“My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack’s muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?”
— Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Essays on Mind and Matter”
Here it is. All of Yang’s musing on the nature of man and the genetic code has finally come to fruition with the Genejack. The Genejack, the application of Retroviral Engineering to the problem of industry, is the physical incarnation of Yang’s philosophy. So it is well worth considering what Yang has actually pulled off here.
The Genejack does nothing other than perform his duties to the best of his ability. Which makes him nothing more and nothing less than any other machine in the factory. It would be beyond pointless to give such a creature the franchise. A society largely populated by Genejacks would need to be a Yang-style Police State by default, since Genejacks have been carefully designed to have no agency of their own.
Basically everybody who isn’t Yang is going to recoil in horror at this idea. This almost certainly includes the player. If Reynolds were content to have a consensus “bad guy” in the game, he could just point to Yang and close up shop right here. And, in fact, most of the player base of the game has come away with the idea that Yang is nothing more than a monster.
But Reynolds is dreaming bigger than that. SMAC plays fair; it wants to give Yang as much of a chance to make his point as any of the other faction leaders. So let’s take Yang’s final question seriously for a moment. How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain? Whether that pain be physical, emotional, or what-have-you.
I think the answer is pretty clear: you can’t. You can ill-treat them, perhaps. But that case is more like kicking a dog or keeping your cattle in a miserable cage their whole lives. That may or may not be morally good. It certainly isn’t nice. But it’s not tyranny. You can only tyrannize someone who has some claim to political as well as moral equality. And the minimum possible bar for that claim is some sense of agency.
In a crucial way, Genejacks aren’t people. It’s like the uncanny valley problem for humanoid robots, in which researchers found that when they got just close enough to an actual human-like appearance without getting it quite right, they discovered that everyone found the resulting robot very creepy. But Yang went at it in reverse. Instead of starting with a bunch of rubber and metal and making something that almost looked like a person, Yang started with a person and shaved away enough of the right parts that the result is horrifying.
I believe that the reason why the idea of the Genejack is so creepy to most people is precisely the reason why Yang considers it such a revolutionary leap forward. It’s not merely the individual/collective divide. They’re not simple, mindless zombies, nor are they more machine than man like the Borg from Star Trek.
Imagine a public relations guy who happens to be a Genejack. He’s capable of carrying on a pleasant conversation with you, and he’ll be happy to for just as long as he thought that it was his job to talk to you. He looks and sounds exactly like a regular person. After all, he’s made out of the same stuff, he looks the same, he’s capable of many of the same feats. The sole exception, really, is that he is no longer capable of or interested in acting like a genetically-viable individual. His only interest is to serve the collective.
This is what Yang was aiming for ever since he named his faction the Human Hive. But he wasn’t able to jump straight there. As he told us before, one does not simply pick up sand from the beach and make a Dataprobe. There is a whole chain of events that has to come in between and none of the steps can be skipped.
Think about how he got here. First, Yang had to collect a bunch of the original colonists together who were willing to pool their efforts and work communally to confront the first challenges on the new world. These people were selected for the voyage but almost certainly not all handpicked by Yang when they boarded. So at first this is like a voluntary commune or a large, extended family – without the genetic ties. And even these small-scale collective endeavors have an awful success rate historically, so keeping this going is not easy. The margin for error is not sufficient at first to allow him to exile or kill very many of his people – he needs to get virtually everyone on board and focused.
Then, as the society grows, Yang has to inspire and cultivate an increasing degree of enlightenment from his followers. People have to be encouraged to continue sacrificing and working toward the goal even after they ascend from abject poverty and come to master their new home. The inherent prosperity of a bigger, more successful collective necessarily increases the individual incentive to defect. And he can’t afford to slow his faction’s growth rate to help maintain stability, as he has six other likely-hostile factions out there to contend with.
