Tag Archives: ethics

the economics of extinction

Here are some economists tying themselves in mental knots on how you would do cost-benefit analysis on complete annihilation of humanity.

…estimating these benefits means that we need to determine the value of a reduction in preventing a possible future catastrophic risk. This is a thorny task. Martin Weitzman, an economist at Harvard University, argues that the expected loss to society because of catastrophic climate change is so large that it cannot be reliably estimated. A cost-benefit analysis—economists’ standard tool for assessing policies—cannot be applied here as reducing an infinite loss is infinitely profitable. Other economists, including Kenneth Arrow of Stanford University and William Nordhaus of Yale University, have examined the technical limits of Mr Weitzman’s argument. As the interpretation of infinity in economic climate models is essentially a debate about how to deal with the threat of extinction, Mr Weitzman’s argument depends heavily on a judgement about the value of life.

Economists estimate this value based on people’s personal choices: we purchase bicycle helmets, pay more for a safer car, and receive compensation for risky occupations. The observed trade-offs between safety and money tell us about society’s willingness to pay for a reduction in mortality risk. Hundreds of studies indicate that people in developed countries are collectively willing to pay a few million dollars to avoid an additional statistical death. For example, America’s Environmental Protection Agency recommends using a value of around $8m per fatality avoided. Similar values are used to evaluate vaccination programmes and prevention of traffic accidents or airborne diseases…

The value of life as a concept is a natural candidate for a tentative estimation of the benefit of reducing extinction risk. Yet the approach seems somewhat awkward in this context. The extinction risk here is completely different from the individual risk we face in our everyday lives. Human extinction is a risk we all share—and it would be an unprecedented event that can happen only once.

I’m not sure we want to turn over the keys to civilization’s future to these guys, who insist that their science must be values-free. In other words, they try to discern people’s values through their actions and statements, but try to make no ethical judgments independent of those observations. I think there is room in this world for ethical principles of right and wrong that are not economic in nature, and more of us need to be actively thinking every day about what those might be. Even though all 6 billion of us would certainly not agree on the details, we could certainly come to a consensus on the broad outlines. Couple this with better mental tools for understanding the complex nested systems we are embedded in, and it could really guide our choices as a civilization in a better direction.

AI Weapons

Stephen Hawking and others have signed a letter urging the world not to start a new artificial intelligence arms race, arguing that these weapons will be…

…feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.

The Pope vs. the Unabomber

Which of these quotes are from the pope’s encyclical, and which are from the Unabomber?Answers at the bottom.

I. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected
human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.

II. There is also the fact that people no longer seem to believe in a happy future; they no longer have blind trust in a better tomorrow based on the present state of the world and our technical abilities. There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere. This is not to reject the possibilities which technology continues to offer us. But humanity has changed profoundly, and the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything. Otherwise we would simply legitimate the present situation and need new forms of escapism to help us endure the emptiness.

III. You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts. Take modern medicine, for example. Progress in medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and other fields. Advanced medical treatments require expensive, high-tech equipment that can be made available only by a technologically progressive, economically rich society. Clearly you can’t have much progress in medicine without the whole technological system and everything that goes with it.

IV. Yet it must also be recognized that nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our DNA, and many other abilities which we have acquired, have given us tremendous power. More precisely, they have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world. Never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely, particularly when we consider how it is currently being used. We need but think of the nuclear bombs dropped in the middle of the twentieth century, or the array of technology which Nazism, Communism and other totalitarian regimes have employed to kill millions of people, to say nothing of the increasingly deadly arsenal of weapons available for modern warfare. In whose hands does all this power lie, or will it eventually end up? It is extremely risky for a small part of humanity to have it…There is a tendency to believe that every increase in power means “an increase of ‘progress’ itself”, an advance in “security, usefulness, welfare and vigour; …an assimilation of new values into the stream of culture”,[83] as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such. The fact is that “contemporary man has not been trained to use power well”,[84] because our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience. Each age tends to have only a meagre awareness of its own limitations. It is possible that we do not grasp the gravity of the challenges now before us. “The risk is growing day by day that man will not use his power as he should”; in effect, “power is never considered in terms of the responsibility of choice which is inherent in freedom” since its “only norms are taken from alleged necessity, from either utility or security”.[85] But human beings are not completely autonomous. Our freedom fades when it is handed over to the blind forces of the unconscious, of immediate needs, of self-interest, and of violence. In this sense, we stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint.

