16 replies to this topic

[CyberMisterBeauty]

By 2056,synthetic people made by artificial genome will become feasible,and surely they will be integrated in society.What do you think how would be the impact of a new specie conviving with humans on Earth?Do you think they will be treated as normal people?Do you think they will suffer prejudice and will be viewd as products as they are artificial and don't have family?

Anothers races will make humans review themselves in the universe ehehe...

[Raklian]

At least for myself, I do not mind synthetic people interacting and living among us. They have the right to do so as much as we do ourselves. They are sentient beings just like we are, only difference is how our flesh is made out of. No biggie.

I'm sure others think otherwise. Of course, there have always been people like that ever since the dawn of our civilization. This is no exception.

[SG-1]

You think that by the 2050s we will have a fully integrated synthetic population?

Wow, well lets consider this fantasy and assume it is true. If they were synthetic it wouldn't matter and no one would be able to tell. That is it. It's like a test tube baby, it doesn't matter where it came from, its not going to have a sign on its head, or be another race of human. It will look like any normal human being on Earth and why would anyone be prejudice about that? Why would anyone need to know they are even synthetic?

Furthermore, ethics aren't going anywhere in 40 years. We would need to start creating people by the thousands today to have a substantial population by the 2050s. Right now we can't even do that and even if we could, there is no point in doing it.

What benefit would anyone have creating a human? Who would parent it? The only people who will benefit from this are women who can't give birth. If a women can't give birth than it would be a good thing to be able to combine her husband's and her own DNA into an artificial womb, but it wouldn't be a 100% artificial genome. Artificial means not existing naturally. If it comes from two parents than it is natural, you are just outsourcing a womb.

Two would be parents would have no reason to have a kid that does not share their DNA that is odd and no one would opt for that. It's like running a business that births children only to send them to adoption houses. It is impractical.
I can see parents modifying the DNA for their child, making them smarter and immune to diseases and mistakes, but that again is not a fully synthetic human.

Edited by SG-1, 24 July 2012 - 07:24 PM.

[CyberMisterBeauty]

SG-1, I'm not talking about pregnance and artificial wombs,I'm talking about synthetic people made by artificial DNA created in lab and then their bodies are grown in a machine.It's like creating an android,but a synthetic is biological not mechanical.

Just read the post of the year 2056 in the timeline...

[Raklian]

You think that by the 2050s we will have a fully integrated synthetic population?

Wow, well lets consider this fantasy and assume it is true. If they were synthetic it wouldn't matter and no one would be able to tell. That is it. It's like a test tube baby, it doesn't matter where it came from, its not going to have a sign on its head, or be another race of human. It will look like any normal human being on Earth and why would anyone be prejudice about that? Why would anyone need to know they are even synthetic?

Furthermore, ethics aren't going anywhere in 40 years. We would need to start creating people by the thousands today to have a substantial population by the 2050s. Right now we can't even do that and even if we could, there is no point in doing it.

What benefit would anyone have creating a human? Who would parent it? The only people who will benefit from this are women who can't give birth. If a women can't give birth than it would be a good thing to be able to combine her husband's and her own DNA into an artificial womb, but it wouldn't be a 100% artificial genome. Artificial means not existing naturally. If it comes from two parents than it is natural, you are just outsourcing a womb.

Two would be parents would have no reason to have a kid that does not share their DNA that is odd and no one would opt for that. It's like running a business that births children only to send them to adoption houses. It is impractical.
I can see parents modifying the DNA for their child, making them smarter and immune to diseases and mistakes, but that again is not a fully synthetic human.

I can think of one thing - soldiers.

[SG-1]

That is what I'm talking about.

A synthetic person is still a human. If you copied a genome 100% (which to create a person, even by 2050, we will have to do) you will come out with a 100% natural human.

You could make these humans super strong and have super abilities but it would take a dictatorship to force people who have free will to be a soldier. The ethics are so against this that it isn't even valuable to do it.
There isn't a need!

Now, if you could somehow create a human with no free will that doesn't care about anything that is another thing, however you would need to hard wire knowledge into the brain so it would know how to set dinner tables for people. A non-sentient organism that looks like a human would be a useless pile of matter unless it can learn - and it wouldn't learn if it couldn't think; therefore, it would have free will.

I wouldn't worry about it, AI will allow robots to do all sorts of crappy jobs for us by the 2050s. By the 2060s homes will be using androids to take out garbage and other chores. If you go by the timeline then eventually androids will be physically indistinguishable from humans and then it really wouldn't matter.

[kjaggard]

there is not a lot of need for even trying for a full person. I think it's far more likely we will create universal donor parts from artificial DNA likely using alternate base pairs that the body doesn't recognize as a biological material and thus won't reject.

