amirite?

It's true. Nature took away a lot of our free will. We can't decide to grow scales or decide to fly though the void of space. We can't decide to only eat sunlight and we can't decide many mental things as well.

But we can decide a awful lot. We can decide if we want to farm. We can decide if we want to work in a office. We can decide if we want thing. More so then anything we can want to be able to do things. We can want to fly, we can want to eat sunlight. We can want to decide our own destiny. Hell. We can even want to want things.

Maybe the ability to want things could be considered a flaw. But I think that is really what makes us human. Even if the ability to want things is in of itself flawed in many ways.

Nature has left us with a lot of free will missing. But that does not mean that taking away the small amount we have is acceptable.

[Hiiri]

Because you are taking away their free will.

You have talked about "designing" a human being to excel at certain things and to enjoy work more.  Therefore, you are taking away his ability to decide if he likes his job.  You are limiting the fields of endeavor this person might experience in their lifetime.  This is taking their free will, which is literally dehumanizing them. From my perspective, these "people" would be abominations.  And if they knew what their creators had done, they would probably revolt.  Unless you "designed" them not to.

How is this any different from how it is now? We don't choose to like certain things and dislike others. And if a person is perfectly happy with job X, why should it matter what originated the happiness?

[Criptfeind]

Because you are taking away their free will.

You have talked about "designing" a human being to excel at certain things and to enjoy work more.  Therefore, you are taking away his ability to decide if he likes his job.  You are limiting the fields of endeavor this person might experience in their lifetime.  This is taking their free will, which is literally dehumanizing them. From my perspective, these "people" would be abominations.  And if they knew what their creators had done, they would probably revolt.  Unless you "designed" them not to.

How is this any different from how it is now? We don't choose to like certain things and dislike others. And if a person is perfectly happy with job X, why should it matter what originated the happiness?

Because people have options. There are wide ranges of things you like. Even if a person decide to do one thing at one company for the rest of their life because they are happy there, they still had the ability to chose that and they would have been happy in many other places as well.

[Frumple]

Nature has left us with a lot of free will missing. But that does not mean that taking away the small amount we have is acceptable.

*scratches head* How would what GG's describing be taking away from our ability to want things, though? As I understand it, it'd just make certain tasks more enjoyable should we decide to do them. Not force the modified to want them or whathaveyou.  There's... no loss involved in the given scenario. Straight improvement, greater capability. Hell, it'd be adding options, not taking from them, yes?

[Criptfeind]

Yeah. That's great and all. Too bad it's way more unrealistic then the name corporate drone becoming literal.

Edit: Not that it matters what is more realistic when taking about two scenarios where one is "increase in productivity" and the other one is "destruction of humanity"

[Realmfighter]

Nature has left us with a lot of free will missing. But that does not mean that taking away the small amount we have is acceptable.

So you're saying that having a greater amount of desires is immediately more desirable?

Why would these new humans, more inclined to focus on their work and more able to complete it have less desires than their unaltered counterpart? Why would wanting to be productive be less desirable than wanting to sit on a couching drinking beer just because it was man made instead of caused by evolution?

[Criptfeind]

I see three questions there Realm.

1: Yes.

2: You literally answered the question in the same sentence.

3: Because someone who likes sitting on a couch drinking beer is a complex person full of lots of desires and ideas and potential. Which they then chose to use on being happy sitting on a couch drinking beer. I would be just as unhappy with someone being forced to sit on a couch and drink beer as anything else.