Seriously, this playing with living organisms to augment their capabilities and make them do our bidding is a bit beyond my personal moral threshold. At this point isn't easier to miniaturize a robot cocroach?
For instance, different people put different amounts of effort in when a rogue house fly enters a room. Some kill, some catch and release.
Which is easier? It really depends on the person and what they are willing to tolerate.
No mushrooms, no meat, and no vegetables.
It looks like something out of CockroachPunk 2077
> After experiments, the shell can be removed and the membrane can be gently polished off to minimise any restrictions on the cockroach’s normal behaviour and daily activities. Four small dorsal openings were reserved for attaching the oxygen tubes, which were connected to the thoracic spiracles.
As long it carries out it mission for a minute of two. Send it to some underwater fibre optic cable and use it as a depth charge to blow it up.
No more requirements for anchors.
https://global.espreso.tv/mosquitoes-vs-moscowitoes-reznikov...
Except that this time you can check if it's working and optimize it better by listening to people's phones and seeing how they react.
An actual quote from a Nature article
> Madagascar hissing cockroach has been used in various applications as a powerful platform
THE COCKROACHES CAN ALREADY SURVIVE NUCLEAR WAR.
WHY DO THEY INSIST ON MAKING THEM _STRONGER_?!
This statement summarizes it nicely:
"The purpose of propaganda is not to make you believe something. It is to make you believe nothing.
Then you will do nothing."
Wasps do not bring harm to me, I know how to coexist with them, but if my kids are around, I will also kill them if they seem aggressive. So my ethics are very pragmatic.
I think the OP was just highlighting that we do this all the time.
I personally feel like cyborg control goes a step beyond selective breeding and it makes me feel icky too. But we need to talk about what the difference is.
It reminds me of somebody I knew who thought that metaphors are dishonest and should never be used.
Maybe it would be more precise to call it a slippery slope but I’m not sure there’s another name for this kind of reductive argument.
I'm not doing those things, I'm making an epistemological point that I think is important, though it's an old one I picked up from reading Gödel, Escher, Bach in the 80s, but I do quite sincerely think that arguments that rely on reductionism are bad and frequently silly. Yet I also think that reductio ad absurdum is a crucial form of critical thought. Reductionism claims "there are no emergent properties when the parts are assembled", whereas reductio ad absurdum says "there's something that your simple rule doesn't account for", so it really is opposed to reductionism, unless it's carried out by misrepresenting the rule as being foolishly simple when it wasn't simple.
This is admittedly something of a sidetrack from the question of exploitation.
In the argument near the top of the thread, the point made is of course that lots of mundane and innocent things are the product of meddling with nature. I can't make sense of the phrase "exploitation is more important than its mere existence", by "its", do you refer to the existence of exploitation? Was that topic raised? I can't find the context. I don't understand what you're saying, but I'm picking up "when exploitation is bad, it's immoral", which is true by definition. But I suppose the unanswered question is why it's bad exploitation to make a cockroach into a robot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabanidae
Yeah, those I kill without mercy wherever I see them. And they don't sting like mosquitoes, they bite and suck.
(Sometimes I am with hippi people who don't kill flies etc. - so they are annoyed by them, but don't know what to do besides complaining, so when I then do the killing, they don't really object)
You might go to countryside or forest to enjoy nature but instead your blood will be enjoyed by plentiful selection of insects of all sizes ranging from tiny Simuliidae to large Tabanidae.
If our solar system drifts too close to another civilization I don't want to get squashed. That's the maxim. We are the fly. If you don't want something bigger than you to be entirely justified in killing you for no reason, you cannot believe yourself to be entirely justified doing the same.
The golden rule is really hard to beat.
For the reason of it being a danger. And that my energy is spend more effective on other things, than trying to save life that potentially carries diseases and goes straight to any open wound or eyes. So they come on purpose, not by mistake.
If that is no reason to you, you may continue to catch and save flies if that is your thing, but please don't say "no reason" when you mean "no valid reason to you".
You might wonder why I say that with confidence, but I might wonder why you wouldn't say it with confidence. But even if the fly does have thoughts, such as "yum, I smell a dead squirrel", it's not a participant in morality. Why should there be a golden rule about protecting animated things? Does it apply to the entities in Conway's Game of Life? Does it apply to alien flies that aren't based on DNA, but not to robots? What is the purpose of such a rule?
If the idea is self interest and reciprocity, you're essentially saying "if an alien civilization assigns rights to all kinds of crazy things, it will also assign rights to me, even though it doesn't understand what I am. Therefore I will assign rights to all kinds of crazy things too, to set an example!"
The example would go unheeded, though, if the aliens don't understand what you are. But if they do understand what you are, they'll hopefully spare you because they recognize you as having moral ideas. In that case, you'd reduce your risk the most by not appearing crazy.
Flies have a role in nature, as decomposers and food/water sources for many other animals. They are a valued participant in Earths ecosystem. Houseflies only exist because we built houses around the decomposing waste that they are biologically wired to seek and consume.
Because your role for them is to provide blood.