All the while, he is certainly encouraging his scientists to experiment with reeducation techniques, using the full spectrum of available techniques. We know he’s in to meditation. We also know that he has carefully structured the physical environment of his bases to advance toward his goals. The twisted warrens that serve as free Perimeter Defenses and the feeding bays Lal mentioned Yang uses for Recreation Commons are evidence of this. There’s no reason to presume Yang would miss any other opportunities to help enforce his vision as he builds up his bases.
Even his beloved Police State mostly exists to help Yang structure society so that nobody ever needs to think about anything that isn’t their job. After Industrial Automation, there’s no need for people to do any job that’s thoughtless or repetitive, so this is not at all the same thing as wanting brain-dead, zombie minions. He’s trying to breed people that are completely focused on their job to the exclusion of as much else as he can manage.
Speaking of breeding, Yang certainly embarked on a comprehensive breeding program from the moment his pod touched land. Every generation of Hive citizens born on Planet is artificially selected to be more naturally inclined to Yang-enlightenment than the previous one. With each improvement in genetic manipulation technology, Yang has been better able to produce a series of humans that would more and more closely approximate a cell in the body politic as opposed to a free-range single-celled organism. Which almost assuredly leads to some pretty wild morphisms off the Mark I human, depending on which duties it is intended to perform.
The result that he has finally arrived at in the Genejack is, according to Yang, a massive leap forward in industrial organization. So it’s worth noting that the game supports Yang’s contention. The Genejack Factory is a very impressive facility. It serves as one of the only multiplier buildings for minerals instead of a type of energy. And it comes the earliest on the tech tree by a good margin, making it much more valuable.
Needless to say, this is an exceptionally powerful bonus. It has the drawback of generating some more drones at the base it is built in, modeling the fact that the new Genejacks need a little more external direction to keep themselves functioning. But this is not a problem at all by the mid-game. Every faction should have the energy necessary for psych spending, the facilities, or the police troopers on hand to suppress the additional drones. Certainly they can find the room in their budget in exchange for a 50% boost in mineral production.
This is all really impressive work on Reynolds’s part. But I think my favorite part about this quote is that, despite all the build up and background on Yang, the player only hears it after he builds one. To my knowledge, nothing in the interface or the previous game lore tells the player what a Genejack Factory is. There are just a couple of hints about what it does: bonus minerals; extra drones. Then he builds one. Only then does he get to find out what he’s done. So to hear this quote in the game is necessarily to be complicit in the horror.
I can still remember the first time I built one of these. I heard Yang read his quote, thought about it for a bit as the rest of the new turn processed, and then went back to the base screen that had the new factory and stared for a bit. I didn’t get all of the above reasoning yet, but I understood enough. I remember seeing the all the extra minerals and then thinking long and hard about whether I wanted to just scrap it. I don’t remember what I decided; I do know I played other games where I didn’t ever build them and plenty of other games in which I did. But I very clearly remember feeling at the time like the decision mattered.
Perhaps I’m just imaginative to a fault. Particularly for a strategy game player. But any game that can make a player feel like his in-game decisions have real weight like that is a success in my book.
Paean to SMAC 
You say that you don’t think Genejacks are mindless drones (or “mindless zombies”), yet the cerebral cortex being atrophied to the point of being unable to desire anything independently would *necessarily* imply that Genejacks were nothing but mindless drones. Even animals have agency, in a certain sense- thus Genejacks are one step below even them in some ways. Take it from a biologist- you can’t go around atrophying a cerebral cortex and get a human being who would still seem normal, like you indicate with your complete implausible example of a genejack PR man… The drones more likely represent natural public outrage at what has been done than anything else…
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They are unable to desire anything independent of the task they are given. Which is very different than not desiring anything at all.
If you’ve ever read Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, you might have some context for what this might look like. If you haven’t, I highly recommend the book. It’s very good. But, in the meantime, here’s the link to the Wikipedia plot summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky
The relevant part of that book for our purposes is that Vinge imagines people called the “Focused”. These people have their brains physically altered by a virus that causes them to focus so intently on their work that, for all intents and purposes, they don’t really parse as people. They have no agency. They just do exactly what they’re tasked to do and desire nothing else. But it’s notable that the task is usually something really complicated. Computer programming, linguistics, and xenobiology feature prominently.
