Why would we abuse them? We treat disabled people OK, don't we? What exactly is your fear? Some kind of prejudice against people who were born through different procedures? We already have test tube babies walking among us and nobody mistreats them.
Such life would not be limited to human forms.
Even with just human forms, if you're going to all the trouble to engineer custom life, why make that life anything other than your idea of perfect? I don't know for sure, but I suspect that a predisposition to obedience to authority figures may be engineered; some would want that in their own children, others in what may be de jure servants and de facto slaves.
Last I checked — a few years ago, and this is a fast moving field — we can't currently 3D print large complex living structures, only simple and small because of the oxygen diffusion limit; if we can engineer around that, even if you still needed to replace the brain with a computer and nerves with metal, you can have a "real life centaur ride" or dragon drones.
If you do that but deliberately replace the brain and nerves with electrical equivalents, you have remote controllable meat[0] puppets making bodyguards redundant (the person being protected can just be remote); making worthless eye witness accounts, DNA tests, and fingerprints; and what happened with DeepFake porn then happens IRL with sex workers puppeting everyone and everything from Addams Family's Thing to Westworld LARP.
The landscape of possibilities and preferences for these things may be radically altered by other related tech. For example, skin samples can be grown in vitro and transplanted back to a human (IIRC this is already done for severe burns victims), combine with suitable GM (IDK, spider silk perhaps?) and someone could become naturally bullet resistant, radically changing not only the nature of bodyguarding but also soldiering.
[0] well, not necessarily meat, it might be made from GM fungus cells or plant cells, but it could be made to look arbitrarily close to or far from any of those things
[0] In the broadest sense that also includes nightmares
I'm working on a novel about this (but with a twist). I think this is exactly what's going to happen.
You seem to be forgetting that people will get things banned if they're obviously bad. If simulating another person becomes a problem, we'll just write a law for that, same as we already do for fraud. You can sign somebody else's name on a document, you know! s How do banks survive the onslaught of fraud! /s
Creating such a being in the first place when one could've been a better small-g god.
Now this may just be naturalism bias on my part, a large number of people are a lot more comfortable with a thing if it's natural rather than the same thing artificial.
> You seem to be forgetting that people will get things banned if they're obviously bad.
The American Civil War was fought over a disagreement about what the north and south thought was obvious.
> How do banks survive the onslaught of fraud!
More than just laws punishing those who do it. Sarcasm aside, a better question might be, how does the USA stop hackers from all over the world from breaking into USA hospitals, encrypting all the documents, and getting hard to trace ransom money in return for the decryption keys?
Yes, people have disagreed about slavery and farm/working animals and all those grey areas of animal and human rights. But it's arrogant of you to take your personal opinion and try to impose it on an entirely different society with creatures that you know nothing about "just in case" the members of that society happen to be morally wrong by your standard. Let them make up their own mind just as we make up our own minds today. They'll be in a much better position to do so.
Yes, absolutely.
As virtually every situation where a human is treated as an animal is seen as abhorrent, so by symmetry I expect most animals in contact with humans to be miserable most of the time.
The only reason I am not going to go as far as to claim the meat industry is multiplicatively worse than literal Auschwitz by the degree to which literal Auschwitz is worse than a single homicide is that I am uncertain how much to value the life and suffering of non-humans.
> But it's arrogant of you to take your personal opinion and try to impose it on an entirely different society with creatures that you know nothing about "just in case" the members of that society happen to be morally wrong by your standard.
Good thing you're putting words in my mouth then.
From my POV, this thread, from root, can be summarised thusly:
"Amazing, but there is a dark side" "Don't they die really fast?" "Give it 25-50 years, and think of Blade Runner."
Then you: "Why would we abuse them", me: "<a list of things that can go wrong, or just plain weird>", you: "What's wrong with a defacto slave enjoying their life doing what makes them most satisfied?"
(As an aside: that's already abuse, so you apparently defending it, even if that wasn't your intent, should demonstrate why we may end up being awful to such life).
Me: "because we've had wars about this kind of thing where both sides thought they were right", you: "nonsense!" followed by projecting that I have (or think I have) any capacity for imposing my personal opinion as a future moral code — I clearly can't even do that imposition today with regard to meat.
In fact, it's even worse than that, because while I would support the outlawing of meat, leather, and even dairy (as they exist today, but I expect all to be vat grown by 2030 and that's fine), I don't have the strength of will to avoid cheese, and that's a failure to impose my own morality on the inside of my own head.
> (As an aside: that's already abuse, so you apparently defending it, even if that wasn't your intent, should demonstrate why we may end up being awful to such life).
I gave the example of an artist who works for personal satisfaction. You call that abuse to have allowed that person to be born? I don't. If someone is intrinsically motivated to be a slave, then being a slave may not only be the best possible life them but could even be better than the life of a normal free person. If it's actually abusive like using human slaves, then people will see than just as we can see that today.
Who are we? Disabled people treated differently in different places. In many places you'd prefer death most likely.