Paradoxically, The power to make humans more moral could also be used to make them less. And since, in the beginning, we wouldn't be moral, these technologies would actually have the opposite effect!
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
#72I 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.
There were too many to pick out a single one - ubiquotious electrification, running water, modern logistics, modern medicine (esp. antibiotics)...
The thing with the political developments is that they were IMHO dependent on previous technological and economical developments.
Fascism was only possible in a modern nation-state. In a feudal world, the peasants didn't care much which king ruled over their land, they didn't identify much with their nation. That changed when everything grew closer together. I think new means of communication and transportation greatly helped with building a national identity (and later were used for propaganda). The rise of capitalism and the bourgeois/civil society were also neccessary factors. Why do I say this was driven by technology? Because the begin of modern capitalism is inseparable from the industrial revolution. In the end of course it's not just a causal chain, but a very complicated development.
Anyway, what I was trying to say is that when people have hopes for the future, they often think of great technological breakthroughs, continuing the progress of the 20th century. A cure for cancer, fusion energy, robots and AI, .... I think the biggest breakthroughs will be on another field: How can we make a global economy that is not so riddled by crises? How can we distribute wealth better? Can we build a society without money? How do we make better descisions as a society (E.g. the political system in the US is clearly broken right now)? How do we ensure the freedom and libery of everybody? How do we prevent wars? etc. etc.
There were a bunch of ideas in the last few centuries in this field, some better, some not - constitutional monarcy, the republic, democracy (parlamentary, or council), socialism, communism (the dozen or so ideas and sytems that called themselves such), social market economy, the stuff they're doing in china right now, and so on. In the last few decades, the consensus seemd to be that these are mostly ideologies, and ideology is dead and capitalism+western democracy has won. Now, we are seeing our system fail slowly, too, and we seem pretty helpless about it. It won't help to throw ever new technologies at it. But I think by learning from the mistakes of past societies, but also from what they got right, we should be able to gradually develop a new kind of society that ensures prosperity, freedom, fairness and peace.
I hope this was not too incoherent to understand :-)
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#73It'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.
Martha Nussbaum has an interesting paper on this very topic, if you're inclined.
https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/sites/lawreview.uchicago.edu/...
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#74While 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 beco…
Are you the author of the article?
For now, I'm assuming yes. Aside from the questions on how to define good morals, and how such morals are best passed on, the main issue I had with the article is that it seemed to be a case of 'when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail'. Have you considered that technology may, in this case, not be the best tool for the job? I'd say the arts and our common culture has more room to be a positive influence on our collective consciousness than the application of some sort of clinically derived morality-inducing technology. Humanity doesn't need to be "fixed", it needs room to grow. Look at what holds back that room to grow and you'll have a much clearer picture of what can be done.
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I simply imply that people are responsible for their actions. People were given the knowledge to make nuclear weapons by those smarter than them. The fact that others may very well have eventually given them the same is neither here nor there, and your weird obsession with requiring it be angels and aliens does nothing to alter that. If you assume many groups of aliens, each species of which might have given out nuke…
And you aren't? The point of involving angels and aliens is to make clear the absurdity of assuming some superhuman agency which handed down the knowledge from on high. Scientists are human beings, too, with all the fallibility and lack of prescience that is our common heritage, and the fact that "others may very well have eventually given them the same" is the very crux of the matter at hand. From our perspective, w…
Humans are fallible, but some humans are massively more fallible than others. Humans lack foresight, but some humans lack a lot more foresight than others. Viewing humanity as a whole, without respect to local variations in morality and other qualities, over-simplifies things.
You have a group of individuals who come across a power that the majority lack, they also happen to be a lot better educated than the average, and their choice is whether to give away the secret of that power. Perhaps they're not well equipped to make that choice, but that's neither here nor there in framing the basic question - and the answer to that question can then be used to form other questions. If they turn out to be ill-equipped to make the choice, then that's at least something that can be worked on. How do you improve the qualities you'd want of a decision maker in this regard?
That's a lot more useful, realistic line of thinking to go down than just shrugging and going 'All humans, we should expect the same knowledge and behaviour.' The behaviour you expect of a randomly chosen human should be different to behaviour you expect of a semi-randomly chosen human from a specific subset. Heck, even the arguments you can have - you can't talk about probability with most people, they're not going to understand what you mean when you say 'standard deviation' or anything like that. Most people do not do much thinking.
You don't need scientists to be super human. You just need them to be a group you can start asking questions about. Get an angle of attack on the problem through. If they turn out to be average or substandard or whatever in some particular area, then there are ways that can be addressed.
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
And you aren't? The point of involving angels and aliens is to make clear the absurdity of assuming some superhuman agency which handed down the knowledge from on high. Scientists are human beings, too, with all the fallibility and lack of prescience that is our common heritage, and the fact that "others may very well have eventually given them the same" is the very crux of the matter at hand. From our perspective, w…
Humans are fallible, but some humans are massively more fallible than others. Humans lack foresight, but some humans lack a lot more foresight than others. Viewing humanity as a whole, without respect to local variations in morality and other qualities, over-simplifies things. You have a group of individuals who come across a power that the majority lack, they also happen to be a lot better educated than the average,…
Given the way you keep ignoring my argument, I don't see this going anywhere useful, so I'm going to curtail my further participation. I'd like to say it's been a pleasure, but...