Everyone who isn’t Focused just refers to them as part of the machinery. And yet they’re all individually very smart and creative in their narrow domains. This makes them terrifyingly effective at their work.
Most of them come off as extreme autistics with narrow savant-like brilliance in their specialties. But there is one example in the book of an exceptional Focused individual who is focused on the task of managing groups. This is a task that requires considerable interpersonal skill, and it turns out that she’s very good at it.
Since Yang’s Genejacks are built from the ground up instead of being repurposed from existing people, there’s no reason to presume that they’d have all the same limitations as the common side effects caused by the virus in the book. Any task you’d want a person to do, you could theoretically grow a person to optimally do. Hence a PR Genejack seems quite plausible to me. It’s essentially the meat version of the way later technologies describe growing a digital sentience around a task.
My main problem with your interpretation of the quote is the existence of Industrial Automation as a much earlier technology on the tree. There’s a lot of implied sci-fi distance between the third-tier and the sixth-tier of the tech tree. So why would anyone derive any benefit from growing a mindless drone when you could certainly build a robot to perform the same task much more cheaply and easily? I don’t see how that adds up.
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> So why would anyone derive any benefit from growing a mindless drone when you could certainly build a robot to perform the same task much more cheaply and easily? I don’t see how that adds up.
A robot requires maintenance. A biological being is self-repairing, to some degree. And self-replicating, so once you have a few near-mindless drones you can get plenty more for no more cost than a lot of food and a bit of time…
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I’d buy that at the technological and ecological level of the Middle Ages. Or even, maybe, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But this is well after Industrial Automation. On an alien planet where the air isn’t even breathable. Even discounting the initial capital investment in time to grow/build (which is a huge deal on Planet – the growth rate is crazy-high), the maintenance cost on people has to be way more expensive than on any conceivable automation of a manufacturing process in a controlled environment like a factory.
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You’re never going to get a robot that’s as general-purpose as the Genejack.
Yes, you can make a robot to carry boxes and put them on shelves. You can make a robot to assemble car doors. Or you can make a robot to paint walls. Or you can make a robot to prepare food. Each of these take substantial time for a trained professional to program – possibly taking more effort to build than it would take to just have the same professional paint the wall himself.
The Genejack doesn’t need a professional programmer. It can do any task that a human can do, repetitively, mindlessly, after it has been shown (hopefully just once) how to do the task. And then when that’s done, it can be easily reassigned – to anything else.
No salary. No creature comforts. It requires only food, and every calorie goes into more work. (And there’s no shortage of food, with genejacks working the fields).
And, apart from everything else, the sight of the Genejack, toiling like a perfect labourer, provides exactly the example Yang wants the rest of his people to be inspired by…
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I think the crux of our disagreement is that you underrate what Industrial Automation really represents. You also do not appear to agree with me on the sophistication we can conclude from the height ascended up the technology tiers. Thus, you underrate the sophistication of the economy that’s implied by the discovery of the sixth-tier Retroviral Engineering technology.
I maintain that after the early days on Planet, brute, unskilled, 19th-Century-style labor is never the limiting factor on economic growth. Especially unskilled labor that takes years to grow and fairly close supervision in operation. But the game mechanics and the lore demonstrate that skilled labor is still a limiting input. Which is why I conclude what I do about the true nature of the Genejack.
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I see Industrial Automation as very much what we currently have in car factories here on Earth; large machines that are very, very good at one specific sequence of actions, and need to be carefully reprogrammed by skilled programmers to complete any other sequence of actions. And it’s those skilled programmers, I think, which are the limiting resource that Yang is having trouble finding, that makes the Genejack an attractive alternative.
I admit that I’m deliberately interpreting facts in order to support the conclusion of the mentally limited Genejack, but I think that’s strongly implied by Yang’s line about the atrophied cerebral cortex; the Genejack is simply incapable of thought above a certain sophistication at all. He is, very much, a mindless cog in the machine, with a certain emphasis on ‘mindless’.
