Justifying bioroids

[AlexanderHowl]

I doubt that the donors of the cloned ovaries will want to have legal and financial responsibility over the children of the bioroids who purchased their genetic material. Anyway, it makes far more sense legally for the mother to be the person who bears a child, not the genetic donor, given the existing legal systems. After all, a sperm donor is not the legal father of a child normally unless the donation occurred through sexual activity or to a woman that he had contracted with (such as through a marriage contract).

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I doubt that the donors of the cloned ovaries will want to have legal and financial responsibility over the children of the bioroids who purchased their genetic material.

Sure, but that wasn't my point. My point was that, given TL 9+ biotech, it's unlikely that either sexual reproduction or natural pregnancy would be especially privileged legally (bioroids might have a special legal status, but if it's created by ordinary sexual reproduction it's not a bioroid). TL 8 doesn't consider artificial insemination legally relevant, and if someone were to create a bioroid today I suspect the legal response would be to toss everyone responsible in jail and treat the bioroid itself as human.

[AlexanderHowl]

I agree that the bioroid would be treated as a human, though the 'tossing everyone in jail' part would be dependent on if they used federal funds or misused private funds, how the bioroid was grown, the consequences of the technology to the bioroid, etc. If they used US government federal funds, embezzled private money to fund their research, used sex slaves to bear the bioroid, etc., they could be facing massive legal problems. If it was a multibillionaire couple who were paying for the technology out of hand to have custom babies with capabilities beyond TL9 genetic engineering, they might avoid legal trouble.

If we assume that we can reach TL9 genetic engineering in the next decade, a TL10 bioroid in 2035 as a prototype would not be out of the question, though it would likely be ruinously expensive and difficult in a realistic setting. The first bioroid child would likely be a billion dollar baby and, while any clones would be much cheaper, they would end up having a final cost equal to 3x their TL10 cost.

[Fnordianslip]

Originally Posted by hal

Bioroids and modern Earth society...

History points us towards a way of understanding what might happen if Bioroid technology is perfected and unleashed on the world in general...

2) With automation becoming a major thing, uneducated jobs are starting to dry up. McDonalds today, is working towards automating the food production process so as to cut its labor costs...

This idea of automation brings up a really interesting point, particularly in the service sector. I can see states with generous social benefits, universal basic income, education, etc., ending up with populations that are highly educated and have zero reason to work in baseline service jobs. At that point, bioroids might be considered superior to automated systems. Most people might want to interact with a living smiling bioroid over a computer interface. Also, while it might be illegal to program humans to love their jobs, it might be legal to program bioroids to do so. Always friendly, always happy, humanesque bioroids in the service industry could be a corporate solution.

To take a sharp turn to another possible reason bioroids are prevalent could be human pandemics. Maybe a lot of the human race has been wiped out due to disease and there's no known cure. You need to get the population back up in a hurry, but making more humans will just lead to more outbreaks and deaths. In this case, making bioroid citizens who are immune might be the ticket out of the problem. 20-50 years later, it might just be that people are used to bioroids being a big part of the population, even if the disease is cured by then.

[AlexanderHowl]

A related possibility is that a pandemic prevents human embryos born or sired by infected humans from surviving, but bioroid embryos are capable of surviving, so natural born bioroids could become popular surrogate children. If technology allows for cloned human sexual organs to be safely implanted in bioroids, they could safely bear and sire human children, as the bioroids parents would be immune to the pandemic. If the pandemic is impossible to eliminate, you could end up with a human generation giving birth to bioroid children and a bioroid generation giving birth to human children, and so on for every, which would make family relations complicated.

In such a setting, you could have wickedly complex families if the situation has continued for a few generations. Imagine for a moment if a human character's with a human sister, a catgirl bioroid mother, a dog bioroid father, assorted bioroid breeds for their four aunts and uncles, and four human grandparents. Their mother possesses the cloned ovaries of her human mother and their father possesses the cloned testes of his father, meaning that the character is the genetic child of two of their grandparents. If the society was isolated from the rest of humanity for a dozen or so generations, their society would have likely diverged greatly from baseline human society.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

A related possibility is that a pandemic prevents human embryos born or sired by infected humans from surviving, but bioroid embryos are capable of surviving.

If it's got an embryo form, it's not a bioroid, it's human or parahuman being grown in an exowomb.

[AlexanderHowl]

No, bioroids can be born as well as constructed, it is just that biogenesis is required to construct them. The defining characteristic of bioroids is the Bioroid Template, which gives them Unusual Biochemistry, Sterile, and 3-5 levels of Early Maturation (meaning that they would be capable of reproduction quite early, if society allows it). Biotech actually talks about bioroids as reproductive surrogates on p. 26.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

No, bioroids can be born as well as constructed

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

they would be capable of reproduction quite early

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The defining characteristic of bioroids is the Bioroid Template, which gives them Sterile

🤔

Something's not right here.

[AlexanderHowl]

You can use transplants to remove sterility.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

No, bioroids can be born as well as constructed, it is just that biogenesis is required to construct them.

You have that backwards. It's possible to construct parahumans with biogenesis, but it's not possible to produce bioroids without biogenesis, their early maturation just reflects how long it takes to grow them. The reason they have sterile is because they cannot grow from an egg and sperm.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Biotech actually talks about bioroids as reproductive surrogates on p. 26.

That has absolutely nothing to do with whether a bioroid can grow from an embryo.