Hacker News Reader

Comment by tuesdayrain | Hacker News Reader

The thought of China creating an army of genetically modified 200 IQ super soldiers/scientists is both fascinating and horrifying. It's comparable to the technological singularity that would occur if we had chains of AI creating superior AI.

View on HN

I think I saw that implied unexpected twist in NEO-Scavenger, actually. There are newspaper headlines from before the collapse (which was related to a supernatural force of belief being real causing fears to manifest). They mentioned a Chinese Supersoldier Rebellion that had overthrown their government creators, I guess paired hyperintelligence and courage are the last things you want in a populace as an oligarchy or dictatorship as they will see things going wrong and won't be afraid to risk their lives righting it effectively.

Yeah, this is actually ignoring how most dictatorships explicitly have an underclass. If you want total control you don't want your country to be strong and prosperous. You want a few blessed elite sectors and let the rest wallow in suffering and poverty so they neither have the ability nor will to fight back.

It's already been done in China.[1] That was an attempt to produce HIV immunity. Not clear if it worked, but it was done. The Master Race is a ways off, but they're starting from a population with an average IQ of 105, so they're already ahead.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6724388/

Source on China's population averaging 105 IQ?

https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html

so basically mutations would be introduced to humankind, not randomly but based X number of ideas controlled by a government and by this removing entropy to our genetic pool.

Virus would love that, yes why no, lets remove the only thing that has keep all living organism on this planet for billions of years from extinction.

If we become good enough at genetic engineering to meaningfully alter our genomes, it seems likely to me that viruses become much less of a concern.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com