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I think an interesting point is that the Genejack factory is one of the few really clearly dystopic facilities that the player is really really tempted to build. The +50% modifier is huge, and as a multiplier is in no way obsoleted by later technology (at least until you switch to an energy based build). The tech pre-requisites are also on the critical path to a lot of good stuff. It seems inevitable that unless the player makes the deliberate moral decision, you’d end up building lots of these – and thus you end up adopting Yang’s system of values.
You talk elsewhere about Yang’s eventual disappearance from the endgame, suggesting some kind of devastating attack. But I’d kinda suggest an alternative: Yang retired.
His quotes from “Looking God in the Eye” betrays a basic confidence in the inevitable progress of humanity. “If our society seems more nihilistic than that of previous eras, perhaps this is simply a sign of our maturity as a sentient species.” It is also addressed at a general, non-Hive audience “Why do you insist that the human genetic code is “sacred” or “taboo”?”
Contrast this with his statements addressed at a Hive audience, which comes earlier: “It is every citizen’s final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people.” “What do I care for your suffering?” These are much more practical, much more useful.
So what I’d posit is that Yang took a look at a the progress of social technology in the midgame and thought, “darn, I’ve won.” Every faction, including Lal are embracing his vision. Genejacks are used across the planet. Yang was always one of the oldest of the faction leaders, and his philosophy is based around not the pursuit of personal power, but the subservience of the individual to the needs of the human race. So, with humanity adopting his ideals wholesale, what is the purpose of the Hive? In Yang’s view, there is none – the Hive was an useful experiment to prove what is possible, but not necessary. He can thus retire to scholarly pursuits and aescetic virtues (I’d view Looking God In the Eye as a rebuttal to We Must Dissent) and trust in the inevitability of his victory thanks to God’s ‘loaded dice’. In terms of ingame mechanics, the Hive probably surrendered.
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You’re correct that the mid-game tech tree leads to societal changes that Yang would resonate with more than most faction leaders. But I think that you’re overstating the case quite a bit here. It matters to Yang why and how people do things, because that’s a marker of enlightenment. Just because Lal’s using Genejacks and MMI doesn’t mean that his guys aren’t still constantly preaching civilization-threatening chaos.
And if you fast-forward to Transcendence, a non-Yang ending probably means that what Yang identifies as the race will be lost. The rest of the faction leaders fundamentally care about abstractions. Run down the list mentally for a moment: Deirdre’s non-competitive utopia; Morgan’s energy-soaked paradise; Lal’s free society; Santiago’s triumph; Miriam’s heaven; Zakharov’s perfect knowledge – none of their visions really require physical people. Robots, AIs, transcended consciousnesses, aliens … any of them would do as the substrate. What matters to them is the pattern.
But Yang’s concerns are focused on a particular concrete instantiation of humanity. He’s clearly willing to be flexible on what it means to be human, but I strongly suspect that uniting with a purely alien intelligence would be a very fraught prospect for him. It would be very easy for this to be done in a way that leads to what he sees as the final death of the relevant collective in a way that even military defeat to a group of rival humans wouldn’t be.
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Interesting. I always thought that the final transcendence victory resonated very clearly with Yang’s stated goals at the beginning. (And that’s another beauty of the game: people like to see Yang as the designated bad guy, but still work towards a transcendence victory.)
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I feel solaced by the fact that you can grow that “Genejack” Drone into Citizen and Talent too, with sufficient “Psych spending”. The allegation that they are dumb muscled,mindless zombie or flesh robot is too hard too believe especially with the previous tech being industrial automaton, and living human body is more costly than machine or robot for maintenance, the flesh body isn’t also that durable for efficient industrial process.