Eventually somebody who is curious may create something like a creature made of spare parts and synthetic neural pathways. That will take a while though because we'll have no clue how to build a brain from scratch, and the brain will not have grown to manage the body systems.

The controversy of even trying to do that will be a hurdle to the process. Eventually there will be people with enough swapped out parts and somebody will succeed in creating something like a 'special needs' brain. The boundry will be very blurry at that point. But I also suspect that the synthetics will be treated like pets or animals. The other thing to keep in mind is that synthetic creatures may be created and grown, but they likely will never be allowed to self reproduce.

So it's unlikely that we will ever see them develop past humanoid pets until somebody breaks laws and either makes a means for reproduction and sets it loose like a virus, or deliberately creates human level neural development.

They would at that point likely be like an alien on earth. Some wanting to destroy it and some wanting to make a celebrity of it. but for some time after it's likely they will be one shot creations, never a population or species unto themselves.

Eventually It will take the more progressive regions of human living that recognize them as people and cousins, to give them all the rights as people... including the right to create others of their kind. By then we'll be so scattered across the cosmos that most of us may be unaware when it happens.

eventually there may be mixed populations and single group population all over the place that lose contact and don't remember each other other than legends or old stories. But when we meet up again we'll all have changed completely and we may not even realize that we are the same people from each others pasts.

[Logically Irrational]

SG-1, I'm not talking about pregnance and artificial wombs,I'm talking about synthetic people made by artificial DNA created in lab and then their bodies are grown in a machine.It's like creating an android,but a synthetic is biological not mechanical.

Just read the post of the year 2056 in the timeline...

Well, the timeline really doesn't say anything about them entering society, if that's what you're implying (you may not be). The point of the segment is that it will be technically feasible in the 2050s. The ethical debate has the potential to go on for a long, long time. Once you get to that point, you get an entire new can of worms that very few people will want to open.

[SG-1]

One thing that may work is creating a clone of your youthful self (or maybe even someone else) and transplanting your brain into it.

That would be cool, being literally reborn into another body. I would rather be reborn into a robotic one. Like keeping my brain in a life support container and using physically indistinguishable surrogates to live in. Of course by the time that may be possible we might be able to just convert a biological brain into a completely artificial one.

[kjaggard]

One thing that may work is creating a clone of your youthful self (or maybe even someone else) and transplanting your brain into it.

That would be cool, being literally reborn into another body. I would rather be reborn into a robotic one. Like keeping my brain in a life support container and using physically indistinguishable surrogates to live in. Of course by the time that may be possible we might be able to just convert a biological brain into a completely artificial one.

Definately not cool. a clone would be your twin, you'd have to kill it's brain to get it's body. I'm talking complete synthetic using dna pairs (Not TGCA) that doesn't exist now. Because using DNA that the body recognizes as living materials means it will immunilogically react to it. It may be possible to make living parts that a body won't react to much like pace makers and other implants now, but are actually living tissues and functioning organs. Then You only have to make copies of the same parts over and over, rather than customize for each person because they would be universal donors like certain blood types. It would be off the shelf body parts.

Any creature made from existing patterns of DNA isn't synthetic in my mind. It's just like invitro or cloning or gene therapy. to be synthetic in my mind requires that you build everything from scratch, cell membranes, mitochondria, DNA from base pairs. Basically start with chemicals end up with life, at no point having cells (adult or reproductive) used from already existing life. And honestly we might get some single cell experiments using our base pairs and mayby even some plants and worms and such using our base pairs. But those will likely be experimental for the purposes of learning. There is just more security and practicality in attempting to create something that is completely different from our natural ecosystem and might be adapted to be off the shelf parts that work for everybody rather than having to tailor them to everyone.

Those first experiments on creating people will be so contriversial and so fringe that they will need a supply of available and intercompatable parts ready to go. Just like you can't build a computer from scratch as cheaply, easily or as fast as you can build one from parts designed for multiple other computers but all made to be modular and compatible with each other.

[SG-1]

I was taking Logically Irrational's post about making organs and taking up a notch.

Of course you wouldn't create a brain...

[Alric]

There is a fairly good chance that if it is possible someone will try doing it.

[EVanimations]

That would be cool, being literally reborn into another body. I would rather be reborn into a robotic one. Like keeping my brain in a life support container and using physically indistinguishable surrogates to live in. Of course by the time that may be possible we might be able to just convert a biological brain into a completely artificial one.

Maybe you could just keep your brain preserved in the robot's "cranium" and the life-support mechanisms would be stored in the "body cavity," instead of keeping the brain in a remote tank somewhere.

If you were to create a younger clone of yourself, you would obviously make it without a brain, and up until your brain is able to control it, the body would run on life support.

Also, don't clones age faster or something? That's what I heard.

