In my opinion, the most despicable thing in the world is physical torture. Not death, nor disease, nor eating junk food for breakfast. Torture, that fearful spectre that’s been haunting humanity since the dawn of time.
Torture makes me so angry that I believe national sovereignty is worth overruling to prevent it. For instance, North Korea is running a network of gulags observable by spy satellites. Hundreds of thousands of people are suffering there, with at least a few tens of thousands undergoing actual torture every year, if not many more. Punishment cells, and worse.
Why not march soldiers right into North Korea, free people from the camps, and set up a government that doesn’t imprison and torture its own people for political reasons? Well, as we’ve seen with Iraq, it’s not so easy. But if we had the money, the manpower, and reason to believe we could set up a stable government after the invasion, would it be worth it? It warrants thinking about. My answer is yes. (Assume we did actually have reason to believe we could set up a stable government, even if you believe that’s impossible. If it is impossible for an invading force to ever set up a stable government, under any circumstances, then obviously the plan wouldn’t work.)
Technological advances in the next few decades are going to make unimaginably horrible torture possible. Much worse than we’ve seen already. For one, there’s the “pain beam”, a laser pulse tuned perfectly to stimulate human pain receptors. I won’t say anything more about high-tech torture, because I don’t even want to risk the minute chance a torturer sees this page in coming decades and gets any ideas. For instance, an Iraqi citizen commented, “the day Uday Hussein discovered the Internet was a dark day for Iraq”. This is because Uday used the Internet as a source of inspiration for torture.
For me, the issue of high-tech torture is sufficient to legitimize the prospect of a trans-national body capable of violating the sovereignty of states to intervene in cases of state-sponsored torture. Police are the world’s number one torturers. Of course, this is a step towards world government, and I’m perfectly comfortable with that. I love my country, the United States of America, but I think some causes are so important they transcend statehood. Preventing torture is one of those causes.
People used to think that torture is one of those things that only bad people do. Not so. Under the right circumstances, practically anyone could become a torturer. The long-term solution is overwhelmingly obvious — modify the human genome so that we no longer have the desire to torture, no matter the circumstances. This is a case study for the generalized argument that reengineering the human species is a moral imperative. It might make some people squirmy, but because humanity isn’t perfect, there are some major possibilities for improvement. When the potential benefits become obvious, the polity will welcome them wholeheartedly.
When proposing modification of the human species, note that I advocate leadership by example, and never obligatory eugenics a la all the scaremongering sci-fi out there.
First, I don’t think it’s possible to “have good reason” to believe we could create a stable government after destroying an also-stable government. If the constituents of proposed democratic state (and I’m almost certain you’re not advocating rebuilding anything less, here) are not ready to put together a republic on their own, nothing any other state can do will help them.
The US has been attempting this already, for decades, when it hasn’t been propping up allied dictators. It may have worked once.
Secondly, do you really think this is something genetically treatable? I don’t see it as a genetic tendency, especially when torture sees very little precedent in other species. Aside from that, how would you propose to deploy this eugenics program, even if it were feasible?
For the first part, the thought experiment really is entirely hypothetical. But obviously the constituents of NK would desire to put together a democratic state if the current dictatorial regime were toppled. And categorically denying that it’s possible to construct a new stable government after the collapse of a former government is contradicted by history. It’s just a matter of probabilities.
For the second part, yes… for instance, increasing the influence of the empathetic regions of the brain over other regions. Ultimately, *everything* is a genetic tendency, though not every human tendency can be manipulated through genetic manipulations. If genetic intervention doesn’t work, there is always neurotechnological intervention. When I’m proposing inventions, assume I mean implementing them just on myself, not inflicting some dictatorial Gattaca on everyone. It’s possible to lead by example. If people really decide that hooking up each other’s genitals to car batteries is an indispensable part of human nature, then I’d be powerless to stop them.
Modifying the human genome is not equivalent to a eugenics program. Also, “eugenics” is just a scare word, because of its association with Nazism. You’d have to be a fool to publicly support eugenics, but supporting the self-transformation of the human species should be quite acceptable. It’s called transhumanism. No need to assume I support “eugenics” because I propose transformation of the human species. I know everyone is touchy about personal liberties because of 8 years of Bush, though.