So i think more likely, the “Gene jack” is built with more about management concern, that modern day technician or researcher or manager whose agenda you can’t be sure, is he/she a slacker, theft, factionist, vandal, or generally a selfish and petty person that the modern day Human Resource department generally have to deal with. Now with Genejack, the manager can be feel assured in assigning people into working the industrial process, without uncertainty and liability that is subversive toward the process, naturally the efficiency goes up.
When it says about brain atrophy, it doesn’t say how much, to what extend does it atrophies, it certainly can’t be completely atrophied, otherwise the creature won’t survive at all, let alone being useful for anything, if the designer had bothered to design, the creation should achieve maximum efficiency compared to the naturally occurring counterpart. I think it is a mild case of induced, controlled autism where the Genejack is engineered to be excelled at his designated field and undistracted by possible agenda like politic or just general human vices like laziness or selfishness, not unlike a modern day education parents sacrificing their prodigious offspring’s social life for the education. Perhaps not every part of human body and gene is actually productive, beneficial or ideal, and truncating them like cancer tumors, warts, is already been familiarized in modern day society.
All in all, i’m being apologetic for the Genejack factory, but with valid facts like available room for modification such as cyborg augmentation tech, Clinical immortality tech, humane UN Peakeeer, pious Miriam’s Lord Believer and green Gaian still able to adop Genejack factory, the ability to spend Psych to turn them into Talents, and the Genejack factory tech lead to “Homo superior” tech indicates that Genejack is actually not a step away, but toward becoming “Homo superior”, consider the Genejack to be the proto “Homo superior”, with further modification and nresource spending to become full fledged “Homo superior”.
I feel solaced, after contemplating this Genejack Factory elaboration… because I feel reluctant to forfeit the Genejack factory to lose the race to The Secret Projects or Transcendence.
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Let me summarize this:
– Genejacks are proto Homo Superior Talents (the evolved humans in the future) that are much more productive than normal Talents, you just need to give them due respect, just 4 Psych is enough for them though.
– Genejacks hold managerial or key working position, not dumb muscle general labor, their presence causes base-wide force multiplier impact in production and possible security vulnerability from their working perk and privileges yet their drone number never scale proportionally with base’s population like Prokhor Zakharov’s drone, always an elite minority, thus they are not mean for dumb muscle general labor work.
– Dumb muscle general labor is neither productive or efficient, unless it’s a medieval economy without machine, robot, telecommunication, high technology, advance economic theory and their optimized configuration, probably won’t even hold their own share compared to the original crew from the ship Unity who are gifted talents by our modern standard already, let alone making the entire base 50% more productive.
– If Genejack factory is so immoral, unethical, why not even a faction with their strong ideology barred from adopting it like their Social Engineering, or at least with faction specific altered effects.
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In my opinion Genejacks are not people, they are human shaped robots, made of flesh and bone, tissue and nerves. They are working ants of human Hive. If those were android miners or gynoid prostitutes no one would blink an eye, but once you use human like flesh there is a controversy, because its a Taboo of the sorts. Yet the Yang is the one that meticously destroys such Taboos by deconstructing them and presenting things considered complex as the sum of simple to his society. Real world Communists always aspired for a reduction in workhours to allow every single person to have more free time for self education and self growth, to eventually be able to perform more various jobs, and combine their skills, expertises, and various knowledge for technological breakthoughs – to boost work efficiency ever further – thus freeing even more time for self education. Apparently Marx even defines a “free time” as a time spent on improvement of oneself, rather than a time spent on entertainment or the like. So in SMAC terms everyone at Hive society gets to be a Talent eventually. But, as the saying goes, if every single person in an army is a Napoleon then who is going to dig up toilet-pits whenever army has to camp. And what if something goes totally wrong – say a nuclear war happens or even a Planet wide cataclysm. Autonomous factories, re-industrializied for autonomous machine labour might be absolutely useless to survivors, unlike Genejack factories. Moreover not spending time and resources to said re-industrialization is pretty nice.
