That, or "a totalitarian regime engineering an army of modified super soldiers". I know they're a liberal pop science channel that make condensed and easily digestable content intended for all ages, but come on
they're shitlibs and didn't they take money from Bill Gates to jerk him off about Africa
they just posted a new video about population being the problem for climate change, since capitalism has to stay.
that was also a gates foundation video
Most of those videos are Malthusian bullshit that don't take the West to task for its capitalist drive. Can't get too political when you're speaking about the potential end of the world, and funded by Bill Gates. Let's just focus on developing nations that don't come close to the emissions western countries currently output, because we must retain a luxurious lifestyle.
Also the last video was hilarious. Basically boiled down to "we're fucked barring some technological breakthrough, mainly because geopolitical interests make all of this a game of chicken because no country wants to relent to any short term economic slowdowns. also, 3rd world population once again!"
They just offhandedly said it's already happening and that it will definitely continue happening
I don't really get your point. CRISPR/Cas9 costs like $5. At the moment the main issue with genetic editing is one of fidelity. Are you just saying that they didn't go Sci-fi dystopia enough for you?
A biocorp is a lot more likely to fuck up gene editing than North Korea; people with a capacity for evil don't all live in a foreign country and go mwahahahhaa
I don't mean to get too contrarian but an epic le science guy in his garage giving his wife and children cancer is more my concern than either of those in terms of humans. The biocorp is more a problem for creating IP crops and livestock that will wreck agriculture forever, but we can barely get decades old gene therapy and stem cell research off the ground with the religious right.
don't forget medicine. technology like this allows us to induce plants, animals, bacteria, etc to produce medicine for us, which will inevitably get patented and screw over the people who need the drugs.
That already happens. Insulin is made with genetically modified yeast bacteria and the genes get patented so these companies can charge exorbitant prices.
That’s true but the nice thing about that is there are many solutions to the same problem (different gene pathway actors, unpatented orthologs, different vector designs) which generally won’t hold up to ip law in court. It’s also not captured like copyright so generics are much easier to provide after a few years. The main issue there is educating the doctors against the pharma company’s paid marketers to benefit the patient.
You're not being too contrarian, that's a perfectly valid and good addition to the conversation!
If this was the best they could come up with, why dedicate a section to the downsides at all? I was expecting there'd be something
Honestly the downsides are just really technical but basically boil down to "What if we fuck up lol". I see what you mean though. The actual downsides will become more clear the closer we get to it.
I predict genetic modifications to make poor people more able to live in hot environments due to climate change while the ecofascists reign over them without those modifications creating essentially a schism in humanity over where you can possibly live that is based on wealth but is permanently inscribed into your genetic code.
this is a huge deal with "disabled" communities for ages. the capacity to just wipe out entire cohorts of people, because the majority cannot conceive of the fact that the minority prefers to retain their identities despite the costs forced on them by the rest of society, has always been there and has always been used, but it's faster and more effective now.
that possible world is, in truth, the same as now - these tools don't truly remake the world - but it's homogenizing forces will strengthen with the shape, kind, and brutality of the violence used to enforce normality, in all its forms, will be intensified.
imagine the stigma of "choosing to be trans" after we've discovered a way to edit a gene that causes it out of the majority of the population, or in choosing to continue to have deaf children, or in choosing autism, or, or, or. in all cases, the stigma will spread to the parents and the perpetrators of these new genocides will be lauded as heroes.
and that's all assuming we're ever told this normalization is happening. if people complain too loudly, companies will hide what these edits do behind large clusters of generally positive edits that "everyone". it won't be three, it will be thousands, all obscured behind technical names - EULAs but for the kids.
it's enough to make you hope that we have irrevocably fucked ourselves and ensured our own destruction. I used to be super in favor of genetic modification - transhumanism sounds so cool - but it should never be a thing under capitalism, and probably not even under socialism while we're still working out societal traumas.
I used to be super in favor of genetic modification - transhumanism sounds so cool - but it should never be a thing under capitalism, and probably not even under socialism while we’re still working out societal traumas.
