It would take at least several years of development to create one vaguely effective venomous human assassin, with probably over a decade of development until the human developed vaguely enough dexterity to actually assassinate people. Unless we figure out a way to make humans grow faster at scale? I’ve always felt that enhancing human genetics to make them into weapons strikes me as more expensive and less scalable than inventing machinery that humans can use as weapons.

What would be more scalable- a human born venomous or the ability to install a venom gland in a human sinus, replacing at least one tooth?

It depends.

Looking at it purely from an efficiency perspective, encouraging biological weapon development in humans at a rapid pace - possibly through retroviral techniques - may be more effective than technological devices, if the former is less detectable than the latter, and especially if the former has a lower price point than the latter.

There are multiple variables in play here, and that's not even getting into the ethical considerations.

How is that time and effort possibly more effective than taking an already skilled person and giving them a gun?

Well, to put it another way, why would you devote time towards a hypothetical violent emission of kinetic force from an explosive device when you could more immediately benefit from removing an intelligent obstacle by applying force with a blunt object?

E.g. - why research a gun when you could brain someone with a big rock?

Seriously, not trying to be condescending here - if you could probably do a thing more effectively down the road with one path, why would you choose a more immediate path?

As OP said, detachability. If you have a venom gland, even if you have to go through a metal detector it probably won't be found.

yes. And in the meantime, simple drones that fling poisoned darts, or even toss venomous snakes, is much more feasible than mutant ninja warriors.

Biting people isn't particularly discreet, and a person that gets captured can't dispose of a gland. A similarly deadly poison in the tip of a mundane item that a person might reasonably be carrying seems much more practical, much more likely to succeed, and much more likely to remain undetected

Georgi Markov springs to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi_Markov

Poisoned dentures sounds a lot like the fake/apocryphal joke about pens during the space race:

> During the height of the space race in the 1960s, legend has it, NASA scientists realized that pens could not function in space. They needed to figure out another way for the astronauts to write things down. So they spent years and millions of taxpayer dollars to develop a pen that could put ink to paper without gravity. But their crafty Soviet counterparts, so the story goes, simply handed their cosmonauts pencils.

The soviets? They just gave their agents poisoned dentures and called it a day.

Not to spoil a cold war joke about excesses of American procurement, but that story has been debunked pretty thoroughly: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...

I think raising a child is a lot more effort than giving a trained operative weaponized dentures.

LOL this is basically the Juicero of weaponizing humans. Absurdly over-engineered solution searching for a problem.

In general, weaponizing humans seems like a solution searching for a problem.

No argument there!

I think we'll be fine as long as nobody names one of them Khan Noonien Singh. But seriously, I agree, someone will do it and then it'll be another multi-armed race.

Anti-critters crawling into ears armor.

I want a prehensile tail and feet. Maybe some gene therapy can make that happen to grow and remodel existing tissue?

A literal multi-armed race.

Why bother with super soldiers when you can have robots and drones?

Animals are pretty resilient, compared to robots. Most animals aren't anywhere near as picky about their fuel source or when they receive it as robots are, especially over weeks-length periods of time. Minor-damage is self-servicable and self-repairing. Even the smartest robots are barely at the intelligence level of the dumbest animals. And some of the more intelligent animals are self-adapting to new, out-of-spec scenarios.

There are tradeoffs, and in many situations machines have a clear advantage over biological organisms.

In aviation and space, there are serious issues in keeping biological organisms alive due to oxygen levels, pressure changes, and G forces. A purely autonomous system would be able to be more maneuverable in more environments than any system that also needs to keep a meat bag alive.

The other thing machines are great at is patience. Land mines can remain operational for decades, just waiting for their opportunity to detonate. Biological organisms have much higher passive maintenance costs.

Seriously, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg

Human 'soldiers' are really only going to be useful in the near future for infiltrating and disrupting social systems, not for dispensing physical violence.

I think you are both way off, we can't get a robot to flip a burger[0] it's going to be a long time for a robot to replace a special forces solider. They aren't just dumb manpower, we are talking a strategist, weapons specialist, paratrooper, negotiator plus a dozen other roles all in a 6 foot tall, 200 pound package that can go into a country and forage off the land for months while waiting for the perfect opportunity to complete it's mission.

[0] I know you can find something on Youtube but if it really worked at scale McDonalds would be rolling them out yesterday.

People said the same thing on the advent of the Air Force. It turns out there's a lot more involved in winning a war than murdering people.

That can be taken to its logical conclusion, like that classic Star Trek Episode:

Why bother building killer robots and drones when you can simulate the outcome of a battle without having to fight it in meat space.

