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“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than und

• kyralis 3y ago
  I wouldn't call "requiring drivers to not be using mobile phones" a "tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims". It's for the good of everyone else on the road, and, in the case of seatbelts, for the good of the rest of society that needs to deal with the burden of caring for unnecessary injuries due to failing to take such a basic precaution.
  • johnnyworker 3y ago
    > I wouldn't call "requiring drivers to not be using mobile phones" a "tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims" It's the mass surveillance that was called such. > It's for the good of everyone else on the road Nope, they too are subject to mass surveillance.
  • wuliwong 3y ago
    > the good of the rest of society that needs to deal with the burden of caring for unnecessary injuries I understand that point of view but I do think it can be tyrannical to not let people live their lives even if they are making decisions that are bad for their physical health. In the US, obesity is a far greater burden on our health care system than people not wearing seatbelts. I still can't get behind fining people for overeating or something like that.
    • xnx 3y ago
      > even if they are making decisions that are bad for their physical health Distracted driving is a risk to other people, obesity is not.
      • carimura 3y ago
        the point is obesity is a risk in a different way because it stresses the healthcare system.
        • nvm0n2 3y ago
          Healthcare systems can scale up to meet the extra demand, and obese people can be asked to pay more for their healthcare. That doesn't apply for phone driving/drunk driving/etc because you can't charge people more based on the risk that someone else might hit them.
          • TrueGeek 3y ago
            We can’t staff for the current level of demand of our healthcare systems, how would we “scale up”? Additionally, this article is about the UK where healthcare is paid through taxes. Are you suggesting the overweight pay higher taxes?
            • flir 3y ago
              > Are you suggesting the overweight pay higher taxes? A soft drinks industry levy, for example?
              • candiodari 3y ago
                ... and then use that money, exclusively, to expand medical training and build new hospitals? WITHOUT taking away any of the current funding for such programs? Sure.
                • 3y ago
  • lisper 3y ago
    > I wouldn't call "requiring drivers to not be using mobile phones" a "tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims". You wouldn't, and I wouldn't, but someone else might. This is the problem: who gets to decide? Today the people deciding the parameters for focusing the AI's attention might be benevolent and acting in good faith by your standard and mine, but who is to say that this will still be true tomorrow? Not everyone shares our quality metric.
    • flangola7 3y ago
      Who decides which laws can be enforced by capture and imprisonment?
      • lisper 3y ago
        When those kinds of things are handed over to AI automation the results are often dystopian as well (at least by my quality metric).
  • carimura 3y ago
    Maybe I'm reading it wrong but to me it seems like the quote is in fact talking about "for the good of everyone else".
    • candiodari 3y ago
      ... and yet I feel this AI is "somehow" lacking in the other side of the equation. It's the government's duty to maintain the roads in a safe state (no potholes, no blocking the sidewalk forcing pedestrians onto the road, actually have correct signage, ...) Strangely, while all of that is covered under the existing laws too, none of it gets covered by AI cameras. Must be an oversight that will be corrected any second now ...
• deleted 3y ago
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• kevinventullo 3y ago
  This is one of those quotes that sounds deep but is obviously untrue if you think about it for a bit. I suspect he would prefer “moral busybodies” to, I dunno, 1930’s Germany.
  • rglover 3y ago
    Substitute "robber baron" with "mid-century gangster" and you'd find it's quite accurate. Mind your own business, keep the peace, and you'll find little trouble. Moral busybodies, by definition, have to constantly meddle in your affairs; it's their sole source of life.
  • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    If I recall the essay, Lewis definitely believes that this applies to things like Nazi Germany or the USSR. The true believers in Arianism and communism thought they were doing good - they were creating this golden future for their people and/or the workers! So destroying everyone who was in the way was morally right (in their view). It's fair to say that Lewis would prefer moral busybodies in Cornwall with speed cameras to either the KGB or the Gestapo. But he considers the Gestapo (specifically mentioned in the essay) to be the end state of what he's talking about when he made the quote. The source is, IIRC, the essay "A Reply To Professor Haldane", which I found in the book "Of Other Worlds".
    • kevinventullo 3y ago
      He specifically says “those who torment us for our own good”. The Nazis believed what they were doing was good for their people, but I don’t think they had any illusions that “destroying everyone…in the way” was good for the people being destroyed.
      • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        Read the rest of the essay, not just the one paragraph. He means "our" in the sense of "us as a group", which may not translate into good for each individual in the group. (He also talks about using the term "liquidating" instead of "killing" as being a bad sign. "Liquidating" people may be good for the group, but it obviously isn't good for the individual.)