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I would recommend Frank Herbert’s novel “Hellstrom’s Hive”. Many Yang quotes are found there. In the book the Hive society is a conscious human choice to emulate insects, the ultimate long term survivors. Selective breeding has led to many weird humans. The scientists have giant heads and only focus on research. Breeders are literal torsos and mouths. It seems monstrous to us but to the members of the Hive human individualism feels monstrous.
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I got the impression that Genejacks were created to not only perform repetitive, mind-numbing menial labor, but to enjoy doing it and desire nothing else.
It kind of reminds me of Brave New World. Genejacks would likely be members of the Epsilon caste. However, I doubt that Yang would approve of giving his people drugs to make people happy.
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I took Genejacks to be like Replicants in Blade Runner. Genetically modified humans suitable for delicate/advanced tasks in dangerous Planet environments (read: not just mindless assembly line jobs) who simply are not aware that they ARE a being. They do their thing 24/7 without wasting time on personal goals or social interaction, and will never stray from the party line. I don’t see them as particularly smart/creative/curious since the quote specifically mention muscles and labor, I imagine them as humanoid Citadel Keepers from the Mass Effect series, and their presence freaks people out, hence the Drones.
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Tyranny isn’t committed against a person, it’s committed against a people. One Genejack might be an experiment, or a curiosity, but a million are a race — a race created from, and therefore essentially *deprived* of, the innate human values that come from being human. The Genejack Factory is the scientific racism of the Earth’s past realized by the scientific advances of the Planet’s future. A people that are biologically “meant” to be good at working for the betterment of their masters and otherwise not worth considering as human. That they do not suffer is good for them but it ultimately doesn’t matter, because the fact that they *are* makes *humanity* suffer.
Suffice to say, I’m with Sister Miriam on this one.
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This argument raises an interesting point.
Yang is a collectivist, that’s clear. But what exactly does “collectivism” mean to him? The Human Hive is, by almost any standard, a dystopian nightmare. Supposedly, the suffering of its citizens is supposed to be for the greater good. But what greater good? What is all the authoritarianism and the asceticism and the implied mandatory suicide policy ultimately in service of? Even the Hive’s version of the Recreation Center, the thing that’s supposed to make the Hive citizen’s life worth living, is a cafeteria serving what is presumably flavorless slop. Nobody seems to be gaining anything out of it. And Yang doesn’t seem to be living it up at everyone else’s expense. So who or what is benefiting from all this sacrifice?
The answer is the Hive itself. Yang’s collectivism isn’t simply “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. It’s that groups are what actually matter, morally, and the individuals who make up that group are no more important than the cells of the human body. The state is a real moral entity whose well-being matters. The citizen is not. Ironically, this is probably the attitude a lot of players have towards the game. Yang is the guy who wouldn’t even bother to consider the ethical implications of the Genejack Factory’s flavor text, he’d just notice that it gives you a huge bonus, put one in every city, and never look back.
So it,’s interesting that, from a purely individualist perspective, Yang is completely right about the Genejacks. Genejacks unnerve us emotionally because of a failure of empathy. We see them not as what they really are, but as baseline humans who have had their agency surgically removed. We consider the possibility of being transformed into Genejacks ourselves, and are understandably horrified by it. But the Genejacks were never baseline humans. They were made this way, are fine with it, and have always been fine with it. From an individualist perspective, the creation of the Genejacks is a victimless crime. Our initial emotional response is simply wrong, and Yang is right.
But from a collectivist perspective, like the one you’re advancing, it’s possible to make a coherent moral argument against Genejacks. The collectivist argument is that the Genejacks are part of a project on Yang’s part to replace humanity with something inhuman. That if you were to gradually replace all of humanity with Genejacks, even if you did so by simply allowing humanity to die out naturally, with no harm done to any individual human at all, something of value would still be lost. That the thing of value being lost is individuality doesn’t make this perspective any less collectivist. It’s the individuality of the collective that’s being lost, not the individuality of individuals.
So really, Yang has us coming and going here. No matter what ethical position you take on the Genejacks, you have to admit that he’s right about SOMETHING.