Answer: I. The Unabomber. II. The Pope. III. The Unabomber. IV. The Pope

Okay, maybe that was sort of obvious. To be fair to the Pope, I picked a couple of the least crazy paragraphs from the Unabomber. This was just meant as a fun, light-hearted exercise. And no, I am not suggesting the Pope is the real Unabomber.

human head transplants

Human head transplants may be possible this century, neuroscientist says

Sometimes a headline says it all. The article says this technology is not far off, although it would be expensive.

The separation of head and body would have to occur on two humans simultaneously, Canavero writes… The procedure, Canavero writes, would have to take place within an hour… He adds that the surgery would take a team of 100 surgeons roughly 36 hours to complete, at an estimated cost of £8.5-million ($128-million).[*]

“The problem” of this surgery, Canavero told ABCNews.com, “is not really technical but is completely ethical.”

It’s hard to imagine any situation where this would be ethical. To have a donor, someone would have to die in a way that leaves their otherwise healthy body completely intact, except for the head. Grafting heads onto executed prisoners might solve the ethical problem for some, but not for me. All I can think of is if we could grow human bodies with no brain at all, or all but the most primitive part of the nervous system that keeps basic organs functioning. Even that sounds ethically dubious. But you figure, if there is a black market for individual organs now, some dying rich person somewhere will try this eventually whether it is ethical or not. I wonder, if we somehow solved all non-brain-related diseases like heart disease and cancer, and we perfected the technology of cloning brainless bodies in some ethical way, how long could we live? How long could the brain actually last, considering that we hear constantly that we start losing brain function as early as our 30s?

I can’t help thinking of the awful 1991 movie Body Parts, in which this sort of thing doesn’t turn out well, and that was just an arm!

* yes if the operation cost 8.5 million British pounds, it should be 12.8 million US dollars above, not 128 million. Either that, or they meant 85 million pounds. It doesn’t really change the point of the article.

Bitcoin and “trustless trust”

This article from Beautiful Data-R talks about how Bitcoin’s algorithms are supposed to generate trust:

The crypto-currency Bitcoin and the way it generates “trustless trust” is one of the hottest topics when it comes to technological innovations right now. The way Bitcoin transactions always backtrace the whole transaction list since the first discovered block (the Genesis block) does not only work for finance. The first startups such as Blockstream already work on ways how to use this mechanism of “trustless trust” (i.e. you can trust the system without having to trust the participants) on related fields such as corporate equity.

It’s an interesting idea – can we design better markets such that participation in the market pushes people toward more trustworthy or ethical behavior? Could you build carbon credits or “embodied energy” values into such a market, for example? This sounds a lot like Adam Smith’s invisible hand – markets themselves were supposed to do this, but the problem today is that there are too many people (living and future) and plants and animals being harmed by markets without participating in them.

programming boot camp

Here’s an article about computer programming boot camps. Marketable job skills are an important thing. Being an educated person who can understand systems, solve problems, and make ethical choices is also a good thing. These two types of education are complementary, but one does not guarantee the other. Corporations are interested in skills because they are trying to exploit some microscopic niche in the economy to make a profit. And that is where most skills apply – in those microscopic niches. When you are exploiting a microscopic niche, you are not thinking about consequences outside your niche. So if that is the only thing we do, it will eventually be possible for highly skilled, highly intelligent, well intentioned people to collectively manage to run our civilization into the ground.

freezing eggs

It’s becoming more common to freeze human eggs. The implications are interesting. A woman can freeze eggs when she is young for later use, obviously. What if a young woman learns that she is not able to have children? Could she choose to be implanted with eggs her sister has frozen? Sure, that seems okay. What about eggs her mother chose to freeze decades earlier? The baby could be someone’s daughter and granddaughter at the same time. But still just a baby. I imagine these things will all happen within families, if they haven’t already. What about buying and selling eggs though? What about a couple paying a stranger to have their genetic child because they are just too busy or don’t want to be bothered with a pregnancy. That’s slightly more troubling, but I’m sure that too will happen if it hasn’t already.

slavery

What happens when an economic system is designed to support the profit-seeking of a small class of immoral people? Well, that sort of thing might have happened somewhere in the world in the past, but certainly not in the United States. Oh wait…

The domestic slave trade was highly organized and economically efficient, relying on such modern technologies as the steamboat, railroad and telegraph…

The sellers of slaves, Baptist insists, were not generally paternalistic owners who fell on hard times and parted reluctantly with members of their metaphorical plantation “families,” but entrepreneurs who knew an opportunity for gain when they saw one. As for the slave traders — the middlemen — they excelled at maximizing profits…

Planters called their method of labor control the “pushing system.” Each slave was assigned a daily picking quota, which increased steadily over time. Baptist, who feels that historians too often employ circumlocutions that obscure the horrors of slavery, prefers to call it “the ‘whipping-machine’ system.” In fact, the word we should really use, he insists, is “torture.” To make slaves work harder and harder, planters utilized not only incessant beating but forms of discipline familiar in our own time — sexual humiliation, bodily mutilation, even waterboarding. In the cotton kingdom, “white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.”

