From: Wei Dai (weidai@eskimo.com)
Date: Sun Jun 02 2002 - 01:01:03 MDT
On Tue, May 28, 2002 at 06:54:19AM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
> At some point in the relatively near future, a program will benefit.
> What do you want to do with the computer resources under your control
> when the running of certain programs becomes a moral issue? Is it
> ethical to stop such an execution once it's started? What I definitely
> do *not* want to happen is for people to never run programs that benefit,
> simply to avoid the issue of halting them!
I would argue that programs don't benefit directly from getting run time.
They benefit from achieving goals that require run time. Thus if you halt
a program before it finishes running or achieves its goals, it may not
benefit at all.
Suppose the program is conscious and has spent a lot of subjective effort
trying to reach some goal, and you halt it just before it does. That seems
pretty bad, worse than not running it at all.
I think a good ethical rule would be to always tell the program the
computational resources it can access and ask whether it wants to be
run given those limitations. That way you never have to halt a program
involuntarily.
> The core issue is whether *freedom*, which has worked so marvelously
> until now in human history, will be ascendant in the future, or
> whether there will be a single morality imposed from above. In other
> words, will I be free to run the algorithms I choose on my resources,
> and will others be free to run me? Unless some nightmare eventuates,
> freedom may actually turn out to be the only computationally feasible
> choice. It really is, even now.
But you can't be sure whether you're living in a simulation or not.
Perhaps whatever resources you think belong to you actually belong to the
person who started this simulation, and therefore under your ethical
system you're not free to run any algorithms without his permission. Are
you sure that's what you want?
By "freedom" you seem to mean people should be able to whatever they want
with property they own. I wonder what is your position on how something
that is initially not owned by anyone (e.g., a piece of the Moon) should
become private property? Also, how does something that is initially
someone's private property (e.g., an egg cell) become self-owned (e.g., a
free person)? What philosophical principles explain/justify these
transitions?
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