Following on from last Tuesday’s ‘ponderable’, I have another one that has been bouncing around in my head. Yet again, it’s one of those problems that can’t be solved internally because it needs empirical data. Good and evil are such fundamentally nebulous ideas. Depending on who you ask, they can either be defined in absolute terms — or they are totally undefinable. Is ‘Good’ merely an act that helps more than it harms? Is ‘Evil’ the logical inversion of that? Is ‘Good’ strictly defined by cultural and societal norms? Is ‘Evil’ merely breaking the law?

Would you kill one person to save ninety-nine others? Does it matter who that one person is? Gandhi? Hitler?

Would you feel Evil by giving the order to go ahead and kill that one person, to save the ninety-nine? Or Good?

Perhaps it’s better to look at this from the angle of whether you feel justified in your action (or inaction).

Justification is the act of internal rationalisation. And being rational is basically what we we humans do. That’s what we’re inputting, processing and outputting, every minute of every day: rational decisions. Input data, process, rational output.

But here’s the kicker: we can only be as rational as our nurture and nature allows. But within those boundaries and limits, we are rational. 2 + 2 = 4, unless you’ve been told that it’s not. But even if the result is ‘wrong’, we continue to process the data in exactly the same way, because how could we ever exist if we doubted our own calculations? We must assume we’re right. We must assume our actions are rational. How can we possibly know an answer’s wrong anyway? After 30 years of doing it one way, should we listen to someone that says we’re wrong? Or that new-fangled ’science’ thing — should we trust that? But wouldn’t that mean we’ve been wrong all our lives? That sounds like a bitter pill to swallow. We can perform actions ‘the wrong way’ or jump to the wrong conclusion for an entire life time and not realise!

So with that in mind… I started thinking about psychopaths. Are they rational? The term ‘psychosis’ defines a malady of the mind that causes irrationality. But is the psychotic aware of their irrationality?

As they drown a bag full of kittens and cackle maniacally, do they know they’re being evil? Is it even possible to be aware of their evilness? Could anyone ever be rationally evil? Can you be rationally evil? Is evil only someone else’s point of view? Have you ever felt really evil? I haven’t…

I’m trying to get my head around this one. Did Hitler think he was being mean, nasty or evil when he signed off on the Jewish ghettos and executions? I bet he didn’t. Perhaps it takes a good person to be willfully evil? Hmm…

I know this one is pretty vague. I’m curious if anyone’s ever actually felt evil though — and I don’t mean in a passing, fleeting way, like when you ignore a hitchhiker or put your pet down. Don’t think about it too much though, because chances are you are rationalising and convincing yourself of weird/maligned actions hundreds of times a day. What are you doing that is actually wrong? Ugh! An entry on ethics might be necessary, if I can even hope to do that topic justice.

Discussing ethics is a little fruitless, at least if you like reaching conclusions. Generally they are rules that govern a particular area or school of thought: medical ethics, political ethics, social ethics — in any given setting, there are ways in which you ’should’ act or behave or even think.

Fortunately, due to us pesky humans being at the top of the food chain, it’s been fairly easy to decide what is and isn’t ethical: that which helps mankind is good; that which harms mankind is bad.

But… how would you about creating a system of ethics for that which isn’t human?

If you can save a human or a cat from falling into a chasm, you save your fellow man.

What if the cat has to decide whether he saves you or another cat?

* * *

The ‘classic’ Robot Ethics example is this:

If a robot murders, who is accountable?

Robots can not yet program themselves; so must the designer be sent to jail?

Robots can not yet build themselves; so must the engineer be sent to jail?

Or… can we actually blame the robot? What good is justice, jail or the death penalty if the robot does not feel? If a robot is a senseless, emotionless killing machine, will justice have been served by just unplugging the robot?

* * *

Now the really sticky bit: what if we (somehow) create robots in good conscience, robots that never murder, never steal — robots that always act ‘ethically’. What if, as they would surely follow in the footsteps of their human creators, they learn to program themselves? What if robots can build themselves?

This is all a very old train of thought but it ties in with the question I asked yesterday: ‘What makes us human?‘ — at what stage do these robots become sentient, self-aware? Better yet: if you unplug a sentient robot, do they cease being self-aware? If there’s a soul, what happens?

In the original falling-into-a-chasm example, you don’t hesitate to choose the human as more important than a cat. What if a robot has to choose between saving one of us, or another robot? What’s the ethical choice from the robot’s point of view?