Hopefully, we can also engineer out the desires to murder, suicide, abort and euthanize, all equally despicable to various people.
Initiating a war to reduce human suffering is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. Hundreds of thousands would be killed and hundreds of thousands would be maimed. Getting shot or hit by shrapnel hurts quite a bit as well. Then there are all the bereaved family members. Plus the massive expense, which could have (e.g) bought food, medicine, and XO laptops for all the worlds poor.
If many thousands were being openly and publicly tortured, and the footage appeared on YouTube, believe me, many like yourself would advocate an invasion to stop it. The alternative is saying “lol, torture, I don’t care”. Invasions do not maim hundreds of thousands… look at the stats. Prolonged occupations might, but initial invasions don’t. I’m NOT advocating war, I’m just saying, look at the stats. Assuming an invasion means hundreds of thousands maimed is naive.
Utilitarian-wise, it’s a matter of numbers. If hundreds of thousands are being tortured and a short war with less than a couple thousand deaths could halt that for decades if not forever, it’s worth it. Anyone who disagrees has merely programmed themselves to object to any war whatsoever as a side effect of protesting this recent disastrous war in Iraq. Don’t overgeneralize.
PS. Drama
You do bring an interesting pov to the table, Michael. That’s a good thing.
Don’t forget, there is a lot of animal suffering going on in this world too. I don’t think we should allow that to continue on a mass scale either. It seems like it is too easy to get complacent about torture/suffering. People tend to allow a lot of awful things to occur in this world largely because they are out of sight or invisible. I don’t think going to war with north korea is a good idea. The people of North Korea are fed propaganda on a daily basis and they really do hate the US. The US is the enemy to them, not their government. So a short war with only thousands of deaths might not be possible. However, there may be other ways of persuading North Korea to abandon their torture tactics in the future.
I wonder what McCain would do if he became our next president? He is against torture, having experienced it first hand. It would be interesting to see if to take any steps to reduce torture in the world, assuming he got elected.
Spot on with no torture policy Michael. However there is no way to program out torture other than two ways. Take away free will – no longer human. Take away all pain receptors – extinction. I say extinction because you would cause your body great harm everyday if you had no pain receptors.
Oh another thing, you really need to clean up your accelerating future forum. It’s full of advertisements.
Don’t be so sure of that, Michael. Don’t be so sure of that at all. There’s no historical precedent for that belief. Dictatorial regimes almost always suppress the socialized memetics necessary to produce a democratic government: this is precisely why Iraq and Afghanistan have failed to do so.
Invasion? No. Humanitarian aid effort on an individualized/civilian level? Certainly — even at the risk of loss of civilian lives. Demand asylum for any citizen of said country who leaves said country? Certainly. It’s not overgeneralization from a small sampling to be ideologically against war in a modern context. We have a forty + year sampling with which to operate within that tells us that wars do not and cannot succeed in their primary goals in a modern context.
That being said: the solution of genetically inhibiting the “desire to torture” is a non-starter. Even if possible, it is impossible to isolate the impulse to torture from the beneficial aspects to the human psyche it is tied to. This is primarily because the majority of torturers typically do not have any actual desire to do so: it is the social context that manipulates otherwise healthy impulses into the destructive.
I don’t see a way around that, right now.
Especially not the invasion of a country with an operational nuclear weapons arsenal. That’s just bad juju.
If Lincoln thought like spacenookie, we’d still have slavery today. Interesting. Perhaps slavery is worse than torture?
Then why isn’t it legal anywhere else in the “civilized world”?
Hint: Only America and Haiti fought wars to end their slavery. And Lincoln’s war wasn’t against slavery at all, Gary. The first two years of the Civil War, slavery was permitted on both sides. All the way through the end, slavery was permitted within the Northern states.
Get your facts straight, sir.
Imperialism can bring some benefits. The Roman and British empires spread education, trade, improved living standards (for example basic sanitation) and new technologies. But imperialism always has a down side, and if liberators loiter in foreign lands for too long they soon become oppressors, often worse than the regimes they originally overthrew. Modern America was basically born out of a struggle against imperialism.
What do you do when a state becomes pathological and begins torturing or killing its own people? Although in theory answerable to their citizenry, heads of state are all too often in practice answerable to noone. The solution here I think is for certain crimes to be internationally recognized, and for the international community to be able to call heads of state to appear and be questioned in ICC courts. Just as is the case for any ordinary citizen if a head of state did not show up in court this would trigger punitive actions to be taken against them, such as economic isolation.
