This whole entire concept is creepy! We should NEVER make a robot not dependent on direct human intervention at periodic intervals to refuel. That way, if something goes horribly wrong, it can only go horribly wrong until the robot runs out of gas/electricity.
The crime of Omelas is not that all violence, war, and other torture have been abolished for the torture of one person (after all, in any sufficiently large society, many more people would suffer the same level of torture at the hands of sociopaths), but in that they do not seek to change it (they are not progressing technologically.)
What kind of absurd technological system is powered by a single unit of human misery? Surely the universe itself is not so criminal as to require it -- that some other system with a similar result of the banishment of all other misery must exist without that single point of misery. Their crime is not seeking that next system, whose results are the same, but achieves them without pain.
I measure the possible biological peak happiness of any individual as 1, the desire for suicide as 0, and anything worse than that as negative. The value of a person is only based on their future -- that is, if God came down from heaven and made Osama bin Laden (for example) into good guy, we wouldn't kill him, despite his past crimes (after all, that what would that accomplish? We might conceivably fake his death though.) Any person is a means, but every person living is also an ends in themselves every moment of their life.
Also, remember that your situation is presented out of context. In other words, you and I are the only two people in the world, and that the consequences are permanent (ie you are permanently more happy, I am permanently a little less happy.) I suspect you're thinking of this in relation to property.
If we put it in a real-world context and place it in the situation of theft, then there are a lot of others factors that come into play, such as
- Respect for property, generally (if such thefts become common, it might result in a lot of waste and psychologically make people stop caring about production.)
- Sense of personal security (can gradually add up)
- Time (and here's the big factor: if it makes you really happy for five minutes and me a little unhappy for several weeks, then the totals change and there is a net loss of happiness in the system; if the timespans are reversed, I wonder how it could be such a big deal)
- Other people (a theft might cause other people to be unhappy besides just the victim.)
Since most human actors in a system have limited information, they'd better have a pretty damn good reason before committing negative actions (provoking fights, theft, murder, etc).
I measure the possible biological peak happiness of any individual as 1, the desire for suicide as 0, and anything worse than that as negative. The value of a person is only based on their future -- that is, if God came down from heaven and made Osama bin Laden (for example) into good guy, we wouldn't kill him, despite his past crimes (after all, that what would that accomplish? We might conceivably fake his death though.) Any person is a means, but every person living is also an ends in themselves every moment of their life.
Aside from the fact that radical eugenics would piss a lot of people off (myself included)(and thus make them less happy, significantly) it also has very very substantial risks, since the outcomes are so incredibly unknown. You could accidentally create a crop of serial killers or mentally retarded babies. A much more likely scenario might be similar to the movie Gattaca, in which the best possible combination is selected from normal people (anybody who would normally breed under current law, basically) although it's more likely that it would be used to screen for things like Down Syndrome and select for a child who won't suffer through life from that. This doesn't mean that people with Down's Syndrome have no value, but that if you had to choose between DS and normalcy, and you could only pick one, you'd pick normalcy. (On another thread I commented that since embryos don't even have brains yet, they don't count until they do. We're talking about creating a person, not a person that's already alive.)
However, technological advancements are the much more likely source of human 'evolution' anyway, since they're not only much more predictable, but can be applied to just about everyone. (Think Ghost in the Shell type prosthetic-bodies.) Mechanization also has a much much higher final potential then biological evolution. Eugenics is, and will pretty much always be, rolling the dice anyway. Then there's the matter of how you'd managed to institute eugenics in the first place, as overcoming the cultural inhibitions against it would probably require some sort of terrible disaster, war or propaganda campaign that would outweigh any of the conceivable (and truly dubious) benefits.
And why can't it? If it increases the net happiness in the system, what exactly is so terrible about it?
You're stuck in a rights-based mindset, but rights don't inherently exist either through god or philosophy -- nature hardly respects the "right to life."
What kind of insane version of Utilitarianism are you thinking of?
And killed? Any individual who is not suicidal has a life worth living, unless for some reason he's unchangeable and dangerous (i.e. serial killer on the loose.)
Rats and trees are gods? LIKE HELL I believe that. Clearly, you know nothing about me or whoever it is you think I represent. You're being quite ignorant here.
Rats and trees aren't sentient, so their only moral value is in their value to sentient beings (ie just humans at this point, possibly machines or bio-engineereed species much later on.) Embryos don't even have brains, even if they share human genetics, therefore they're completely out of the runnings for sentience (and rights) at that point of development, so by all means we should pursue stem cell research. That is my point, which you seem to have missed rather completely.
Aren't those "created" stem cells still the same age as the individual that yielded them?
