Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2014-06-22]:
It happens quickly—more quickly than you, being human, can fully process.
A front tire blows, and your autonomous SUV swerves. But rather than veering left, into the opposing lane of traffic, the robotic vehicle steers right. Brakes engage, the system tries to correct itself, but there’s too much momentum. Like a cornball stunt in a bad action movie, you are over the cliff, in free fall.
Your robot, the one you paid good money for, has chosen to kill you. Better that, its collision-response algorithms decided, than a high-speed, head-on collision with a smaller, non-robotic compact. There were two people in that car, to your one. The math couldn’t be simpler.
This, roughly speaking, is the problem presented by Patrick Lin, an associate philosophy professor and director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University. [1]
Ethics and science do not go together.
Decide what you really want.
Is it so important to have "science"?
Can your life be more complete with something else?
Every life is valuable.
And we cannot choose who will leave and who wont.
Algorithms.
Analysis.
Data.
What do that all matter when we cannot understand the basics of life?
We are gods.
Because we can choose to just Be.
And no algorithm will ever understand that...
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