“I think is for certain crimes to be internationally recognized, and for the international community to be able to call heads of state to appear and be questioned in ICC courts. ”
Well, if you are going out to get that done, pack a lunch.
In cases of economic isolation, do you really think the “evil leader” goes hungry? Doesn’t happen. You want to get rid of regimes like this, you do what has to be done and that means you send in the military.
Mike,
Oh, of course. But objecting to this is even more controversial because people are addicted to consuming meat. Just look at vegetarian articles that reach the front page of Digg and you’ll see what I mean. Vegetarians are called “militant” just for sharing their views.
Sometimes it seems like when I say anything of substance, a few commenters vehemently oppose it, btw. I suppose I’ll have to get used to it.
Cypher,
The notion that changing human behavior by rewriting our own genome eliminates free will is a common fallacy. Changing the human brain can increase or decrease the number of possible actions arbitrarily. If you eliminate torture, you could open up corresponding regions of activity space much larger, not to mention morally fulfilling than what was lost. You might say that we lack free will right now because our number of possible actions is highly constrained by our reproduction-obsessed, evolution-crafted mess of a brain.
IConrad,
You’re actually right about the desire of the people thing. Oh well. I guess the object would be for the people to have the motivation to build a government slightly better than the one that came before it.
The American Civil War was fought over slavery. Thousands of historians can attest you this. Your position that it wasn’t is in the extreme minority.
“You’d have to be a fool to publicly support eugenics, but supporting the self-transformation of the human species should be quite acceptable.”
I fear that you don’t understand how hostile some parts of the US and the Third World are to many forms of technology, especially the ones which involve mucking around with human biology. To name a simple example, if an article about Todd Huffman were published in tomorrow’s NYT, half the country would probably assume he has some kind of mental illness.
“I’m NOT advocating war, I’m just saying, look at the stats.”
Recent examples:
Iraq, ~800K-1,200K dead, many millions more wounded or forced to leave the country.
Vietnam, ~2M-5M dead, plus another 700K Cambodians, many millions more wounded.
Korea, 300K dead, 600K wounded, many millions of civilians killed or wounded (no reliable figures).
WWII, 20M military deaths, 20M civilian deaths (not including Holocaust victims) and Eru-knows-how-many wounded.
“He is against torture, having experienced it first hand.”
McCain voted for the Military Commissions Act, which gave Bush & Co. authority to use “enhanced interrogation practices” (torture).
“The Roman and British empires spread education, trade, improved living standards (for example basic sanitation)”
British imperalism: http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1674478,00.html
Roman imperalism, of course, killed countless thousands of people, and it eventually backfired (to put it mildly). We’re *still* recovering from the disaster that befell Rome in the 4th and 5th centuries AD. With our modern technology, we cannot have another Rome. There’d be nothing left.
Mike, your position that strong AI is possible is in the “extreme minority”. Thousands of computer scientists will attest you this.
The mainstream in many cases is wrong. History is one of those cases where it is much more feasible. At the end of the day, the idea that the Civil War was over slavery is patently absurd. Consider: “The Union included all of the free states and the five slaveholding border states and was led by Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party.(Emphasis mine.) It is factually self-evident that the American Civil War did not begin over slavery at its core, but that at most slavery itself was ancillary to the causes. Yes, the Republican Party was founded on Abolitionist terms; Lincoln himself was an Abolitionist.
But he never proposed the abolition of slavery within the states until well after the Civil War was underway.
The biggest problem to this interpretation is the oversimplification effect: the actual cause was a feeling of disporportionate representation in the North from the Southerner’s perspective: this was part and parcel of the very important “balance between the states” between the southern culture (which endorsed slavery) and the northern (which of course did not) represented in the inclusion of new states as either slave-owning or non-slave-owning states.
The conflict is a traditional one, however, that has at its roots a far older one: The urban/industrial culture coming to grips with the agrarian society. We still face this, to a much lesser extent, today.
But no — the Civil War was not fought to abolish slavery. Anyone telling you — or themselves — this is in direct contravention of the truth, in a self-evidentiary manner.
