I suppose the difference is whether you’re doing the Intel attack now, or in a hypothetical future in which Intel is making brain simulators that seem likely to become AGI. As someone else mentioned, if we’re talking about literally THEY ARE BUILDING SKYNET RIGHT NOW, then violence seems like the right idea.
I guess it is kind of suspicious that I know without doing the calculations that we’re not at the point where violence is justified yet.
But we are willing to let people die who we don’t think are important that we could have saved. This is equivalent to killing them, no? Or do you approach the trolley problem in some way that references the wider society?
Even though on this individual problem leaving things alone would be worse than committing an act of violence, in the general case having everyone commit acts of violence is worse than having everyone leave things alone.
This example cherry-picks a case where violence is the correct answer. But when we generalize it, most of the cases it affects won’t be cherry picked and will have violence do more harm than good. We have to pretend we’re setting a moral system both for ourselves and for the fundamentalist who wants to kill gay people.
So in this case, you’re letting die (killing) the people your (smart) unpopular violent action would have saved, in order to save the lives of all the people whom other people’s (stupid) unpopular violent actions would have killed.
It could be justified—if you’re going to save the world from Skynet, that’s worth instituting a moral system that gives religious fundamentalists a little more latitude to violent bigotry—but I imagine most cases wouldn’t be.
I suppose the difference is whether you’re doing the Intel attack now, or in a hypothetical future in which Intel is making brain simulators that seem likely to become AGI. As someone else mentioned, if we’re talking about literally THEY ARE BUILDING SKYNET RIGHT NOW, then violence seems like the right idea.
I guess it is kind of suspicious that I know without doing the calculations that we’re not at the point where violence is justified yet.
Even though on this individual problem leaving things alone would be worse than committing an act of violence, in the general case having everyone commit acts of violence is worse than having everyone leave things alone.
This example cherry-picks a case where violence is the correct answer. But when we generalize it, most of the cases it affects won’t be cherry picked and will have violence do more harm than good. We have to pretend we’re setting a moral system both for ourselves and for the fundamentalist who wants to kill gay people.
So in this case, you’re letting die (killing) the people your (smart) unpopular violent action would have saved, in order to save the lives of all the people whom other people’s (stupid) unpopular violent actions would have killed.
It could be justified—if you’re going to save the world from Skynet, that’s worth instituting a moral system that gives religious fundamentalists a little more latitude to violent bigotry—but I imagine most cases wouldn’t be.