6 ms·

I don't get this attitude. If something is technologically/scientifically feasible, it will get invented, and it will get perfected and it will get used. Milita

I don't get this attitude. If something is technologically/scientifically feasible, it will get invented, and it will get perfected and it will get used. Military drones, human cloning, designer babies, you name it. Taking the high road just means someone else will do it instead.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
RIMR 7y ago
I don't get THIS attitude. None of those things are ethically justified via your "somebody's gonna go it anyway" philosophy.
- echelon 7y ago
  > Military drones, human cloning, designer babies, Only one of these is objectionable. The other two ought to be pursued so we can further advance the human race and improve the quality of everyone's lives. They're totally justified.
  - fouc 7y ago
    designer babies are objectionable?
    - onion2k 7y ago
      In the sense that it would give the wealthy an unreasonable advantage to stay wealthy forever and mean an end to social mobility, which would in turn lead to a feudal social class system, yes. The thing is though, money does that already if your society doesn't have strong inheritance taxation, so I'm not sure it's really such a problem.
  - p1esk 7y ago
    Which one? Honest question.
    - welly 7y ago
      I'm putting my bets on military drones.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    Which one is objectionable?
ssss11 7y ago
That mentality is a race to the bottom which ends in no humanity
- bsenftner 7y ago
  No. It is a race to develop both sides, the detection and the attack against that detection. The "other side" will develop similar on their side, and the competition is what advances everyone. Practically every thing technological we have is due to war/defense research.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  To me, that's the mentality of facing truth, even if it's uncomfortable. That's not a threat to humanity.
- ikeyany 7y ago
  All of the countries that did not invest heavily in their militaries no longer exist.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    Iceland is a figment of my imagination?
    - sroussey 7y ago
      And Costa Rica?
      - hobofan 7y ago
        And most individual countries in Europe?
        chronic71819 7y ago
        > Iceland is a figment of my imagination? > And Costa Rica? > And most individual countries in Europe? All of these countries, for practical purposes, do not exist. They do not have influence on the world stage. They may as well be China, considering how easy these countries will bend to Chinese money. So either you develop the surveillance tech, or you must look the other way when China develops it. If you disagree, your economy will be ruined.
kfrzcode 7y ago
This is a very slippery slope
asxd 7y ago
While I see your point, I have a hard time imagining designer babies will be socially acceptable in the west within this lifetime. I think it’s reasonable to believe the usage and research of technology is bounded by societal norms to a significant extent. When it comes to adversarial technology however—and designer babies are arguably not in that group—I can agree with that it’s imperative to understand the tech so that it can be defended against.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  I know that empirically, in terms of what society thinks, you are probably correct, but what is wrong with designer babies? Isn't it the only way we can continue the further improving and developing of the species (instead of making it worse by artifically keeping people with genetic diseases alive and reproducing), at the same time also avoiding the more horrendous parts of natural evolution and selection like genocide, race wars or idiocracy-styled trends of selecting by the dumb metric of sheer number of kids?
atoav 7y ago
Same could be argued about much worse ideas, ideas where people historically shied away and tried to control at least a bit of the context in which these ideas fell. The whole developement of nuclear weapons is a story of the when, of the how fast and of the should I and would have looked certainly different if it’s protagonists all had based their decisions on the ethical rationalisation you proposed here. Who knows, maybe even the Germans would have gotten nuclear weapons? The hard question obviously is: where do you draw the border? If you invented the paperclip and it was beeing used in the holocaust’s bureaucracy blaming you would be a bit far fetched. If you invented the gas showers of the KZs whose only purpose it was to mass-kill prisoners, not feeling ethically responsible would be totally mad. In between there you have got Werner von Braun with his V2 rocket, which isn’t exactly easy to judge. He enabled space travel, yet the bombs killed many british civilians quasi randomly and out of the blue and the number of slave workers killed during construction was even higher than the number the rocket killed. Inbetween these three examples there are infinite shades of ethical dilemma while your argument paints this as a binary question about whether something could or should exist or not — and if the answer to the could is True, who cares about the answer to the should, right? I propose something else. If you value your own intellect you should abstain from ideas that could be, but shouldn’t and rather attack things that could be and should be or maybe even things that should be, but couldn’t by the thinking of today. We engineers, scientists, thinkers and artists are giving birth to things that become reality, but it is our indivisual decision if we do: You will rarely find a writer telling you he had to write that dehumanizing dangerous text, because if he wouldn’t have done it somebody else would have. We can stray farther from this even and paint an example where a old lady collapses at a bus stop. Now you could have someone robbing her as she lays there (”If I wouldn’t have done it someone else would’ve”). Or you could have somebody going for first aid and calling the ambulance (”If I wouldn’t have done it someone else would’ve”). The statement “someone else would’ve done it” is not really a ethical reason to do anything. The question you should ask yourself is: in what kind of society do I want to live and do my actions contribute to it and if so at what cost? What if everybody acted like I did?
- dpq 7y ago
  > The question you should ask yourself is: in what kind of society do I want to live and do my actions contribute to it and if so at what cost? What if everybody acted like I did? But then of course this is the wrong question to ask. This is nothing more but a complicated version of a multi-party, repeated Prisoner's Dilemma problem. Except that you don't know your negative payoff when an opponent chooses to defect, but it may well be minus infinity (you get holocausted or nuked into paleolith). And then defection by any single party gets you the negative payoff. So if you only ask the question you suggest and ignore the rest of the options, you are doomed. I'm afraid that the world's politicians (most of them at least) are completely sane, and all this "race to the bottom" stuff going on is just the result of the game theory & life being what it is.
jonathankoren 7y ago
True, maybe someone will make these things, but that doesn’t mean one has to approve of it, nor be the one that builds it. Bad things still happen even they’re outlawed, but that doesn’t mean we just throw up our hands and proclaim that there’s nothing anyone can do about anything, and dismantle the entire legal system.
hobofan 7y ago
> Taking the high road just means someone else will do it instead. Someone will do it, but someone will also do the counter-thing to it. In this example someone might research how to prevent people from being identified through walls, and I would hope that those people are the more skilled ones.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