<Mind explodes>

* * *

Back to humans and humanity. What happens when we finally play around with cybernetic brain implants? Does this become a religious or spiritual issue? If having a soul is what separates us from the rest of the food chain, surely we must somehow look after this tenuous physical/spiritual link; would modifying our brain with artificial technology alter or sever that link; would it make us soulless?

At what stage do we, by definition, become robots?

Looking into Pandora’s box I can see another nastier, gloopier issue: what if we’re already soulless? What if there’s really nothing to differentiate us from our finely-engineered robotic brethren? Would that just make us our android overlord’s herd of cattle?

I’ve been tackling the subject of authority (who or what you trust when seeking the answer to a question) and knowledge (a working, true data set) for a while now. I haven’t really gone into ethics because it’s a sticky one. I’m going to try it now, in a couple of articles.

* * *

I think it’s painfully apparent to everyone by now that technology itself is not a good thing.

Technology is merely a tool. Really, that’s all. Technology is a tool that can be used for good or bad. In the future, technology might gain sentience and become much more than a tool, but that’s outside the scope of this entry because… well… arguing something that may or may not come true is hard work. And I’m not a sci-fi author.

There’s an old, trite argument, but it illustrates my point: guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Technology is the same thing, but because inventions are new and shiny, people are mostly blind to its nefarious uses; it lacks the evil connotations of the gun that we’ve developed over hundreds of years. When the gun was first invented it wasn’t ‘bad’ either — just new, and very cool.

Technology — the idea of new inventions, modifications, enhancements – really is the same thing as the humble gun. I mean, if you want proof, a gun is technology. Weaponry is one of the longest chains of technological development in history! And it’s not abating either… it has a long way to go. I’m sure you’re aware of the tax money that goes into ‘defence’. Weapon technology has been the deciding factor of major wars and the continuation of empires and dynasties — having advanced weapons is (sadly?) probably the pinnacle of any given modern civilisation.

But because guns (and canons and muskets and rifles and…) have killed huge swathes of the population, does that make technology bad?

There are literally millions (billions?) of people that would say guns and weapons are Bad Things. They kill people, ergo… bad. Before guns, we had swords, spears, slings — were they also bad?

How about fire? Was Prometheus, the lad that stole fire from the Gods, the greatest war criminal of all time? Without fire, almost everything you see today wouldn’t exist. Chemical energy is the end of that technology chain, and we frickin’ worship chemical energy.

That’s the thing — without fire, that desk in front of you wouldn’t exist. That’s how technology works — it’s omnipotent and omnipresent. You can’t staunch the flow of one technology and expect to carry on living the life you live.

Without fire, we would have burnt out [hah -- frozen to death more likely] and gone extinct a long time ago. Without spears, we would’ve starved. Without guns we would’ve perished in wars.

You see how I keep using the word ‘we’? It’s a selfish thing, eh? Man makes fire because he doesn’t want to freeze. Selfish, selfish, selfish. Man fashions a spear because without it, he uses more energy hunting than he gains from the animal’s flesh. Man crafts a gun because it lets him kill — or threaten — at range, without putting himself at risk. SELFISH!

But what’s the other option? No technology? No fire? No human race? Just step to the side and make way for another master species? How on earth are we ever going to agree to that? No, we can’t stop progressing — that’s one thing we can’t do. We might nuke ourself in the process, like so many civilisations before us, but it’s better than standing still, stagnating, dying.

We can agree then that technology isn’t a good thing itself, but something so intrinsic to human survival that we can’t imagine life without it, without tools. But as always, when anything involves humans, it’s more complicated than that.

With technology we create both solutions and problems. One caveman uses fire to cook his food while another uses it to brand dissident villagers. You keep a gun in the house to dissuade burglars, I keep a gun to shoot Negroes. While one scientist is planning clean, sustained energy from nuclear fission, another is working under the duress of an evil mastermind that wants to nuke us to smithereens.

Thus there are some that think technology has lowered our quality of life — that technology is a bad thing — though that’s impossible if you take ‘technology’ to mean any and every tool we’ve ever fashioned. So they probably mean ‘recent technology’ — the atomic bomb, the Internet, sports cars, Facebook, etc.

And maybe they have a point. You’d never think of a telephone as a bad thing, right? But the Internet? Maybe. Fire’s a good thing — but weapons of mass destruction? Probably not. They’re both advancements on the same technological line

It’s too unknown. The rules are unknown, the lines are blurred. There have been failed technologies in the past