Aside from that, perhaps we should be granting rights to sentience rather than by genetics? Why? Because we don't grant rights to amoebas, we slaughter large numbers of living animals, etc, etc. And what then of the future, when other things, be they machine or bio-engineered, might become sentient -- are they to be denied because they don't have enough x% genome in common with the humans?
Your view isn't difficult to understand, but it's incorrect and based on emotions rather than reason.
There is a moral system which can reliably answer any ethical question with enough data in a logical and dare I say "scientific" manner. Most slashdotters would probably object to it, since like Economics it's not necessarily intuitive, and does not embrace "rights" as an absolute phenomenon.
It's called Utilitarianism.
I also use Adderall XR and I'm not addicted at all. While I appreciate the effects it has on my productivity, it raises my heart-rate and metabolism uncomfortably, and quite frankly the idea of putting drugs in my head scares the frak out of me. I've only got one brain.
The idea was to protect the shareholders from the company executives just giving assets away, or making entirely unsound business decisions. For example, you invest in my company and I run it completely into the ground. This should garuntee some recourse.
I'm sure it's possible to create a similar ruling that protects both shareholders and the general public.
It doesn't matter if you have a holographic projector inside a teacup operating as your computer if it's just plain inconvenient to use compared to just about every other futuristic interface out there. It would be substantially wiser to create an interface that is controlled via thought, or some other intuitive action, which would allow us to easily select and process our data. The grand-parent is right: how do we select the data to transfer? How do we manipulate it? Why would you even use a cup as a metaphor in the first place?
This isn't visionary, it's someone playing with Photoshop. I hope you're being sarcastic.
IIRC, corporations are required to maximize shareholder revenue by a legal precedent. Obviously that could include morally reprehensible actions, but only if they are legal.
Of course, if the appropriate group if people own all the shares of a corporation, they will not require this and the corporation would not be vulnerable to such a case ("You're wasting my money!") in court. Likewise, the board of directors could argue that evil actions will cause horrible PR should they ever get out, and thus be more damaging to the company, but I don't think lawsuits over this usually happen as long as the company's not having other serious issues.
Simple, if the simulation tells people that reality is a hallucination created by their subconscious mind and its "reality" appears to be just as real, people won't know which is which. The only way they could objectively "prove" which one is real is to die.
On a more serious note; the ITER project building the hot fusion reactor in Cadrache, France, expects to see the beginning of commercial fusion power in the year 2040, if everything goes according to plan. That's a date that sounds real without being depressing.
You are correct. I was making a quick post.
Later in the story's discussion I comment on "All they need to focus on is providing the product that their customers demand, or would demand if they knew better and found out later how awesome it is." (As opposed, of course, to finding out later they didn't want.)
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean too optimistic -- autonomous biomass-eating robots are a BAD PLAN.
This whole entire concept is creepy! We should NEVER make a robot not dependent on direct human intervention at periodic intervals to refuel. That way, if something goes horribly wrong, it can only go horribly wrong until the robot runs out of gas/electricity.
Have you considered Transwikism?
I embraced Utilitarianism to avoid that buggersome moral relativity and nihilism that are so easy to come across.
What kind of absurd technological system is powered by a single unit of human misery? Surely the universe itself is not so criminal as to require it -- that some other system with a similar result of the banishment of all other misery must exist without that single point of misery. Their crime is not seeking that next system, whose results are the same, but achieves them without pain.
Also, remember that your situation is presented out of context. In other words, you and I are the only two people in the world, and that the consequences are permanent (ie you are permanently more happy, I am permanently a little less happy.) I suspect you're thinking of this in relation to property.
If we put it in a real-world context and place it in the situation of theft, then there are a lot of others factors that come into play, such as
- Respect for property, generally (if such thefts become common, it might result in a lot of waste and psychologically make people stop caring about production.)
- Sense of personal security (can gradually add up)
- Time (and here's the big factor: if it makes you really happy for five minutes and me a little unhappy for several weeks, then the totals change and there is a net loss of happiness in the system; if the timespans are reversed, I wonder how it could be such a big deal)
- Other people (a theft might cause other people to be unhappy besides just the victim.)
Since most human actors in a system have limited information, they'd better have a pretty damn good reason before committing negative actions (provoking fights, theft, murder, etc).
I measure the possible biological peak happiness of any individual as 1, the desire for suicide as 0, and anything worse than that as negative. The value of a person is only based on their future -- that is, if God came down from heaven and made Osama bin Laden (for example) into good guy, we wouldn't kill him, despite his past crimes (after all, that what would that accomplish? We might conceivably fake his death though.) Any person is a means, but every person living is also an ends in themselves every moment of their life.