RIMR 7y ago

I don't get THIS attitude. None of those things are ethically justified via your "somebody's gonna go it anyway" philosophy.

echelon 7y ago
> Military drones, human cloning, designer babies, Only one of these is objectionable. The other two ought to be pursued so we can further advance the human race and improve the quality of everyone's lives. They're totally justified.
- fouc 7y ago
  designer babies are objectionable?
  - onion2k 7y ago
    In the sense that it would give the wealthy an unreasonable advantage to stay wealthy forever and mean an end to social mobility, which would in turn lead to a feudal social class system, yes. The thing is though, money does that already if your society doesn't have strong inheritance taxation, so I'm not sure it's really such a problem.
- p1esk 7y ago
  Which one? Honest question.
  - welly 7y ago
    I'm putting my bets on military drones.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Which one is objectionable?

ssss11 7y ago

That mentality is a race to the bottom which ends in no humanity

bsenftner 7y ago
No. It is a race to develop both sides, the detection and the attack against that detection. The "other side" will develop similar on their side, and the competition is what advances everyone. Practically every thing technological we have is due to war/defense research.
BurningFrog 7y ago
To me, that's the mentality of facing truth, even if it's uncomfortable. That's not a threat to humanity.
ikeyany 7y ago
All of the countries that did not invest heavily in their militaries no longer exist.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  Iceland is a figment of my imagination?
  - sroussey 7y ago
    And Costa Rica?
    - hobofan 7y ago
      And most individual countries in Europe?
      - chronic71819 7y ago
        > Iceland is a figment of my imagination? > And Costa Rica? > And most individual countries in Europe? All of these countries, for practical purposes, do not exist. They do not have influence on the world stage. They may as well be China, considering how easy these countries will bend to Chinese money. So either you develop the surveillance tech, or you must look the other way when China develops it. If you disagree, your economy will be ruined.

kfrzcode 7y ago

This is a very slippery slope

asxd 7y ago

While I see your point, I have a hard time imagining designer babies will be socially acceptable in the west within this lifetime. I think it’s reasonable to believe the usage and research of technology is bounded by societal norms to a significant extent. When it comes to adversarial technology however—and designer babies are arguably not in that group—I can agree with that it’s imperative to understand the tech so that it can be defended against.

Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
I know that empirically, in terms of what society thinks, you are probably correct, but what is wrong with designer babies? Isn't it the only way we can continue the further improving and developing of the species (instead of making it worse by artifically keeping people with genetic diseases alive and reproducing), at the same time also avoiding the more horrendous parts of natural evolution and selection like genocide, race wars or idiocracy-styled trends of selecting by the dumb metric of sheer number of kids?

atoav 7y ago

Same could be argued about much worse ideas, ideas where people historically shied away and tried to control at least a bit of the context in which these ideas fell. The whole developement of nuclear weapons is a story of the when, of the how fast and of the should I and would have looked certainly different if it’s protagonists all had based their decisions on the ethical rationalisation you proposed here. Who knows, maybe even the Germans would have gotten nuclear weapons? The hard question obviously is: where do you draw the border? If you invented the paperclip and it was beeing used in the holocaust’s bureaucracy blaming you would be a bit far fetched. If you invented the gas showers of the KZs whose only purpose it was to mass-kill prisoners, not feeling ethically responsible would be totally mad. In between there you have got Werner von Braun with his V2 rocket, which isn’t exactly easy to judge. He enabled space travel, yet the bombs killed many british civilians quasi randomly and out of the blue and the number of slave workers killed during construction was even higher than the number the rocket killed. Inbetween these three examples there are infinite shades of ethical dilemma while your argument paints this as a binary question about whether something could or should exist or not — and if the answer to the could is True, who cares about the answer to the should, right? I propose something else. If you value your own intellect you should abstain from ideas that could be, but shouldn’t and rather attack things that could be and should be or maybe even things that should be, but couldn’t by the thinking of today. We engineers, scientists, thinkers and artists are giving birth to things that become reality, but it is our indivisual decision if we do: You will rarely find a writer telling you he had to write that dehumanizing dangerous text, because if he wouldn’t have done it somebody else would have. We can stray farther from this even and paint an example where a old lady collapses at a bus stop. Now you could have someone robbing her as she lays there (”If I wouldn’t have done it someone else would’ve”). Or you could have somebody going for first aid and calling the ambulance (”If I wouldn’t have done it someone else would’ve”). The statement “someone else would’ve done it” is not really a ethical reason to do anything. The question you should ask yourself is: in what kind of society do I want to live and do my actions contribute to it and if so at what cost? What if everybody acted like I did?

dpq 7y ago
> The question you should ask yourself is: in what kind of society do I want to live and do my actions contribute to it and if so at what cost? What if everybody acted like I did? But then of course this is the wrong question to ask. This is nothing more but a complicated version of a multi-party, repeated Prisoner's Dilemma problem. Except that you don't know your negative payoff when an opponent chooses to defect, but it may well be minus infinity (you get holocausted or nuked into paleolith). And then defection by any single party gets you the negative payoff. So if you only ask the question you suggest and ignore the rest of the options, you are doomed. I'm afraid that the world's politicians (most of them at least) are completely sane, and all this "race to the bottom" stuff going on is just the result of the game theory & life being what it is.

jonathankoren 7y ago

True, maybe someone will make these things, but that doesn’t mean one has to approve of it, nor be the one that builds it. Bad things still happen even they’re outlawed, but that doesn’t mean we just throw up our hands and proclaim that there’s nothing anyone can do about anything, and dismantle the entire legal system.

hobofan 7y ago

> Taking the high road just means someone else will do it instead. Someone will do it, but someone will also do the counter-thing to it. In this example someone might research how to prevent people from being identified through walls, and I would hope that those people are the more skilled ones.