Same. The Transhumanist Lib to Radical Lefty pipeline is real. Somehow I played the Deus Ex games and only came away with "Oooh designer prosthetics pretty" for the longest time... I even wanted to work in prosthetics in some capacity, any capacity, until I realized only the wealthy could afford technology I thought would be egalitarian...
It ain't Vietnamese kids with blown-off legs from landmines getting new robot replacements, it's Don Jr. looking to impress his daddy for a minute.
Why would choosing to have deaf children be a positive? Wouldn't that construe child abuse and torture? Pretty sure if you ask any deaf person if they'd like to gain the ability to hear you'd get an enthusiastic affirmative. This ridiculous ultraleft fetishism of the lack of abilities has to stop, it is always better to be capable of doing more rather than less.
Pretty sure if you ask any deaf person if they’d like to gain the ability to hear you’d get an enthusiastic affirmative
the exact opposite is true - the deaf rights groups are adamant that they do not want to be eliminated as a community. they take pride in their deafness and look at attempts to eradicate deafness as genocide. I strongly suggest not speaking on behalf of groups you are neither part of nor have a relationship with - if I weren't informed on this subject, I'd never have spoken.
Ridiculous. Taking pride in deafness is like taking pride in not having a limb - where's the pride? That you can do less with your body? Improving on human weakness and suffering is not genocide. This rhetoric comes too close for comfort to evangelical logic of not messing with god's work.
I'm glad you know better than the people you're casually dismissing. have you considered that you perhaps just hate minorities? otherwise, you could just go talk to the people you're condescending at instead. you might learn where the pride in community comes from.
the deaf community shares languages and cultures that are entirely distinct from hearing ones. it's genocide because to eliminate the deaf population is to wipe out those cultures.
also, as you're definitely a chud that needs to post hog, I'm not replying any further. take your pointless and misdirected anger someplace else.
The bourgeois community shares languages and cultures that are distinct from the proletarian ones therefore dismantling the bourgeois class would be genociding a minority 🤪
A person who can hear can chose to close their ears, a person who can see can chose to close their eyes, a person with intact limbs can chose to sit still or lie down, the reverse doesn't work. Saying you're genociding a minority by restoring people's abilities is akin to saying that giving people a set of gills as a supplement to their lungs so they can easily swim underwater is terran genocide. Maybe it's you who are a conservative retrograde chud and ought to reflect on why you have the urge to torture children.
I guess that'd be too depressing and that it's easier and "non-political" to just go "a cartoon supervillain could do comic book bad guy stuff maybe, I dunno"
we'll mark them with dark skin so it's easy to tell at a glance (and hey, it will protect them from UV). everything old is new again.
I remember taking a cell microbiology course and reading and doing all these tests on living cells, like attaching fluorescent tags onto cytoskeletal proteins, taking antibodies from Donkeys against a certain marker in human cells and seeing if they show up on a Western Blot, or everything they do in reserach using HeLa cells (cancerous cells taken from an African-American lady in the '50s against her knowledge or consent and which we still use today despite her family saying they don't want them to be used in research anymore) or a whole lot of shit. I remember getting the feeling that we really shouldn't be messing with life on this deep of a scale... kinda like reading Jurassic Park. Like, the US military keeps smallpox around even though it's supposed to be eradicated in the wild. With the power we have at our hands with gene editing, they could design some variant of smallpox that is even more communicable and also skips past immunities.
I understand that people might have legitimate ethical concerns with gene editing even if the libiest example Kurzgesagt gives is "people the west considers to be dictators might live a long time."
Why would you equivocate keeping around biological weapons with using science to alleviate human suffering? And why would you be concerned with the theoretical consent of a long dead person in using their unwanted cancerous cells if it helps create new remedies for still living people? By that logic we shouldn't ever expropriate the bougies since they don't consent to it. The bigger public good should be top priority.
There's a precedent for this, considering the CCP allows for this to proliferate. smdh it's like everyone here has a 6-month memory news cycle...