Slave-owning states participated in the war against the CSA. This could not be possible under the paradigm of the abolition of slavery as the cause of the re-unification effort.
Tom,
I mean it’s quite acceptable on the Internet, especially areas of blogspace like this that are filled with geeks who play video games and watch movies chock-full of transhumanist content. I’m aware that Middle America and the Third World has many bioconservatives. I’ve been fighting them memetically since my diatribe against Leon Kass.
Iraq is a disaster because of prolonged occupation and a powerful insurgency that hates the USA. Iraqis also seem incapable of political reconciliation. Vietnam was a disaster because of Soviet support for NV and guerilla warfare where the locals had an advantage. Korea I don’t know enough about, and WWII was a major World War. Obviously WWII was worth it, because otherwise the Nazis would have taken over Europe and North Africa, so I’m not sure how mentioning a just war helps your position there.
My argument is that sometimes the utilitarian benefit of military action outweighs the cost in deaths. This is the entire premise on which the existence of the military is based. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have one.
There are counterexamples to the wars you listed. For instance, toppling the Taliban only resulted in ~13,000 deaths, and the benefit to the country (especially to millions of women repressed under this Islamic regime) obviously outweighs the cost. Maybe people there didn’t really want to follow the strictest possible interpretation of Islamic law.
And maybe people in North Korea actually want to be allowed to leave, or avoid having their relatives imprisoned for something they did, or be tortured just for listening to South Korean radio. Meanwhile, Kim Jong Il is testing ballistic missiles and consuming gallons of fine cognac in his mansion.
Read stories of the North Korean gulags, and tell me your gut reaction. “Oh well, this sucks, but it’s their country, and they’re free to torture each other all they want”? The alternative to such a calloused reaction is a desire for change. Diplomacy should always be the first step, but sometimes rogue states don’t give a shit about diplomatic pressure.
Dictators don’t deserve to torture their own citizens with impunity. The international community needs to gang up on these monsters and put them out of business. Luckily, there are very few states where torture is openly approved at the highest levels. NK is one of these.
The alternative is too harsh to bear — keep letting it happen forever.
Ian,
Touché, I shouldn’t use appeals to the majority. I’m interested in your interpretation of the Civil War and will think about it. Any references you have in this vein would also be appreciated.
IConrad is right; Northern opposition to slavery was a large part of the South’s motivation for secession, but the war was hardly an altruistic act on the North’s part. In fact, Lincoln was a free-soiler (opposing the extension of slavery to new states), not an abolitionist (opposing the abolition of slavery even in existing slave states).
An important thing to keep in mind about North Korea (source):
Forever? It’s not like there’s absolutely no way it could end without military action, although as impenetrably psychotic as the current leadership is, it might take a very long time.
“And categorically denying that it’s impossible to construct a new stable government after the collapse of a former government is contradicted by history. It’s just a matter of probabilities.”
I presume you mean categorically denying that it IS possible”. And in that sense, we agree. I was hoping you would note my concession of “It may have worked once.” I had The Balkans during the 90s in mind at the time. I didn’t say it was impossible.
Yes, you’re right; sometimes it does work, as I said. Rarely. Rarely enough to dispense with it as consistent policy at present.
That said, casualties of successive conflicts might well be coming down, and military techniques/technologies may have a role to play in that. As casualty counts come down, the argument acquires some strength.
I know you’re not a state eugenicist; we’ve had this conversation before. But the reason I keep bringing it up is that you don’t make it explicit. With far-out extremist critics like yours, don’t you think you should?
“Obviously WWII was worth it, because otherwise the Nazis would have taken over Europe and North Africa, so I’m not sure how mentioning a just war helps your position there.”
It still caused massive amounts of casualties. It *was* worth it, but only because of Nazi extremism. If the Nazis had remained the way they were in 1935 (totalitarian state w/concentration camps, but no aggressive wars or mass killings), would it have been worth it?
“Iraq is a disaster because of prolonged occupation and a powerful insurgency that hates the USA.”
An NK war would be a disaster because of their huge arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons. Seoul, with many millions of civilians, is only 50 km or so from the NK border, and Kim Jong wouldn’t hesitate to wipe it off the map.
“Meanwhile, Kim Jong Il is testing ballistic missiles and consuming gallons of fine cognac in his mansion.”
