THS / BioTech: Organlegger efficiency

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by CeeDub

Good points. What about backwaters where culturing human tissue (or importing it) is illegal?

Other restrictions could be taxes, copyright, exorbitant license fees or choked supply. Think about all the reasons there are blackmarkets for otherwise legally sold items today.

ETA: Other considerations are quality- would you rather have the heart of an Olympic athlete or some artificial sweatshop knockoff?; and concerns about "being natural"- artificial organs are made from GMOs!

Originally Posted by CeeDub

What other ways are there to portray the practice as even more ghoulish than it already is?

Keeping the victim alive to drain bile, marrow and various endocrine secretions from them?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by CeeDub

So far, there is a lot the human brain can do that software simply can't do even remotely as well. That might change, or it might not.

But very, very few of those things are things that we could make an extracted human brain do for us. It's not totally impossible for that to change before figuring out how to solve those problems in software, but it's certainly not the way I would bet.

Originally Posted by CeeDub

Maybe a matured, adult brain with experiences is required. Sure, might take longer to grow and experience can be simulated with feelies, but some shady people might take shortcuts.

What are they doing with the brain that requires experiences, but not cooperation?

Originally Posted by CeeDub

That would raise a lot of questions when friends and family see the body of their missing loved one by chance, or when the government matches the face to a missing persons report.

What face? What body? After you've harvested everything useful from a body, you don't just leave the scraps lying around unless you're operating in a place where there's effectively no risk of investigation.

Stealing only a few organs is still a blatantly obvious crime unless nobody does any kind of autopsy on the murder victim. Might work if you're positioned so that the death isn't considered suspicious at all, otherwise it's totally pointless.

Originally Posted by CeeDub

Good points. What about backwaters where culturing human tissue (or importing it) is illegal?

How do you figure they'd have that rule, but allow transplants at all?

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

I'm not really convinced about enslaved brains, how much good work is an extremely traumatized brain going to do? You could drug them but then how much good work is an extremely drugged up brain going to do?

Unless there is something metaphysical about the human brain, it seems unlikely to me that technology would be able to interface with a brain like that more easily than you can just simulate the necessary function in software.

And if something actually requires a brain, there's going to be a push to use the minimal amount of brain necessary (maybe a cluster of neurons grown on a chip) to feed whatever output is needed to a computer running the rest of the process.