I notice the sign says ‘We can make for you a wife’.
 
What about husbands? Or were the natural women all ‘removed’ once they became obsolete?
 
There are times I wish I’d seen and read less SF horror as a boy.

@Lord Of Dorkness  
Can’t wait

@ChaosMeta
 
Give it a few decades, maybe half a century or so, given the slow pace of medical tech being approved…
 
Yeah, gods, the rule of first adopters and cybernetics are going to be WILD.

Imagine, if you will, a world where humans, ponies, furries and scalies coexist….

@Cirrus Light  
And they’re partial to complete black boxes…for now

@Prometheus labs CEO  
I think biological neurons do that - neurons used for one purpose can also serve another function or few, and that’s one of the difficulties of understanding the brain.
 
Look at how neural nets (AI) work. It’s crazy. Those are basically just mimicking real ones, but limited to a clock cycle because they’re in virtual space instead of physical space.

@redweasel  
I’m pretty sure technology like that is a lot less than 30 billion years away, for everything except the zero-point battery I’d say that kind of technology is at least a few decades away

@Prometheus labs CEO
 
personally I like the idea of a whole swarm of radio controlled flying drones.
 
@Prometheus labs CEO
 

@Meanlucario  

@Phantom Rider  
I rather a small pony, though a robot tiny desk pony would be best.

@redweasel  
Well the human brain is already pretty redundant in that it doesn’t make use of most of its synaptic potential, meaning it could be way smaller and still hold a full human mind. Knowing that it might be possible to make something like a breezie, although their brain would probably have to be very complex and dense, possibly even made of artificial neurons, which work much faster and can act as multiple neurons in one, rather than biological ones. I personally like the idea of the artificial breezie brain being a sentient neuromorphic computer

@Phantom Rider
 
if you can solve the information density issue, then sure! I’m not a huge fan of breezies though. they look pointless.

@Meanlucario  
@redweasel
 
What about a cute li’l Breezie fluttering around?

@Meanlucario
 
my issue is I’d wanna be a tiny desk pone

@redweasel  
I’d just want a tiny desk pone to motivate me.

@Meanlucario
 
if it was that simple, we probably would already have pet twilights running around.

Now that’s the kind of future I’d want to live in, although I’d probably be in a similar boat to the old man by the time I got to see it

@redweasel  
I doubt it’s that simple or easy.

@Cirrus Light
 
frankly if I could use biotech to save someone from losing their child, I’d do that in a heartbeat too. it’s not like you can’t already just whip up a new child in 9 months or so. and improving the quality of life for elderly people is awesome. the only thing worse than death is a slow decline before it. I’d love to have a bunch of cute little ponies running around making people’s lives joyful, and I don’t see why anyone would want a 12 year time limit. if they did, they could just get a dog, and watch it horribly waste away naturally.
 
so I feel bad for ardashir, since there’s so many people trying so hard to creep them out about this wonderful stuff, and there’s not much you can do to stop being affected by that, when hollywood keeps getting in your face and screaming all “oh godddddd how horribleeeee!” about it.

@Cirrus Light  
I remember a video about gene editing I saw a few months ago, talking about how it’s a system with great protonation, and because of that, people are either extremely caution to prevent unforeseen side effects, while others want to use it straight away without hesitation. There’s a reason one of the lead developers had a nightmare of her explaining it to a pig-faced Hitler.

@redweasel  
I mean, they’re not totally unjustified - in a way the Luddites have a point, without modern technology, we’d never have world wars or mutually assured destruction and the nightmare of an uninhabitable radioactive winter waste of Earth.
 
Similarly, biotech can spawn nightmares. Some more obvious than others. Many are wild conjectures. But we face the possibility of bad, acknowledging it and avoiding it to get the good.
 
Yeah, those things with biotech would be bad, but that’s no reason to not pursue it.
 
I dunno, it’s 4am so I’m probably ranting incoherently :q

@Cirrus Light
 
all I’m saying is lots of biotech is simple and safe, and it’s politics that make the trouble. because of the fearmongering, most people are just as horrified by the points in @Ardashir’s post as you are about that one thing we’re not going to argue about.

@redweasel  

 
Well, I’d say that’s close to saying murder isn’t a big deal (because whether it’s murder or not entirely depends on your definition of what a human life is, and given things like advancing incubator technology and c-sections, birth seems an archaic place to draw the line), but that just gets political so let’s not.
 
There’s a thread for that. I’ll even initiate and take the conversation there.

@Blissey1
 
well, I more mean the governmental police, due to corrupted laws treating ideas like salable commodities. but yeah, they’re basically monsanto’s goons now. tax funded!
 
biotech sadly has dangers beyond the biology. like gene patents, or also like how abortion isn’t a big deal, compared to the taking away of our freedom to prevent it. or how pharmaceutical abuse hurts us far less than the pharmaceutical industry. heck, stem cell research is the key to great longevity! that’s the opposite of dangerous! but the religious groups attacking it… very, very dangerous.

@redweasel  

 
and by thought police you mean Monsanto