The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
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The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
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Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#2While I fix my cache:
TLDR: Don’t give a toddler a flamethrower.
In more detail: The letter makes an argument for allocating more funds towards solving less immediate causes of human suffering. In particular, one emerging problem is that we as a species may face a morality apocalypse: Our species’ level of moral responsibility may become laughably insufficient to manage increasingly powerful technologies. We may become like a toddler with a flamethrower, resulting in suffering on a massive scale.
More detail yet: Technology allows us to impact the world more drastically, and can as easily be used for good as it can for evil. Technology is growing at an accelerating rate, while moral progress is plodding. Already our technological power outstrips our ability to use it responsibly (e.g. are we morally developed enough as a species to be entrusted with nuclear weapons?). A mistake would be to view morality as a fixed part of the human condition — there may be technological ways to enhance empathy or decrease our species’ tendency towards greed, revenge, and moral flexibility under duress. Without intervention to remedy our morality (perhaps through technological means), humanity may be at significant risk for horrific outcomes as our technical abilities more drastically eclipse our moral ones.
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#3OK, I understand the problem being proposed, but what is the solution here? what solution is being suggested by the author? I understand that we are gaining more and more power without as good of understudying and self control to use it, but what can the Gates do to help?
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#4Something about the idea of an "open letter" always bothers me. I don't know who Joel is, or why I should trust that this issue is important. The coming of a "morality apocalypse" is pure speculation, with no data or even anecdotal examples to back it up, and seems straight out of 60s Cold War MAD paranoia with little to add since then.
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#5I think this is a very interesting question, but there's a pretty strong tendency in the human psyche to assume that the answer is more or less to replicate $MY_CLAIMED_MORALITY out to the rest of humanity, which this essay does nothing to avoid. ($MY_CLAIMED_MORALITY stands in contrast to $MY_ACTION_MORALITY, i.e., how one behaves, which this essay does discuss there being a difference in, to its credit.) Fiddling with morality may have large potential benefits, but it can also cause catastrophe, yes, even worse than what we have now.
"Increasing empathy" sounds great, right? But it can cause excessively local decision making brought on by a particular case of acute pain, while missing the greater good that may be done elsewhere. It may allow a morality-parasite leader to come to power to manipulate everybody via their increased empathy to do something awful. (Indeed, I'm sure many people here have found that even in current society, there's certain areas that you must deliberately reduce your empathy in; you simply can not afford to be manipulated by every picture of a starving child you come across, or you'll become broke... and with no guarantee that your donations are doing anything but lining a pocket somewhere, if you're too busy giving to do background checks on who you're giving to....) And of course it's not a knob; what "increases empathy" in the lab may in the field "increase empathy for my tribe", as we are so wired for that.
Tribalism is bad, right? Perhaps so, but "let's just turn down the tribalism" does not clearly work. We are tribal for a reason. Unless you can flip the switch all at once, you run the risk of the selfless a-tribals getting parasitized by the still-tribal, meaning it may not be stable. It may not be stable even if you could flip the switch all at once; you still have to worry about morality parasites.
To say nothing of what happens once you have the power to twiddle with human morality, and then those of altered morality start twiddling the knobs themselves, which would be inevitable.
Yes, it is likely that some morality changes will have to occur for human survival... no, it probably is not the case that you can predict them trivially now, no, it probably isn't as simple as "Why can't we all just love each other?", and I very strongly suspect that if we could get a preview of that new morality, we'd all probably find it repulsive in some way... it's simply inconceivable that the answer is as easy as taking somebody's modern morality (which does not come from any magically better morality source, it's as broken as everybody else's) and stamping it out on everyone else.
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#6The gap between technological capability and the ability to deal with the consequences illustrates a problem with our collective intelligence and the ability or inability to contain the more volatile members of our species when they make use of technology for their own selfish gain.
Morality (the desire to render many shades of grey into black or white decisions) is not going to save you. The only solution that mortality has to offer at this point is to limit technology or attempt to put a halt to further progress until humanity has had a chance to catch up. To a certain extent this is being tried already in various conservative movements around the globe - from opposing stem-cell research to limiting the effectiveness of vaccination programmes.
Instead I'd put my money on creating more effective institutions and better levels of organization in order to limit any adverse effects until human intelligence is able to progress at a similar pace.
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#7Something about the idea of an "open letter" always bothers me. I don't know who Joel is, or why I should trust that this issue is important. The coming of a "morality apocalypse" is pure speculation, with no data or even anecdotal examples to back it up, and seems straight out of 60s Cold War MAD paranoia with little to add since then.
Open letters are only ever used correctly by those with enough power/influence to address their audience as a public entity.
Therefore, the main reason why those lacking power, in this case Joel, write 'open letters' is in the hope of gaining enough attention from others peeking at a letter addressed to a private individual.
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#8Yes, the global populace is immensely immoral.
What is your solution?
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#9Have you considered using Ethics rather than Morality ?
I hear the word morality and immediately assume the speaker/writer is arguing from a religious point of view.
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#10The author says that scientific and technological progress in certain fields is outpacing human morality, but he or she advocates advancing science and technology toward better understanding human morality. Presumably, this would entail understanding and modifying the chemistry of our bodies to eliminate the "baser animalistic drives" caused by evolution. However, if our species is so immature, how do we know that our modifications are moral? How do we make sure the people wielding this awesome power aren't immoral themselves?