People like to have clear-cut moral heuristics like “killing is bad.” This gives them an easy guide to making a morally correct decision and an easy guide to judging other’s actions as moral or immoral. This requires simplifying multidimensional situations into easily legible scenarios where a binary decision can be made. Thus you see people equating embryo disposal to first-degree murder, and others advocating for third-trimester abortion rights.
Hestia
Karma: 9
The purpose of an “elite” university (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc.) is not to identify the top N most brilliant students: it’s to manufacture the power elite of the next generation. (Contrast this to something like the Indian Institute of Technology, which does aim to identify the most brilliant students, has done a good job of this, but does not manufacture the political/social power elite).
As a quick glance at Washington DC can demonstrate, this country is not run by 1600 SAT scorers and hasn’t been since the Clinton Administration. The university’s job is to pair a striver class with a gentry class, providing the gentry class with a trusted hiring pool and providing the strivers with social mobility to the uppermost echelon. Academics are thus only one of many factors in selection.
I understand why people talk about “human extinction” from AI, because it’s a lot more attention-grabbing, but it’s much easier for me to see a way in which AI kills a billion people or 5 billion people than every single last person down to the uncontacted tribes.