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[Loud Whispers]

furries

There's a fine line between awoo and kill it with fire

Also relevant:
My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack’s muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?

[Harry Baldman]

Wouldn't we just have some sort of not-robot uprising?

Some sort of... human uprising?

Pshaw, that's just a science fiction scenario! Such a thing couldn't possibly happen in real life, unlike a superintelligent AI revolting against its technocratic masters and using its superlative intellect to deduce special relativity through a webcam, then psionically eradicating half the population of New York City in order to ultimately prevent the demise of the human race.

EDIT:

Genetic engineering is scary powerful.
Genetic engineering of babies is largely prohibited.
Genetic engineering could see a major advancement every four years.(my opinion)

It isn't as long as you observe any reasonable standard of safety and keep in mind how little we actually know of genomes in terms of how they apply to functions most people are interested in.

Yes, and for very good reason.

Probably, but they'll only filter down to mass-market applications in 15 years at best, if at all. Unless you mean potentially game-changing breakthroughs like PCR or CRISPR, in which case I'd tend to disagree, those come about once a decade or two.

[TempAcc]

Ogryns when.

[Loud Whispers]

Ogryns when.

Ogryns were made with good old natural selection and copious doses of space exploration. Also, a sincere morality ;-;

[Cthulhu]

Permanent slave class. 

Is slavery still a bad thing though, if they're genetically engineered to like being slaves?

Define "bad"

[eerr]

I'm searching online and I've heard the proposal that gene drive could be used to kill the entirety of an invasive species.

Here's a question:

Is it ethical to wipe out the local population of a species?

Is it ethical to wipe out the local population of an invasive species?

What is the difference between the two?

[Draignean]

Killing the entirety of something with gene drive techniques is inherently difficult. It's possible to destabilize a population, weaken it so that the native species has a chance to recover, but the gene drive techniques I'm familiar with still rely on natural reproduction- just stacking the odds in favor of selecting a certain selection.

Can you forward the article? I'm interested in how they intend to kill off something instead of simply weakening it.

As far as ethics go, that's an issue for conservation. Personally, I'm all in favor of stacking the deck in favor of the native species, but, well, it's a bit hypocritical to say that as a human being.

[MrRoboto75]

Wouldn't we just have some sort of not-robot uprising?

Some sort of... human uprising?

The human slaves won't revolt because they've been genetically engineered to be subservient.

In other words, you created a machine that needs to eat and shits everywhere, and probably requires anywhere from 16 years to a couple months to produce.  Why?

[x2yzh9]

Shouldn't gene editing be regulated by the united nations, as well as the security council(possibly)? If you've ever played the game deus ex, it openly envisions a horrifying world in which people with genetic engineering are routinely slaughtered and made to be (virtually speaking)slaves to the 'non-augmented'. I'd hate to see a great scientific discovery such as this one go to the evil people in the world with unrestricted usage.

However, I am all for gene editing in that it can make important scientific improvements

Not to mention, if you've ever watched the old school movie GATTACA, it describes a horrible reality where people who want to go to space, or be functional individuals have to pay horribly high costs
to even do it, or in that their parents do.

[scrdest]

Bloody hell, genetics isn't magic. 'Just genetics people to be subservient' is roughly like telling an IT guy 'I want a sentient AI by next Monday, just go write one'.

Today's clinical cutting edge is to patch up normal human organs with reprogrammed cells, preferably without giving someone a horrific teratoma in the process, or fixing single-gene defects like cystic fibrosis. That's still a long way from even knowing how basic body-modding crap like giving someone an extra digit would be reliably and safely done, much less fucking with the single most complex and poorly understood organ in any animal.

[Draignean]

Bloody hell, genetics isn't magic. 'Just genetics people to be subservient' is roughly like telling an IT guy 'I want a sentient AI by next Monday, just go write one'.

We're thinking in the future man, like the day when we have to worry about the consequences of the gene-baby of Tom Waits and Charlie Sheen trying to claim that the catgirl he wears as a hat is technically classifiable as an animal and shouldn't have to wear any more clothes than the average cat (just the neck bell).

'Is Future man, Future is magic. Soon we'll be in the era where designer babies line up to join clone armies for the glory of the 0.01% elite who've gene-modded themselves into immortality, an era where corporate fat cats with six-foot dicks snort coke off flesh-dolls dressed up like disney princesses, an era where the poor man is forced to augment himself in order to get a job to pay for the augments to get the job to pay for the augments to get the job (...)

It's an era where you order an iBaby from apple, and that baby sues you because you gene-modded its mind to the point that your company, your intellect, is so meager in comparison to its abilities that any attempt to 'raise' such an infant would be so lacking in stimulation that it would be as cruel as locking an ordinary infant in a closet.

Genetic modification: electricity for the new age.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

To be honest, I don't buy into the 1% God-Kings fears about transhuman technology. Rich people have a lot more access to resources than the typical person, but in all but the worst countries the top and bottom quality of life are within sight of each other. Common conditions have a strong effect, but more importantly while people aren't roused to fight for a lot of things I know you couldn't restrict salamander regen and biological immortality without the fire rising. Everybody wants that who isn't afraid of transhumanism, and even the ones who are still want it but are conflicted. They want it in an everyday way too, not in the same way everybody wants a private airplane.

[Harry Baldman]

Killing the entirety of something with gene drive techniques is inherently difficult. It's possible to destabilize a population, weaken it so that the native species has a chance to recover, but the gene drive techniques I'm familiar with still rely on natural reproduction- just stacking the odds in favor of selecting a certain selection.

Can you forward the article? I'm interested in how they intend to kill off something instead of simply weakening it.

This near as I can tell is the research article they're referring to, having looked it up earlier today while searching with a similar question to yours. Currently reading it myself.

[Draignean]

Killing the entirety of something with gene drive techniques is inherently difficult. It's possible to destabilize a population, weaken it so that the native species has a chance to recover, but the gene drive techniques I'm familiar with still rely on natural reproduction- just stacking the odds in favor of selecting a certain selection.

Can you forward the article? I'm interested in how they intend to kill off something instead of simply weakening it.

This near as I can tell is the research article they're referring to, having looked it up earlier today while searching with a similar question to yours. Currently reading it myself.

Still reading more deeply, but, from what I skimmed, the damage to the species of interest (Malaria) is a side-effect of a neutral mutation in a second species (Mosquitoes) that the species of interest happened to need in its transmission cycle.

It's interesting, and I laud the idea, but it's not monumentally useful for eradicating most invasive species. Great for killing things with parasitic development stages, but I'm not still not seeing how it could be used directly.

Indirect defense, by modifying the native species to make it more able to combat the invader, raises different moral questions.

[Folly]

Bloody hell, genetics isn't magic. 'Just genetics people to be subservient' is roughly like telling an IT guy 'I want a sentient AI by next Monday, just go write one'.

Sounds like you need to genetic up some smarter IT guys. Make sure you nerf their ambition while you're at it; we don't want a bunch of hyper-intelligent technophiles running around with the capacity to create sophisticated AI's and the ambition to turn them against the rest of us.