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Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Westerners, particularly Americans and Brits, are comfortable or at least reconciled with drastic societal change. China and Russia have seen too many invasions, revolutions, peasant rebellions and ethnic-autonomy rebellions (each of which taking millions of lives) to have anything like the same comfort level that Westerners have.

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Oh, I agree that neither power wants the peasants to have them. But make no mistake -- both governments want them, and desperately. There is no universe where there is a multi-lateral agreement to actually eliminate these tools. With loitering munitions and drone swarms, they are ALREADY key components of nation-state force projection.

I'm old enough to remember the public debate about human cloning and human germ-line engineering. In the 1970s some argued like you are arguing here, but those technologies have been stopped world-wide for about 5 decades now and counting because no researcher is willing to work in the field and no one is willing to fund the work because of reputational, legal and criminal-prosecution risk.

Engineering humans strikes me as something different than engineering weapons systems. Maybe as evidence, my cousin works in the field for one of the major defense contractors. Please trust that there are already thousands of engineers working on these problems in the US. Almost certainly hundreds of thousands more world-wide. This is definitely not a genie you put back in the bottle. AI clone wars sound "sci-fi" -- they are decidedly now just "sci."

>This is definitely not a genie you put back in the bottle.

I don't think a defeatist attitude is useful here.

> those technologies have been stopped world-wide for about 5 decades now and counting because no researcher is willing to work in the field

That's not true. I worked in the field of DNA analysis for 6.5 years and there is definitely a consensus that DNA editing is closer than the horizon. Just look at CRISPR gene editor [0]. Crude, but "works".

Your DNA, even if you've never submitted it, is already available using shadow data (think Facebook style shadow profiles but for DNA) from the people related to you who have.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair

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