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I don’t think suffering is a necessary component of the Human Hive. Think about it – you can catch more flies with honey. I was considering the situation of someone working in the feeding bays, before it’s automated. And let’s say they get a streak of independence and start making the food slightly more flavorful by adding more sugar than is strictly necessary – and they get found out. It doesn’t quite matter how – maybe their supervisor noticed that the sugar reserves are being depleted more quickly, or perhaps one of the workers who goes to the feed bay has reported the operator. Are they going to be taken to the back and shot or reprogrammed via the Virtual World? The first option is wasteful and the second is expensive. Instead, you have the psych officer equivalent sit this person down and explain to the hapless operator that they screwed up. The psych officer explains the goals of the HH and how conformity is necessary for the shifting of the sense of self to the sense of community. And since human beings do have a tendency to conform when they are older, there is a good chance that this person will get reinvigorated with Yang’s ideology and not fuck up again.
Of course, if they persist, then it’s off to be reprogrammed or exterminated, I imagine.
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I am not sure if I can agree with that for a single reason, suppose that the fact a set of aliens, by the fact that they are, makes humanity suffer because of an emotional reaction. That would be nothing but a ‘we must destroy those aliens because they offend our senses of decency’, which can’t be a valid reason ever.
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I think the terms “gift to industry” “designed for labor” and “muscles and nerves” strongly imply that GeneJacks perform physical labour. If your interpretation that all physical labor has been outmoded is correct it’s possible that Yang wishes to continue using human labor for some philosophical reason similar to how humans in Dune have been mutated through spice and eugenics to do tasks that a robot would normally do in most Sci-fi settings. I also suspect that Yang is wrong that they feel no pain. He could either be lying outright as the quote seems to imply he is pitching this idea to someone or he has deluded himself with his own ideology. I think the increased drones strongly implies that the new GeneJacks are not happy slaves.
I also disagree that Industrial Automation means that human physical labour no longer exists. In the game you need population (human laborer’s) to work the tiles around your bases. The quote for Industrial Automation discusses using remote working robots to mine boreholes as that climate is inhospitable for humans, the game rewards this by giving you exactly that. Supply crawlers are remote working robots that allow you to work a tile without needing to assign a worker on your base management screen.
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It should be noted that drones are flavoured as *undereducated* citizens, not just unhappy ones. And while certainly drones cause Drone Riots, it should be noted that there are other plausible mechanisms for the effects of Drone Riots than simply “everyone is angry and there’s a general strike”; it could also be an Atlas-Shrugged sort of problem where there are not enough people who know how everything works to maintain the literal machinery of production.
Genejacks, of course, have an atrophied cerebral cortex; this means they are drones via undereducation regardless of their state of satisfaction with their duties.
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I’m surprised no one has connected the genejack pitch to other ‘artificial slave races’ in media – the pitch and use case for genejacks is very much like Blade Runner’s replicants, right up to requiring additional ‘police’ to quell their rebellions. They also prompt the same questions about how industrial organization alienates people from their humanity, so you once again get an entire sci-fi novela in a ten-second quote and gameplay affect.
I also think the prospect that Yang is wrong is really interesting – there’s a lot of ambiguity as to where the drones produced by this facility come from.
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They are not very far away from what many humans have been and are in our world. “Building” humans with a set of skills and way of thinking that follows what a nation wants is something common.
Giving a soldier love for killing the enemy or hate to do it is not as far away from being a “Machine”.
All the war crimes commited by soldiers, some following order and some without knowing what they were doing or what they were doing or not thinking it was bad.
I mean, the Militars that killed many innocent people in Argentina, the USA soldiers that drooped tons and tons of bombs and napal in Vietnam, the Nazis in Europe and more, many more.
how many of them really sat to think before acting and rejected the idea? probably not many because it happened again and again and again.
Yang just did the same but focusing the people on working instead of killing and jumping a few steps, no need of media to tell that the other is the enemy, no need to religion to justify the acts, no need of economy rewards and more…
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