With the advent of genetic design and designer babies, I don't see how ethics alone can prevent "soldier" and "assassin" specialists from being born that have all sorts of enhancements.
What would be more scalable- a human born venomous or the ability to install a venom gland in a human sinus, replacing at least one tooth?
Looking at it purely from an efficiency perspective, encouraging biological weapon development in humans at a rapid pace - possibly through retroviral techniques - may be more effective than technological devices, if the former is less detectable than the latter, and especially if the former has a lower price point than the latter.
There are multiple variables in play here, and that's not even getting into the ethical considerations.
E.g. - why research a gun when you could brain someone with a big rock?
Seriously, not trying to be condescending here - if you could probably do a thing more effectively down the road with one path, why would you choose a more immediate path?
> During the height of the space race in the 1960s, legend has it, NASA scientists realized that pens could not function in space. They needed to figure out another way for the astronauts to write things down. So they spent years and millions of taxpayer dollars to develop a pen that could put ink to paper without gravity. But their crafty Soviet counterparts, so the story goes, simply handed their cosmonauts pencils.
The soviets? They just gave their agents poisoned dentures and called it a day.
I want a prehensile tail and feet. Maybe some gene therapy can make that happen to grow and remodel existing tissue?
In aviation and space, there are serious issues in keeping biological organisms alive due to oxygen levels, pressure changes, and G forces. A purely autonomous system would be able to be more maneuverable in more environments than any system that also needs to keep a meat bag alive.
The other thing machines are great at is patience. Land mines can remain operational for decades, just waiting for their opportunity to detonate. Biological organisms have much higher passive maintenance costs.
Human 'soldiers' are really only going to be useful in the near future for infiltrating and disrupting social systems, not for dispensing physical violence.
[0] I know you can find something on Youtube but if it really worked at scale McDonalds would be rolling them out yesterday.
Why bother building killer robots and drones when you can simulate the outcome of a battle without having to fight it in meat space.
Whoever loses has to line up at the suicide booths.
Purposes are tools humans use to give their own lives meaning, if they desire. Purposes should serve humans, not the other way around.
I wouldn't be that into assassination as a vocation even if I had superpowers that made me an extremely good assassin, for example.
Obligatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
What if you sequence the great computer scientists and average ones and find some genes that really make a difference? What if you sequence sociopaths and discover a series of genes that correlate heavily with it? Sexuality, flight or flight responses, physical aptitude, mental aptitude.
We've spent millennia doing a less advanced form of this on dogs, can you honestly say a lot of these dogs we've bred for specific jobs aren't "into them"?
No, this entirely different to that. I'm saying that a person's physical attributes are orthogonal to that person's personality. I'm not discussing if their personality is a result of nature or nuture, just the fact that if you're, for example, physically predisposed to, say, being able to grow large muscles, that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you are personally interested in, say, competitive weightlifting (regardless of whether or not that personal interest (or lack thereof) is a result of nature or nuture).
The fact that you are predisposed to be able to grow large muscles is obviously nature; the circumstances surrounding whether or not you actually do grow large muscles is open to the nature/nurture debate, as well as the psychological manifestations that might lead one to engage in (or avoid) bodybuilding, competition, et c.
But the problem is parents would be making that decision. Or in this case a dictator's military haha.
There are already hover parents living vicariously through sports, music, chess whatever.
I can imagine this going to extremes with parents making these forever physical decisions.
Elite athletes can chose to endanger their health for the sport they love.
But I'm not sure about the ethics of a parent deciding to say give lower resting heart rates/higher vo2 max with cycling in mind, even though it could be deadly slow.
Make your children better than theirs. Smarter? Less likely to get diseases? Who knows. The point is, now your side has the edge, so they have to keep up. Maybe they get the edge next, so you have to innovate. And so on. Assuming there's sufficient "headroom" to build up these genetic transhumans, and we don't run into some no-free-lunch scenario where improvement is either impossible or comes with unavoidable nasty side-effects, you can't just sit still. You have to continue to improve or you can no longer pretend that all people are created equal in certain important respects. Morally equal, yes, but "morally equal" doesn't get you a leadership position.
For example, partial genetic immunity to malaria carries an increased risk of syckle cell anemia. Most traits are like that to an extent.
And yet the nerve to my retina is still installed backwards.