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans are fallible, but some humans are massively more fallible than others. Humans lack foresight, but some humans lack a lot more foresight than others. Viewing humanity as a whole, without respect to local variations in morality and other qualities, over-simplifies things. You have a group of individuals who come across a power that the majority lack, they also happen to be a lot better educated than the average,…
Given the way you keep ignoring my argument, I don't see this going anywhere useful, so I'm going to curtail my further participation. I'd like to say it's been a pleasure, but...
From my point of view I'm not ignoring your argument. It's a shame we can't understand one another, but thank you for your time anyway.
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#78It is not something new. All we know the free market mantra that _too big_ companies are not viable. I also remember that Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" central point was that it is the technology that dramatically reduces the probability of intelligent life (and that is why we cannot find any aliens around). Even our owners (the friends of Gates couple), remind us about of the same dangers or overpopulation in the face of resource depletion, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI0fnRbhHFo. What is new to me is the linear growth of morality. Why?
I see that people are simply becoming more ignorant on the basis that they do not need to study the nature and technology because technology already provides everything to them and, furthermore, and, furthermore, defend their ignorance saying that the technology is so far ahead of the morality that we need to harmonize our relationships better rather than learn (that is, advance) the technology. Modern people do not understand that you cannot distinguish between good and bad and decide what to do with your technology if you are illiterate.
Might be the letter author refers to the linear IQ growth. Ok, but this also concerns me because we have stifled the natural selection with our advances in medicine and improved quality standards, which allow to survive and reproduce anybody whereas only 2/10 did reproduce yet 100 years ago. Since we did not replace the natural selection with artificial one, the biological quality (aka our genome) of new generations is degrading (you believe the opposite, right?), http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/7686. I propose to solve this problem not letting the inferior comrades to die but paying for the services with the reproduction right: if you are genetically unhealthy and, thus, take more from the society than give to it, you should let to produce people to the other, those who maintain the civilization and advance the technology. This is in your interest.
The article speaks a lot about possible misuse of the technology. But the most astounding fact is that the civilized nations have the technology to organize the comfortable live efficiently, but use it to kill the nature on the daily basis and do not notice it!
But I can tell you how you is personally guilty abusing the technology every day: The technology allows you to burn all the precious resources very fast and this is considered as a good thing. The freedom culture and technology gives you cheap gasoline, car and house and I bet that you believe that you are absolutely sure that this is good to have a personal house, separate from the others and waste more because more waste is more consumption, better economy and greener world. Thereby, you hate the consumerism. However, this is the car-house based infrastructure that costs the most to you and to the nature. Once you condense the population into apartments in multifloor buildings, as it was practiced in the Eastern Block, for instance, the resource consumption (lands, for transportation, heating, lighting, and building/maintaining the infrastructure) reduce 10-100 times and we'll fit into the ecological footprint. This is how how you can we make the life of 10 billion sustainable. The 10-100 savings are achieved since the average distances are shrinked dramatically, which, per se allows huge savings but additional savings are because you can use more effective (i.e. public) systems of heating and transportation - sharing the resources as consumers, which contributes another order of magnitude. You can even compost in the New York city apartment, http://sustainability.stackexchange.com/a/2402/476. We can even use trains for inter-city travels instead of planes. Trains do not consume the energy whereas our favorite planes are the paramounts of ineficciency. This way we could reduce carbon emissions, save fuels and stop global dimming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming#Probable_causes. Yet, we wont, right? There are certainly bad people who can use terrible technology for bad and we better write Bill Gates about them. We have a right to be independent, self-reliant, live in a private house and spend a fair amount of gasoline.
I like the communist preaching telling that we should stop consumerism, greediness and other drivers of capitalist hell and turn to sympathy, concern for the others, unfamiliar and the rational social planning environment. I even think robots should do the same, cooperate rather than fight for their egoistic interests. What I do not like is that you remove the part predicting that we'll have consciousness people who will stop wasting lands in 2014 from the Isaak Asimov interview (compare http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.h... and what you have in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6995644). I see quite the opposite to what seen the futurist. Our passion to have a house is strong as usually. It is expedited by the technology and housing bubble , we build ever more cottages and urban spawls (enjoy their sights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl). So, when you speak about some adversaries that will use technology for bad, can I look at you? I always look at you because you are the that criminal.
Do you keep up with the morality to understand what I am talking about? If you do, ask the Gates couple to free the green lands from your houses and roads, moving all activity into the dense, 3D cities.
Re: The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates
#79It 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…
The most inhuman acts of ignorance and hatred have traditionally been committed by societies, not individuals. Individuals may have the ability to commandeer jet planes and fly into buildings, but only a nation can build a nuclear missile system capable of annihilating the planet. The problem isn't with individuals. The problem is with society. And on that front — societal ethics seem to be keeping pace with technolo…
Take your post.
Append: ", so far." and ", yet."
Now you understand the concern.