At Mon, 01 Mar 1999 16:33:41 +1100, you wrote:
>
>Like Ronald Reagan, much of my life appears to be remembered through movies
>;-)
>
>Check out Sigourney Weaver in "Alien Resurrection" and then let us know what
>you all think. There is one scene (without spoiling the movie) that really
>made me rethink notions of cloning etc: It doesn't always work out
>perfectly.
>
>Anyhow, my vote is that creating a slave is slavery and I oppose it. Even if
>they don't. I also believe that free thought necessarily entails a desire
>for freedom, so I hold the thought experiment of sentient being who loves
>slavery to be null.
>
>> Thought I would throw this question out. Is it ethical to create
>> specially designed sentient beings which would be engineered to do specific
>> tasks? Would it be ethical for their creators to profit from the labor of
>> their creations? Esentially, we're talking about the possibility of a perfect
>> slave caste, willing and able to serve general purpose sentients (like us) in
>> whatever capacity we design them to. What do you all think?
>>
>> Glen Finney
>
Jack Vance, in a SF novel (either THE DRAGONMASTERS or THE LAST CASTLE, I forget which) treated the topic of genetic warfare, where each race (there were two very dissimilar ones) created troops designed to serve different war functions from the DNA of their POWs; thus engineered race A soldiers were fighting for race B against soldiers of race B engineered by race A. The irony is that the side with the most flexible genome lost, because it was turned against them.
Joe E. Dees
Poet, Pagan, Philosopher