These are quotes from a New York Times review of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist.

“help consumers become more irrational”

This Tedx Talk says the idea of “leading with green” in marketing is dying. If we want to scale up green consumer behavior, it says, we have to appeal to people’s irrational interests, like desire for wealth, status, novelty, and sense of altruism.

I instinctively recoil from the marketing-driven view of human beings as brainless consumer robots. And yet, there is no denying that marketing must exist because it works. It bothers me for few reasons. First is the idea that it is necessarily “irrational” to consider emotions in decision making. What is so irrational about trying to experience more pleasure and less pain? Does the fact that it is mental pleasure or pain make it irrational? I don’t think so – trying to improve status because you think it will lead to pleasurable social ties or avoid shame seems perfectly rational to me, as does helping someone so you can avoid feelings of guilt later on.

Another thing that bothers me is the idea that marketers are appealing to people to make choices based on their sense of right and wrong, while not making choices based on their own sense of right and wrong. Sure, it’s true that corporations are amoral piles of paper, but the people inside them do not have to be. We shouldn’t let a pile of paper trying to make a profit remake us flesh and blood humans in its own image.

Clearly a certain segment of the population will make decisions based on their sense of right and wrong. But in order to make the correct choices about right and wrong, they need to correctly predict the consequences of their actions. And to do that, they need to understand the social, economic, and environmental systems we find ourselves embedded in, and we need to look at these systems not just under a microscope and in the short term, but at a larger scale and over long time frames.

So what we need is an education system that teaches ethics and system thinking effectively. Our education system does not do either right now, so we have a situation where even formally educated people have not been given the mental tools to understand the consequences of their choices. A certain segment of the population is willing the make ethical choices, but their sense of right and wrong is easily manipulated by other segments of the population, who themselves have no sense of right and wrong.

If more children were challenged more often to think about right and wrong, as they were also being educated in system thinking, perhaps we could begin to inoculate the population against this madness that is otherwise going to destroy us. I don’t know what fraction of the population has to be ethical system thinkers before our civilization is successful. I think it is much less than 10% now, and it is not working. I don’t think it has to be 100% though. Maybe we should aim for a majority and go from there.

more on corporate social responsibility

Just thinking some more about yesterday’s post on the profit motive and shareholder value as the only responsibilities of business. I remembered a recent interview with Noam Chomsky where I thought he explained very well why profit maximizing entities do not automatically serve the greater good:

In market systems, you don’t take account of what economists call externalities. So say you sell me a car. In a market system, we’re supposed to look after our own interests, so I make the best deal I can for me; you make the best deal you can for you. We do not take into account the effect on him. That’s not part of a market transaction. Well, there is an effect on him: there’s another car on the road; there’s a greater possibility of accidents; there’s more pollution; there’s more traffic jams. For him individually, it might be a slight increase, but this is extended over the whole population. Now, when you get to other kinds of transactions, the externalities get much larger… Destruction of the environment is an externality: in market interactions, you don’t pay attention to it. So take tar sands. If you’re a major energy corporation and you can make profit out of exploiting tar sands, you simply do not take into account the fact that your grandchildren may not have a possibility of survival — that’s an externality. And in the moral calculus of capitalism, greater profits in the next quarter outweigh the fate of your grandchildren — and of course it’s not your grandchildren, but everyone’s.

What makes the gospel of shareholder value so insidious is that it gives the human beings inside corporations a shield to hide behind – an excuse to not ask any questions about right and wrong in their daily actions. I think Milton Friedman has it right that a business corporation on paper is a completely amoral entity. Now it appears that business corporations are evolving and molding a whole new species of human beings in their image! As children we are taught to think about right and wrong every day, but then as adults we don’t have to any more. This is not human at all, and we can reject it – the managers and employees at the car companies and energy companies have a responsibility to think about right and wrong every day and to make choices that are consistent with what they think is right. If the only thing that is right is not working for that company, then so be it. Consumers can do the same. The political system can provide somewhat of an ethical framework for society from the top down, but we individual humans need to take responsibility for our daily actions and meet it halfway.