I would shoot the bastard myself if I had a few hundred million bucks. But an assassination wouldn’t kill millions of innocent civilians. The country is bound to collapse from internal pressure alone in a few decades, never mind non-military external pressure.
Nato,
I’m not a state eugenicist, but what is considered a “minimum standard” for health may change over time, and people may one day decide that knowingly giving birth to children susceptible to horrible genetic diseases is just cruel. Then legislation will be written with a “eugenic” flavor. A democracy might democratically decide to institute policies some alarmists might call “eugenics”.
Or, there may not be any laws for people having certain genetics, but widespread consensus in lieu of laws. For instance, most people agree that children should be given numerous vaccines. In the future, people may overwhelmingly have children with a genetic makeup that makes them immune to the cold and flu.
Again, “eugenics” is a scare term, the shock value of which conveniently dismisses all shades of grey. Is state encouragement of embryo screening “eugenics”? How about making genome sequencing available to parents so they have more knowledge about the type of kid they’ll have? Any compulsory medical treatments? Is assisted suicide “eugenics” because we’re killing off the diseased, even if they want it? Eugenics doesn’t have a sufficiently precise definition, so if we really want to discuss the issues, I think the word is useless.
Not everything is a slippery slope. Legalization of gay marriage wouldn’t lead to the wholescale collapse of traditional marriage, as some conservatives would have you believe. And using biotechnology and genomics to improve public health wouldn’t lead to a Brave New World. Whether or not a certain intervention is going too far must be examined on a case-by-case basis.
This may have already been mentioned, but I didn’t have time to read through every response. There is precedent for intervening in such a fashion, the war with Serbia over Kosovo was under similar circumstances. Unfortunately we are a little busy in the Middle East at the moment, so starting a war with N Korea would be difficult.
On the bright side, I don’t think it would be difficult to set up a stable democratic government in NK, since there is already a stable democratic government in South Korea. I think it would be more like a re-unification scenario like East and West Germany if North Korea was defeated in a war. The other question is if the war would be morally justifiable. Do you think it is important enough for you to personally take up arms and risk dying in this war? Starting such a war many of your fellow citizens would be doing just that, and some of them will die fighting.
I disagree with you about saying that everyone is capable of torture in the right circumstances. Perhaps in extreme circumstances, but I think the vast majority of torture that goes on in the world is done by people known as sociopaths. These individuals have a unique psychological makeup where they lack empathy, and this has empirically been shown to be true with brain scans. I think that if the chemical imbalance in a psychopaths/sociopaths brain could be corrected this could go a long way in solving many of the worlds social problems.
Not as extreme as you might think.
Unfortunately, this is a total misconception. :( Anyone in a position of power, like policemen, will eventually torture given the right circumstances. The two studies linked by Nick are canonical. If you read about the gulags you will see that torture was institutionalized on a truly massive scale. Does that mean that hundreds of thousands if not millions of Russians were all sociopathic? Not at all.
Torture is universal enough that you clearly don’t need to have a unique psychological makeup to do it. It has similar psychological underpinnings as bullying, but taken to the next step. It’s also a factor of desensitization — first you bother the prisoner with bright lights and rock music, next you and your friends are doing all sorts of evil things. And once you cross the line, you’ll always be capable of doing it again, under the right circumstances.
Torture is horrible, causing pain in general is horrible, be it emotional or physical. The problem with some global police force, is that, who sets the standard for what constitutes torture? I don’t believe that the United States can be trusted in this regard. Look at their record in dealing with enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay.
In the case of North Korea I think we can all agree that their actions are immoral, however, we have to take into account the brainwashing that goes on there; as well as the sense of national pride that every person has for their country. These are powerful tools to manipulate people, to push people to act in ways that are not beneficial, to themselves, or others.
It would be extremely difficult to justify to the populous of various nations that they should spend the money and lives that it would take to end the various evil deeds that take place around the world. The issue is too complex to be solved by attempting to re-engineer entire countries.
National pride along with brainwashing would cost hundreds of thousands of lives on the North Korean side, as well as tends of thousands of lives for the invaders. I don’t doubt that there are millions of North Koreans who hate their lives and their leadership, but I’m not sure how that translates to the troops in the military. The military are experts at manipulating human nature and controlling the will of the people. Like I said, it’s too complex and issue to just solve with military might.