Whoever loses has to line up at the suicide booths.

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

What if that's better? Everyone could have a purpose and not need to search for it, often in futility.

Not everyone wants a purpose, many people who have purposes imposed on them by parents or other authority figures later reject them, and not everybody who does want a purpose thinks of it as a search.

Purposes are tools humans use to give their own lives meaning, if they desire. Purposes should serve humans, not the other way around.

There's no indication that someone's genetically-specialized vocation would be something that that person would personally be interested in pursuing. There are numerous counterexamples of a person's choices in life being orthogonal or even entirely opposed to their parents' hopes and desires for their life.

I wouldn't be that into assassination as a vocation even if I had superpowers that made me an extremely good assassin, for example.

Obligatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

It sounds like you are very much in the party of nurture over nature. Either could result in a person "being into" something. You are taking your genetics and your upbringing and projecting them onto future scientific possibilities, and I don't think that makes much sense.

What if you sequence the great computer scientists and average ones and find some genes that really make a difference? What if you sequence sociopaths and discover a series of genes that correlate heavily with it? Sexuality, flight or flight responses, physical aptitude, mental aptitude.

We've spent millennia doing a less advanced form of this on dogs, can you honestly say a lot of these dogs we've bred for specific jobs aren't "into them"?

> It sounds like you are very much in the party of nurture over nature.

No, this entirely different to that. I'm saying that a person's physical attributes are orthogonal to that person's personality. I'm not discussing if their personality is a result of nature or nuture, just the fact that if you're, for example, physically predisposed to, say, being able to grow large muscles, that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you are personally interested in, say, competitive weightlifting (regardless of whether or not that personal interest (or lack thereof) is a result of nature or nuture).

The fact that you are predisposed to be able to grow large muscles is obviously nature; the circumstances surrounding whether or not you actually do grow large muscles is open to the nature/nurture debate, as well as the psychological manifestations that might lead one to engage in (or avoid) bodybuilding, competition, et c.

There's no real conclusive science for what you're proposing. The body could be impacting the mind and altering one's personality but we haven't learned enough about the brain to really know for certain. Opinions on this topic are likely from anecdotal experiences and not real science.

I've thought about it and there are for sure small physical things I'd love to change from birth to benefit my sport/hobbies.

But the problem is parents would be making that decision. Or in this case a dictator's military haha.

There are already hover parents living vicariously through sports, music, chess whatever.

I can imagine this going to extremes with parents making these forever physical decisions.

Elite athletes can chose to endanger their health for the sport they love.

But I'm not sure about the ethics of a parent deciding to say give lower resting heart rates/higher vo2 max with cycling in mind, even though it could be deadly slow.

What if they aren't interested in, or worse, resent their "purpose," but can't change it due to some societal and genetic pigeon-holing? That sounds worse than searching for a purpose for myself, tbh.

That's horrible. I think you don't know what a meaningful life is.

Almost nobody does, at least today. Some offtopic. The reverse side of the dollar bill depicts a small pyramid with an eye on it. This symbol is a pretty clever summary of our civilization. The eye means the human mind that connects a small upward facing triangle at the top - the spirit, with a heavy structure at the bottom - the matter. The upper triangle is small because today people barely recognize its existence. The mind tries to figure out which side it belongs too and often it gives up and identifies oneself with the matter. The "purpose" from the comment above is the pinnacle of this thinking: the mind decides that "since I really belong to this two legged biomachine, my purpose must be same with that machine's".

The only way to weaponize humans is the Red Queen's Race:

Make your children better than theirs. Smarter? Less likely to get diseases? Who knows. The point is, now your side has the edge, so they have to keep up. Maybe they get the edge next, so you have to innovate. And so on. Assuming there's sufficient "headroom" to build up these genetic transhumans, and we don't run into some no-free-lunch scenario where improvement is either impossible or comes with unavoidable nasty side-effects, you can't just sit still. You have to continue to improve or you can no longer pretend that all people are created equal in certain important respects. Morally equal, yes, but "morally equal" doesn't get you a leadership position.

There's no free lunch. Every significant enhancement comes with a corresponding disadvantage. Otherwise millions of years of evolution would have produced something better already.

For example, partial genetic immunity to malaria carries an increased risk of syckle cell anemia. Most traits are like that to an extent.

Humans can imagine and create things that never had the appropriate conditions under which they could evolve. The possibility space has not been fully explored.

> There's no free lunch. Every significant enhancement comes with a corresponding disadvantage. Otherwise millions of years of evolution would have produced something better already.

And yet the nerve to my retina is still installed backwards.

How do they ensure being venomous to others while remaining immune themselves?

Start slowly :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20074160