[FrustratedMonky]

"very stupid and uneducated thing to suggest"

1. Take a common trope in fiction and research for a hundred years. With long known commonly linked ramifications.

2. A company actually starts doing it.

3. Suggest a link

4. -> Call it Stupid.

Yeah. Don't worry about it at all. Nothing to see here.

[stavros]

If we wanted to pump out human slaves now, I don't think the main obstacle is that we can't find enough women to bear them.

[FrustratedMonky]

If they are born of woman, they would be human.

If they are made, we can re-label them as machines and give them lesser rights. And make ourselves feel better about treating them as lower class by some 'justification', like they don't have souls.

Perhaps some gene editing to give them 'blue' skin, some non-historically-biased-color to identify them.

Really. There are ton of books with these themes already. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said, and now a company is doing it, so why am I getting downvoted.

[jurgenburgen]

> If they are made, we can re-label them as machines and give them lesser rights. And make ourselves feel better about treating them as lower class by some 'justification', like they don't have souls.

We could but maybe we don’t? Slavery is pretty inefficient. If South Korea could mass produce people, I’m pretty sure the government would be happy with just letting them be normal members of society instead of some kind of Smurf slave caste for a populace vanishing from demographic collapse.

Fiction is nice when you want to speculate on “what if …” but reality is infinitely more complex.

[Dylan16807]

Gene editing is a whole different topic. And only the very first one would need to be "born of woman".

Artificial eggs are basically irrelevant to the dystopia you're describing.

[FrustratedMonky]

Eggs are simpler than Wombs. Chickens are simpler than Humans. Of course we have to solve the simpler things first. Of course, this is leading along the same path as occurs in Brave New World. We have to be able to grow chickens before we can move on to humans.

We already have cloning. But have lacked being able to do it without implanting the egg into a female. This is just getting us closer.

Baby steps. That the dystopia isn't happening today doesn't mean we aren't working on it.

[fragmede]

What is "it", exactly? I have probably read some of the same dystopian science fiction novels as you have. But this is Jurassic Park, not A Brave New World.

[FrustratedMonky]

In one of the movies, they did clone a human, they just didn't lean into that story line. It was treated as a one-off, but the same science allowed both. (in the fictional story)

The point isn't that we'll have humans tomorrow. Just that this one step. We'll need to solve problems on simpler animals first. An egg is easier than a womb, a chicken is easier than a human. It's the start.

So yes. Brave New World isn't today. But its obvious this technology is on the same path.

[stavros]

Yeah but there's also the book where we make people in a lab and they're great and everyone lives happily ever after forever. Don't cherry-pick your data.

[FrustratedMonky]

So I'm not providing a good literary survey of books with similar tropes and providing some of the positive ones? There are literally half dozen very famous negative examples, but I didn't do good enough search to find a positive one?

That would be like every comment on AI should include some example from The Culture Series as an example that all this AI stuff could great.

[stavros]

No man, it's just that saying "this scenario is popular because it makes for a good story therefore it'll happen in reality" is an absurd point to make.

[FrustratedMonky]

Taking scientific breakthroughs and extrapolating and/or comparing to Science Fiction? Shock, clutch my pearls, who would do such a thing. The absurdity. Surely nobody has done this before.