I’m not saying that it’s impossible, just highly unlikely, given the current state of the world, and human nature.
I’m a little disconcerted by the idea of attempting to change human nature through genetic engineering. Not because I believe that humans nature should stay the same, but that, we don’t know what the consequences of changing one or more aspects of our nature would be. It could be highly beneficial, or extremely destructive, we just don’t know.
Maybe once we have computers powerful enough we can model human behavior. At this point we could modify various aspects of human nature and see what kind of affect this has on human behavior, as well as the effect it has on society as a whole.
I’d also like to comment on what mark said about torture and sociopaths. It’s essentially been proven that human beings are capable of the most horrible acts of rape, torture, and murder. It doesn’t matter what your upbringing. All human beings share common traits that, given the proper circumstances, will lead a person to torture and kill otherwise.
There are a set of famous experiments done during the second half of the 20th century dealing with this issue. Stanley Milgram ran an experiment on obedience which found that people will torture and kill another human being, if they are told by the authorities that they will not be punished for their actions. The following link describes the experiments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
I suggest everyone who hasn’t heard of these experiments, and thinks they would never torture, rape, or kill, should read it. It will open your mind to how easy it is to manipulate people into doing horrible things, and how easily a person is willing to give in to evil acts.
I think that the U.S. criminal justice system makes insufficient use of torture. My argument is here:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/08/bias-against-to.html
It is also a common misconception that all psychopaths are violent killers, or even criminals. The majority of them, estimated around 3% of the population, appear as normal, socialized individuals. Many of the more intelligent ones make it to powerful positions in society.
Here are some links that you don’t have to pay to access regarding psychopathy and brain scans, as well as other interesting info on the subject-
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/18573/
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/004209.html
http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/psychology/robert_hare/6.html
http://www.hare.org/links/saturday.html/
and last but not least, a good general book on the subject-
http://www.amazon.com/Without-Conscience-Disturbing-World-Psychopaths/dp/0671732617
In this book the author hypothesizes that many of the worlds social problems are caused by psychopaths. He also says that normal humans are not capable of the same kinds of atrocities that psychopaths are capable of. At the very least, I think the people who are actually giving the orders to carry out torture and atrocity are psychopathic, and they are a lot more common then most people realize.
I forgot to mention, I tend to think it is not that people in power will do evil things under certain circumstances. Rather, it is more like a larger percentage of morally corrupt people, in other words, people with psychopathic tendencies, seek positions from which they can abuse others. This is because they get off on abusing people and if they are smart will find ways to do it without getting caught. Don’t underestimate the cleverness of these individuals to mask their underlying disorder and appear to otherwise be upstanding citizens.
Torture is a tool. It is actually a rather desperate tool. Power is a very delicate balance of compromises and those in power are rarely adequately informed of all they need to know to wield power. As a result there is always the constant compulsion for those in power to take shortcuts. I personally believe that as soon as someone hits real power he or she will be inclined to use illicit devices, compulsion, corruption and torture being one.
Another thing which is real and clearly visible is the bewildering increase in options for someone in power. People without power are not served such a wide cuisine of options but those in power receive a a virtual banquet of relative freedoms. These freedoms are paired with the aforementioned hard choices and compromises but not always recognized as such by the powerful.
I am extremely suspicious of power but I accept the cold hard reality that for those in power, who are faced with such a wide array of freedoms, considerations and duties, coercive methods, “cheating” or outright torture eventually become unavoidable. We as a human species have very few natural predatorial enemies, and those in powerful have immediately stepped into that void as soon as we had tribes and tribal authority. It was only natural, right? Some would even call it God’s Will, just how arrogant can you get?
You argue all you want against torture, pile laws and punishments and control devices on societies, it will help not a single thing. The only solution is, for the time being, to restrict the distance between those in power and the constituency. As soon as an emotional distance develops (those in power are inherently better, for instance because they were member of some fraternity in college) the stage is set for abuse of power. Right now, and for only a few flimsy decades, we can treat that by “keeping the powerful” in sight. I would designate the movie “fight club” as a cinematic example.