• jerf 3y ago
  The problem is that laws are an approximation of safety and well being. When laws were all we had, the delta between the laws and the actual thing we want (safety) was not something we spent a lot of time worrying about, because we couldn't detect the difference. The law couldn't be enforced anyhow. The problem is as we get perfect enforcement, the delta does become visible. The reality is that when a road is set to 55 mph, that is not some sort of pronouncement from God that that is the one true speed that the road is safe at. It was just an approximation. But then we set up a camera that treats it as rigid ground truth, and now you can be nailed with a ticket if you're doing 56 miles per hour. But does that help anyone? Was anyone unsafe because you were going 56 mph rather than 55? No, of course not. 55 was never the point. Nominally, safety was the point. Safety is not about going a single speed. There are days and conditions when 65 is practically as safe as 55. There are days and conditions where 65 may be safer than 55 (e.g., everyone around you is doing it on a multi-lane road, you're safer following along than stubbornly insisting on being 10 mph divergent). There are days and conditions where the safe limit may well be 15, or even 0. That's the real thing we want. But that's not what computers and AI give us. They give us rigid enforcement. As society develops the capability to enforce laws rigidly, it will need to figure out that rigid enforcement isn't what we ever wanted. The laws were not themselves the end goal. Unfortunately, this is going to be harder than it should be because this rigid enforcement creates and/or reinforces a power center in the people who will benefit from this rigid enforcement, both monetarily and through the additional power to selectively pardon people for what is de facto a brand new set of crimes, in the sense that the are a whole bunch of convictions that could never have occurred in the past. Modestly clever use of the pardoning process will allow them to hold on to that power for extended periods of time by using it to cover over the worst and most socially costly offenses (see also "Support via working out how to raise enough of a Twitter fuss to get the company's attention"; you can suppress outrage and even look magnanimous by pardoning the things that get into the news while hammering everyone else). We will, of course, have to learn this the hard way.
  • nvm0n2 3y ago
    I mean sure but they give us rigid enforcement because there's no universal and fair way to define what the "real" limit should be. Limits do get changed dynamically on motorways. You can argue that with the ever greater digitization of cars there's a way out of that: use AI to monitor road conditions and dynamically adjust the speed limit, where those superseding limits are uploaded to a central server that in-car dashes can download from. As long as the limit only ever goes above the signposted limit, it can work. People with old cars just won't learn when they can go faster (except via smartphone maps).
• matthewfelgate 3y ago
  Oh grow up. Wearing a seatbelt isn't oppression you muppet.
  • Brian_K_White 3y ago
    Adults almost never use 'grow up' as an argument. They actually know what their argument is and say that. Seatbelts are a great example of exactly the stated form of oppression through giving moral busybodies the power to be more than merely annoying with their presumptions and opinions about your life.
    • matthewfelgate 3y ago
      Lol I wonder how much you cry when you see a fire extinguisher knowing it stops your right to die in a fire.
      • Brian_K_White 3y ago
        There is no equivalent rule that says you must wear a fire extiguisher whenever you enter a building. Therea are building codes the require smoke alarms EXIST in any living space, and other codes that say any business or facility providing public or employee access to a space must HAVE extinguishers and other features. Those would be equivalent to the regulations that car manufacturers must include seatbelts and other features and meet various standards in order to sell their products to the public. I didn't suggest or even remotely imply anything like those codes.
        • matthewfelgate 3y ago
          If you don't want to wear a seatbelt don't ride on the public roads. We live in a society.
          • Brian_K_White 3y ago
            I don't think you understand what society means. What you just demanded was antisocial. Meaning it was not an example of living and letting live, and getting along with your neighbor. It was an attempt to impose your will on your neighbor, without the excusing necessity of any shared resource or effect on yourself. To illustrate the difference, I don't care if you wear a seatbelt or not. I also think cars should be required to possess them as they are. I even think it's at least arguably not automatically wrong to protect kids from some parents and require them for kids until they take over responsibility for themselves. That is a more complicated question not automatically right or wrong, because a lot of kids have been harmed under the banner of "protecting kids from parents", but there is at least a valid theory for it.
• recursive4 3y ago
  Two days ago I was running on a road that lacks sidewalks and was almost hit by a driver who was clearly texting and not paying attention. This is not tyranny for the good of its victims – it's protecting everyone else from a needless lack of care for the safety of others.
• barbazoo 3y ago
  > It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. Oh what a slippery slope indeed. /s Instead of grandstanding, how do you suggest the law get enforced otherwise than partially automating checking if drivers are not driving blind for dozens of meters at a time?
  • soneil 3y ago
    "dozens" is probably underestimating it. That's a 70mph road, so just over 31 metres per second.
• deleted 3y ago
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