>>21257That's the sort of thing that's easy to catastrophize. We are as a society investing billions of dollars into finding ways to create un-souled human intelligences. And that intentional un-souling is to the greatest possible extent non-metaphorical. We slowed down on using fetal stem cells instead of adult-harvested chemically adjusted skin cells recast as neurons, and it's not because the fetal cells were less neurologically effective or adaptable than alchemist skin. The social barriers against using adaptable fetal tissue are the real issue, but an alchemist transmuting skin into a brain to create a homunculus is socially and ethically palatable. These slave circuits are already sentient (in the scientific sense of having and responding to senses and sensory organs, most organoids independently develop photosensitive "eyes") and conscious (in the scientific sense, demonstrating all brainwave forms and developing cyclical brainwave patterns equivalent to human newborns) but because of the manner of their creation there is no real objection to their lifelong use as slave-circuits. So the important thing about forming a new class of human organism for the purpose of unpaid labor, including the unpaid intellectual labor we hope to profit from with organoid computer banks, is to make sure that they are created in a way that is different from the normal mode of pregnancy and fetal growth. Artificial wombs may give us that difference, especially if we could show that the class of being that emerges from them is emotionally and/or intellectually deficient and therefore unworthy of love or respect or medical care; everyone resents the amount of love or respect or voting rights or medical care that are currently given to people with standardized IQ test scores 4 points below their own. That way, we may not even need immigrants to solve the economic problem of physical labor, even while organoids promise to alleviate the economic problem of intellectual labor. Then we will see that the line will go up and the chart will be green and the gdp will be big.
So I can see the horrible dystopia concept, a society in which women's rights to abortion are made contingent on the sleeve-birthing of troglodyte monsters intellectually and morally unfit for any role in society except as unskilled labor for the benefit of very nearly no-one.
I take some comfort in
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