But that era of accountability is over. Very very soon those with power will become as immanently unaccountable with each step they draw further away in ever expanding ivory towers. They will be liberated to regard those with no power as lesser humans and those who are perceived as a nonproductive part of society as ballast. The latter segment of society will expand fast when we have AI and robots and there will be a strong incentive for those who are powerful, to use that power to lash out according to their pleistocene tribal programming, and rid the collective of the explosively expanded “useless” segment of humans. This “entlosung” will start slowly, with small coercive jabs nobody objects too (after all they’re only gypsies/unemployed/illegals/mental patients, right?) but as soon as technology permits will expand to include more than half of society. And technology will fill this gap between theory and execution at a exponential rate.
Torture is a symptom of something bigger Mike. If you object to torture, you should object to the underlying evil and face that this underlying pathology may in fact balloon to historically new proportions in a few years.
I argued that concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an unaccountable power elite is probably the biggest existential risk to humanity and I do so here again.
We are all slaves. We were all born into a prison we cannot smell or taste or touch. It’s a prison for our minds. Don’t let that prison turn into a death camp.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp#NGO_reports
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prisoner_abuse
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/21/cia_sere/
Indeed Michael. Europe should invade the USA and revoke your independence. It would be fun for the most of the americans. It would be just like War of the Worlds.
Anyone have ideas on how to quantify the maximum achievable amount of human pain? Assume unlimited technology and one human lifetime, but no trans-humanism. Preferably normalize the “total pain the average Westerner receives and remembers during his healthy life” to 1, so that I have a reference point to compare to.
What sort of technology would it take to make people untorturable? Implanted mini-grenades wired to go off if the pain centers are too active, something like that?
I’m not necessarily opposed to steps toward world government, but I’m not “perfectly comfortable” with them either. If a world government goes sour that seems much worse than if some individual governments go sour.
As for the North Korea situation, would it be a ridiculous suggestion to just evacuate South Korea before attacking?
Here’s a paper by Bryan Caplan about totalitarian future world governments as an existential risk:
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/total4.doc
Tortures exist since man exists. Old tortures, new tortures, there has always been very easy to torture so tecnology isn’t going to worsen anything.
On the contrary, technology has allowed us to know when and where there is a torture & that’s the best way of preventing it.
Spoken like a man whom has never been exposed to teargas. Or Josef Mengele.
Technology (social and material) has advanced the capacity for the degrees, scales, and magnitudes of the tortures we inflict upon one another.
—Spoken like a man whom has never been exposed to teargas. Or Josef Mengele.
that’s not an intelligent comment. There aren’t sweet tortures!
“an Iraqi citizen commented, “the day Uday Hussein discovered the Internet was a dark day for Iraqâ€. ”
extremely insightful, michael. very interesting quote indeed.
No. The proposition hinges on too many unknowables, chief of which is “can we do this without rigging things to go our way?”
I’m sure there’s a logical breakdown somewhere because I’ve thought nothing about this, but I have little problem with the idea of much more targeted interventions (e.g., kill the midget, then kill the midget who replaces him if he’s over the top, then kill the oligarchy that replaces him with a target dummy figurehead if we don’t like them, etc.).
Sure, it’s prone to abuse, but not to the point of forcing our way of doing EVERYTHING down the throats of millions of people. The upside is we more subtly incentivize a bare minimum of cooperation.
“But obviously the constituents of NK would desire to put together a democratic state if the current dictatorial regime were toppled.”
Even if this were true, sans tinkering, it wouldn’t make it a good thing.
“I had The Balkans during the 90s in mind at the time. I didn’t say it was impossible.”
Could you elaborate? I’m having trouble figuring out what “worked” in that debacle.
As for WWII being worth it, I’m having trouble seeing why the gulags didn’t make Patton’s ideas worth it too. Just a roll of the dice that we took on the Germans, instead of the Soviets?
Oh wait, that makes no sense – the commies got rolling well before the nazis…
Geopolitics – humanitarianism justifications are after the fact victory-history.
Kinda hard to set up totalitarian world government in the future when the future has molecular manufacturing (I.E. Personal Fabrication) and ubiquitous WMD’s in the hands of numerous opposing factions. There’s a reason the U.S. cannot invade NK. Other posters have already mentioned it.
I just want to say Mr. anissimov I agree with everything you say in this article. I too wish to see the stop of torture and I believe technology is the way to go. I only wish I knew how to speed this up. Do you have any suggestions for me?
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