[SG-1]

I don't want to risk dying, so I'd hide my brain somewhere "Armageddon" proof and have my own sustainable energy source (fusion maybe?) connected to keeping it in life support. I would then have a fail safe so If I died I could just inhabit a body that is hard wired to my brain so I don't end up a floating consciousness forever. If there is no way of coming back up to the surface or if there is nothing up there (I would have a couple of exits leading up to the surface all hidden) I would smash my brain to death so as not to live forever in a black dark pit.

I have it mostly all thought out, I need a reliable internet source that would be able to handle my big brain and maybe some surface bunkers with robots ready for just me and my body.

The way I see it is this, if I happen to live a long time I might as well put loads of money into an account and let it collect interest for a couple of hundred years. If money isn't obsolete I will be filthy rich. Being a rich man among the oldest generation alive on Earth, may cause some people to hate me. I might be hunted down for sport, so some punk can say he killed one of the oldest people ever.

The key is having as many fail safes as possible. Of course I am (half) joking when I say all that because in the back of my mind I don't really believe I will make it to live forever. The technology seems to advanced for my generation to see it happen.

[Raklian]

I don't want to risk dying, so I'd hide my brain somewhere "Armageddon" proof and have my own sustainable energy source (fusion maybe?) connected to keeping it in life support. I would then have a fail safe so If I died I could just inhabit a body that is hard wired to my brain so I don't end up a floating consciousness forever. If there is no way of coming back up to the surface or if there is nothing up there (I would have a couple of exits leading up to the surface all hidden) I would smash my brain to death so as not to live forever in a black dark pit.

I have it mostly all thought out, I need a reliable internet source that would be able to handle my big brain and maybe some surface bunkers with robots ready for just me and my body.

The way I see it is this, if I happen to live a long time I might as well put loads of money into an account and let it collect interest for a couple of hundred years. If money isn't obsolete I will be filthy rich. Being a rich man among the oldest generation alive on Earth, may cause some people to hate me. I might be hunted down for sport, so some punk can say he killed one of the oldest people ever.

The key is having as many fail safes as possible. Of course I am (half) joking when I say all that because in the back of my mind I don't really believe I will make it to live forever. The technology seems to advanced for my generation to see it happen.

But I think it is conceivable to think we may be able to find the most efficient means of cryrogenically preserving our bodies within our lifetime. The technological capability of reviving our bodies out of our cryrogenic slumber needs more time to develop, probably beyond the scope of this century. That said, it is reasonable to say it is easier to develop the best means of preserving our bodies now and let our descendents worry about the more difficult problem of reviving a frozen body. Better taking a stab at that rather than relentlessly mopping that nothing can be done.

[MarcusAurelius]

When I read this post all I could think about was that the technologies leading up to synthetic humans is still a fair way away.

However society will be seeing an explosion to what is possible and a redefinition of how Genetics is seen today and how we can manipulate it will surely occur in the next 50 years.

I would like to reiterate most of kjaggard said and just add that we are short selling ourselves in thinking genetic engineering 50 years down the track will be so basic like we see today. And by that I mean just manipulating existing organisms to suit a particular need or to hybridize one organisms function to augment another. If the original poster is asking about the social impacts of a complete synthetic (as kjaggard put it building a human from scratch) then it will depend how far along society has come. If we are fully immersed in VR and space faring by then and even made augmented humans to survive on harsh environments like Mars or other planetary bodies. Then I think we might be more tolerant and uphold their rights as long as they are sentient. I am sure by this time even AI sentience may demand some recognition of rights to exist etc.

This youtube came to mind just as a thought on what to expect in the future of genetic engineering and future technology. I think people should think outside the square more. Although I recognize its difficult to fathom post singularity manipulation of technology. But I think this video put it aptly when saying the future young scientists of the future will be like genius or prodigies or artists creating masterpieces with the tools of the future.

Or as Freeman Dyson put it...

In the future a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote versus.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUQVNPaRxH4&feature=related

Edited by MarcusAurelius, 25 July 2012 - 09:57 PM.

[MarcusAurelius]

@CyberMisterBeauty

I found this video that basically underpins everything that will come from now into the future. Synthetic biology will be a steady and gradual process with its own breakthroughs and advancements in the coming decades. So that by mid century it may be mature enough to develop synthetic exotic pets until reaching enough complexity to engineer something like a human but completely artificial. My prediction is that it will first be used in space travel, for adapting astronauts to better handle lower gravity and extended periods in space. We are seeing the humble beginnings now with news about gene splicing and adopting one organisms traits and transplanting it genetically onto another.




The Future of Biomaterial Manufacturing: Spider Silk Production from Bacteria
http://www.zeitnews....uction-bacteria

Artificial Jellyfish 'Medusoid' Swims in a Heartbeat: Creation is an Amalgam of Silicone Polymer and Heart Muscle Cells
http://www.zeitnews....algam-silicone-