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The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates

blog.joellehman.com

31–40 of 79 posts

Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates

#31
post #19

Every attempt to compel humanity towards some higher degree of morality, or to accelerate this process, either through force or through law or by throwing money at the problem, fails. Our morality is increasing, but slowly. It is a developmental process. Steven Pinker's observation that violence has actually declined over the course of human history, despite anecdotal evidence to the contrary, attests to this fact. U…

I think the mistake was comparing the speed of silicon with the speed of biology.

Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates

#32
post #21
post #14

It is not a matter of morality. Suppose you have 100 billion robots, each programmed not to press a world-ending button. Some of them will press the button. It's a matter of statistics and the moral framework of the other robots doesn't even enter into the equation. That's exactly the situation we're in. Moral progress has always trailed behind our capabilities, and if I may say something heretical here, maybe it's a…

Although I am not advocating a technological slowdown (nor do I think one is even possible) -- I think a wiser people would inhibit technology "until we're ready." If the result of technological growth vastly outpacing our ability to responsibly handle its power is extinction, then it is easier to make an argument for the morality in technological caution.

To which angels do you propose we entrust the power of evaluating "until we're ready"? The matter under discussion here is a case in the field of governance, and the entire problem in that field is how fallible humans govern other fallible humans without making disaster inevitable. Were angels available to govern, the field wouldn't exist at all, because we'd never have had the need to invent it. Suggesting that someone should "inhibit technology 'until we're ready'" reduces to suggesting that all human forms of government should be replaced with angels. Sure, no argument, that would work a lot better than anything we have now! Does it matter?

Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates

#33
Before the 1960's, when God was in schools, both Blacks and Whites, didn't have to lock their doors.

Before the 1960's, there was no iron bars on windows, dead bolt locks, car, home and business alarms, and no security cameras in the home, business or city wide.

Those are the facts, especially for the atheists and agnostics.

Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates

#34
This is a very sensible and well-reasoned, if ridiculously windy[1], essay which has its basis in one completely erroneous assumption, which is that it's possible to answer, save after the fact, a question like "[A]re we morally developed enough as a species to be entrusted with nuclear weapons?"

That's a very simple question to answer, but you can only do so in hindsight. Did we exterminate ourselves with nuclear weapons? If we did, then we weren't morally developed enough to be entrusted with them; if we didn't, then we were.

And even in that, there's another bogus assumption, which is hidden behind the word "entrusted". No one entrusted the human species with nuclear weapons; there was no event in which God, or angels, or sufficiently advanced aliens, descended from on high, amidst clouds of incense or rocket exhaust, and bequeathed unto us the knowledge of what happens when you squeeze a ball of uranium very tightly. It may seem absurd to point this out, but only until you consider that "entrusted", in implying a higher power which did the entrusting, implies also a higher power which could reverse that decision; there being no such power, it is impossible to reason accurately about the morality of any technological development when such reasoning involves the implicit assumption that there is such a power.

[1] Those familiar with my comments on HN may be astonished to see me calling anything "windy", much less ridiculously so. In my defense I can only say that I reserve the use of that adjective and its adverb for cases of extreme provocation, the nature of which should be obvious to anyone attempting to wade through the text I've so described.

Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates

#36
It's unclear to me that "moral progress" is well defined, as it seems to imply that there's some universal, generally accepted notion of an ideal morality which we can aspire to. And yet I seriously doubt that we could find any agreement on what that could be.

Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates

#37
People will be surprised how blurry the constructs of society really are. Science really IS easier compared to politics. You don't need scientific advancements, but they're welcome too, and in the end they matter a lot.

Marketing technological advances while aiming to help the poorest is I think the best way to show everybody how technologies can really help us, and not enslave us. Technologies must be designed with political goals too. You could naively say the iPhone is creating more political problems than it solves, and you'd be right. What Bill Gates does is creating incentives for research in the way the NASA did. And I think it's awesome.

I guess that's what makes Bill Gates smarter in the end. You'll moan about antitrust laws and go watch JOBS, but today the people who make difference are businessmen who knows their basics of science.

If you're unhappy about politics, don't tell Bill Gates, that's not what he does. His giant financial resources won't help solving political problems.

Maybe he could pour money into making some media communications projects about science and studies just like Al Gore did, but again, I doubt Bill Gates really has the proper connections to do this.

Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates

#38

I think it is not so much a question about morality, but about our societal structures. In the past few centuries, human history has been driven by technological advances. But the major defining development of the 21 century will not be technological, but social. Society will either radically change for the better, or for the worse.

What was the defining development of the 20th century? I can think of many big ones that weren't technological in nature, for example the causes of the world wars.

Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates

#39
post #14

It is not a matter of morality. Suppose you have 100 billion robots, each programmed not to press a world-ending button. Some of them will press the button. It's a matter of statistics and the moral framework of the other robots doesn't even enter into the equation. That's exactly the situation we're in. Moral progress has always trailed behind our capabilities, and if I may say something heretical here, maybe it's a…

>It is not a matter of morality. Suppose you have 100 billion robots, each programmed not to press a world-ending button. Some of them will press the button.

Am I missing something? If they are (a) robots, (b) each "programmed not to press a world-ending button", then none will.

Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates

#40
post #14

It is not a matter of morality. Suppose you have 100 billion robots, each programmed not to press a world-ending button. Some of them will press the button. It's a matter of statistics and the moral framework of the other robots doesn't even enter into the equation. That's exactly the situation we're in. Moral progress has always trailed behind our capabilities, and if I may say something heretical here, maybe it's a…

do you know how clueless what you said is?
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