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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3236 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Suppose we developed a specific form of genetic engineering that allows us to freely modulate a person’s compulsions and interests (for the purposes of this example, say a compulsion for accurately completing taxes). In almost all ways, the resulting human is completely normal, except:

  1. It has the all of the intellectual capabilities of a 99.99 percentile tax advisor, including things like “common sense”.
  2. The modifications have deprogrammed any interest in any other task - friendship, love, travel, sports, television, etc. It feels nothing from engaging in any activity that isn’t organizing and filing tax forms (aside from basic self-sustenance tasks like eating and sleeping or ancillary tasks like learning arithmetic, language, and tax codes), from which it gets a small dopamine high. When not doing taxes, it will go into maintenance mode where it does basic self-sustenance tasks, but otherwise will stare at a wall until the next tax related task. It shows no signs of subjective boredom or of any desire for anything more to life.

To you, would it be ethical to take some eggs/sperm, hire some surrogates, and create a small army of these beings to have them do all of our taxes? How does your position differ from creating an artificial general intelligence (supposing we developed the capability) to do the same?

Out of curiosity have you read To The Stars? It explores a kind of similar idea.

Mild spoilers (worldbuilding elements): ||Eventually they interact with an alien society structured around the idea that individuals have a prefspec (preference specification) that they can modify at will which determines their compulsions and interests. An individual can decide to modify their own prefspec to better match their desired goals. For example someone planning to be a parent could self-adjust to enjoy the nurturing and caring components more than they otherwise would.

This also allows for prefspec negotiation, where individuals or groups can negotiate mutual modifications to each others' prefspecs to reach compromises between what would have been mutually incompatible values. Factions end up trading prefspec modifications between each other, sometimes for material compensation or sometimes for prefspec modifications in other areas.||

It's a pretty neat exploration of the concept, but it does start pretty deep into the story.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/777002/chapters/1461984

I think the Freedom Alliance Elites are a closer parallel. From To the Stars by Hieronym, Chapter 34:

Defeats on the battlefield failed to put the remains of the Freedom Alliance in the mood for surrender, however. The hyperclass oligarchs, by now thoroughly indoctrinated by their own poisonous ideology, placed the blame for failure squarely on the shoulders of their soldiers, declaring that if their soldiers could or would not perform, then they would be modified until they would. In underground laboratories around the world, scientists tinkered with the genomes of vast arrays of clones, designing thicker cranial plating, muscular augments, toxin glands, and whatever else might be expected to improve combat performance, regardless of personal welfare or the source of the genetic modifications.

Perhaps the most disturbing modifications were those made to the brain, the seat of consciousness itself. Some brain regions were enlarged; others were shrunk or deleted entirely, written off as unnecessary in an instrument of war. Empathy, love, fear—all these were unnecessarily evolutionary adaptations that could now be placed squarely in the dustbin of history. The tools of war, these "perfect" soldiers would not need to ever question their orders, or indeed do anything but show their prowess in combat.

This horrific disregard for basic human dignity showed itself amply in the names of the abominations that would serve as the FA's elite soldiers in last stages of the war. Grunts, Tankers—these were not nicknames given by their enemy, but their actual designation, followed of course by a serial number. These soldiers came in different varieties, each shaped by their battlefield role—giant hulks for assault troopers, lithe, giant‐eyed nymphs for snipers. The Tankers were some of the worst, barely more than an out‐sized head on a shrunken body, perfect for connecting directly to the life‐support system of a medium armored vehicle.

While some of these creations were sentient, after a fashion, the nature of such a sentience was loathsome—tied to one task until death, devoid of human or even animal emotions, and each bound irreversibly by its cortical control module to its masters. It is telling that, at the end of the war, there was essentially no resistance to the Emergency Defense Council's Decree 224, ordering the summary execution of any FA "Elites" found anywhere.

In the end, the FA spared not even its civilian functions from such "enhancement"…

— Excerpt, Unification Wars, textbook for Primary School History

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