Aside from the fact that radical eugenics would piss a lot of people off (myself included)(and thus make them less happy, significantly) it also has very very substantial risks, since the outcomes are so incredibly unknown. You could accidentally create a crop of serial killers or mentally retarded babies. A much more likely scenario might be similar to the movie Gattaca, in which the best possible combination is selected from normal people (anybody who would normally breed under current law, basically) although it's more likely that it would be used to screen for things like Down Syndrome and select for a child who won't suffer through life from that. This doesn't mean that people with Down's Syndrome have no value, but that if you had to choose between DS and normalcy, and you could only pick one, you'd pick normalcy. (On another thread I commented that since embryos don't even have brains yet, they don't count until they do. We're talking about creating a person, not a person that's already alive.)
However, technological advancements are the much more likely source of human 'evolution' anyway, since they're not only much more predictable, but can be applied to just about everyone. (Think Ghost in the Shell type prosthetic-bodies.) Mechanization also has a much much higher final potential then biological evolution. Eugenics is, and will pretty much always be, rolling the dice anyway. Then there's the matter of how you'd managed to institute eugenics in the first place, as overcoming the cultural inhibitions against it would probably require some sort of terrible disaster, war or propaganda campaign that would outweigh any of the conceivable (and truly dubious) benefits.
You're stuck in a rights-based mindset, but rights don't inherently exist either through god or philosophy -- nature hardly respects the "right to life."
And killed? Any individual who is not suicidal has a life worth living, unless for some reason he's unchangeable and dangerous (i.e. serial killer on the loose.)
Just FYI, I was comparing embryos to amoebas, not saying that amoebas should get rights.
Rats and trees aren't sentient, so their only moral value is in their value to sentient beings (ie just humans at this point, possibly machines or bio-engineereed species much later on.) Embryos don't even have brains, even if they share human genetics, therefore they're completely out of the runnings for sentience (and rights) at that point of development, so by all means we should pursue stem cell research. That is my point, which you seem to have missed rather completely.
*shrug*
And what would you say is the biggest problem?
Aside from that, perhaps we should be granting rights to sentience rather than by genetics? Why? Because we don't grant rights to amoebas, we slaughter large numbers of living animals, etc, etc. And what then of the future, when other things, be they machine or bio-engineered, might become sentient -- are they to be denied because they don't have enough x% genome in common with the humans?
Your view isn't difficult to understand, but it's incorrect and based on emotions rather than reason.
There is a moral system which can reliably answer any ethical question with enough data in a logical and dare I say "scientific" manner. Most slashdotters would probably object to it, since like Economics it's not necessarily intuitive, and does not embrace "rights" as an absolute phenomenon. It's called Utilitarianism.
I also use Adderall XR and I'm not addicted at all. While I appreciate the effects it has on my productivity, it raises my heart-rate and metabolism uncomfortably, and quite frankly the idea of putting drugs in my head scares the frak out of me. I've only got one brain.
Replying to kill moderation. Hit the wrong one.
...and all of it will happen again. Maybe.
It could also be put to a vote: 10% pay cut or 10% layoff.
The idea was to protect the shareholders from the company executives just giving assets away, or making entirely unsound business decisions. For example, you invest in my company and I run it completely into the ground. This should garuntee some recourse.
I'm sure it's possible to create a similar ruling that protects both shareholders and the general public.
It doesn't matter if you have a holographic projector inside a teacup operating as your computer if it's just plain inconvenient to use compared to just about every other futuristic interface out there. It would be substantially wiser to create an interface that is controlled via thought, or some other intuitive action, which would allow us to easily select and process our data. The grand-parent is right: how do we select the data to transfer? How do we manipulate it? Why would you even use a cup as a metaphor in the first place?
This isn't visionary, it's someone playing with Photoshop. I hope you're being sarcastic.
IIRC, corporations are required to maximize shareholder revenue by a legal precedent. Obviously that could include morally reprehensible actions, but only if they are legal.
Of course, if the appropriate group if people own all the shares of a corporation, they will not require this and the corporation would not be vulnerable to such a case ("You're wasting my money!") in court. Likewise, the board of directors could argue that evil actions will cause horrible PR should they ever get out, and thus be more damaging to the company, but I don't think lawsuits over this usually happen as long as the company's not having other serious issues.
Simple, if the simulation tells people that reality is a hallucination created by their subconscious mind and its "reality" appears to be just as real, people won't know which is which. The only way they could objectively "prove" which one is real is to die.
On a more serious note; the ITER project building the hot fusion reactor in Cadrache, France, expects to see the beginning of commercial fusion power in the year 2040, if everything goes according to plan. That's a date that sounds real without being depressing.
You are correct. I was making a quick post.
Later in the story's discussion I comment on "All they need to focus on is providing the product that their customers demand, or would demand if they knew better and found out later how awesome it is." (As opposed, of course, to finding out later they didn't want.)