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Comment by Game_Ender | Hacker News Reader

Medical science is one field where, assuming your can handle the deaths, ignoring ethics will let you move faster than competitors. You can skip early phases and go right to testing in people, you can try gene editing and just bring embryos to term and check the results. An interesting counter to this is that CCP draws some power from its ability to be seen as a legitimate protector. So losses from overly aggressive medical experimentation will have to be kept quiet.

At some point we will be able to engineer people with more of the positive traits we see all at once, and many fewer defects. If you do it safely at scale first it would make your society more robust, but that is a big “if”.

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People have an intense fear of this sort of thing. It is very deeply wired into our brains to worry about threats from people who are alien to us, and who are also potentially stronger. So if you’re going to make an army of super-human soldiers (or even just citizens) you’d better be sure their performance is so much better that it’s worth alienating every other person on Earth. Given that warfare seems to be moving in the direction of autonomous machines, it’s a little bit difficult to imagine that anybody is going to get a lot of benefit out of this sort of thing, but who knows.

"uncanny valley" - things that appear human but behave wrong/differently are deeply disturbing to us.

I assume this is a evolved defence against mental illness, parasitical infection, or something similar. But it could be aliens ;)

there was quite a long period of pre-history where homo sapiens were living alongside other branches of humans - around 300,000 years ago there could have been as many as 8 (!) other species of humans running around. I imagine we developed the uncanny valley sense during a period like that.

Wow, fascinating. I had never considered that angle before, that the genetically engineered would be "aliens" in the eyes of the public (even on your own "team") and therefore enemies.

I don't know what to draw from it, but it's interesting nonetheless.

You're joking right? This is literally the premise of the entire X-Men franchise. Or pick any trope where regular people develop supernatural powers.

You don't really need to keep things too quiet if everyone understands they will be jailed or disappeared (or worse, their family forever will have negative social credit) for dissent. It's not as if Tiananmen happened in some faraway village with few witnesses.

If everyone knows about something but no one would admit it, does it matter that everyone knows it? The knowledge will go away in a generation. As a dictator it surely is magical.

Even better is to just do the experiments on the vilified. That's how it was done in most of the cases in the 20th century.

The citizenry does't care of its billed as protection from an enemy or a punishment against the enemy.

It is unproven whether genetic “improvements” to intelligence or other traits would make a society like China’s more robust. Conversely there are very few countries with average incomes above $15k per annum that are able to survive as dictatorships, this is often attributed to education levels increasing with wealth. That could indicate that increasing intelligence would make China less stable.

“Positive traits” is subjective. What may be seen as a positive trait in the western world may be considered a negative trait by Chinese Communist Party. The CCP will not want critical thinkers and people rejecting authoritarian power. A positive trait in their eyes is NOT being a critical thinker and NOT rejecting authoritarian power.

Imagine an army of 10 million Chinese soldiers bred with “CCP positive traits” for the purpose of fighting, who follow orders without questioning and sacrifice themselves for any mission, no matter how small or inconsequential. You can squash enemies inside and outside of China. In a perverted sense this also creates a robust society: A robust dictatorship or even world power.

> assuming your can handle the deaths, ignoring ethics will let you move faster than competitors.

An aside, completely ignoring humans in this story for one minute, that's evolution leaning into a fitness gradient.

We often forget that because of our plastic bubbles and lattes. No big cats with huge claws to run from. But nature guided this process in us for a long time.

"Nature is metal"

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