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Comment by tibbydudeza | Hacker News Reader

So "Planet of the Apes" was not so far fetched after all.

Now somewhere someone will think ... hmmm why can't we replace all our complaining factory workers and their wages/healthcare/retirement plans with these "creatures" and only pay them peanuts and banana's.

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> Now somewhere someone will think ... hmmm why can't we replace all our complaining factory workers and their wages/healthcare/retirement plans with these "creatures" and only pay them peanuts and bananas.

Pretty sure Amazon and Uber are already on it.

> why can't we replace all our complaining factory workers and their wages/healthcare/retirement plans with these "creatures" and only pay them peanuts and banana's.

Automation would probably be cheaper, more consistent, and more effective.

Biology wasn't designed for production line work. Humans are really bad at it. Engineered primates might be better at it because they'd be engineered not to get bored or frustrated, but they'd still be a fraction of a % as efficient as a machine with 100 arms and conveyor belts.

So we need monkeys with 100 arms, got it.

David Brin, Uplift Universe. Start with Startide rising. It covers this in a more interestingly ethical way I think.

and Sirius by Olaf Stapledon.

one of the most beautiful books ever written, and now by this news very prescient.

Brave New World had a similar idea

Future brainy monkeys will watch that movie like it’s a documentary.

There have already been issues with some coconut harvesting operations using monkeys as laborers.

We've been replacing factory workers with machines for 250 years. It's made us, including the remaining factory workers, very very rich, compared to where we started.

Productivity has gone up but wages haven't kept up. The owners are rich, sure, but we should be honest about the working class getting the short end of the stick here.

250 years ago people in England, among the richest in the world, lived considerably poorer lives that the worst in the third world today.

GDP per person has, to the extent it's possible to compare, gone up by 30x (3000%) since then.

You're just repeating your point instead of addressing mine.

Oddly, I came up with a pretty good plan for Enslaving Humanity without most of them noticing (and the software architecture that would power it) during a Sunday Drive today.

I'll say that the concept I came up with was probably far far cheaper than gene therapy and could be reached in 5-10 years. So I wouldn't lose sleep over this

Unless you can think of any steps to prevent your plan from working, try to forget about it. Somebody will re-invent it later, but that'll be later. We've created more of the readily-accessible good technology than the readily-accessible bad technology, and it'll take an active effort to keep it that way.

Currently most of humanity is oblivious to it's enslavement, what does your strategy add?

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