I’m sure you guessed, but the typical reason for why someone cares so much about chances to use slurs is because they’re a racist.
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Yeah, the underlying justification for this particular interpretation of the Trolley Problem is to go from “Yes, I’d say a slur to prevent a nuclear holocaust” to “OK, what other situations is it acceptable to say them in?”
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That sounds like something a replicant would say if questioned!
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Cause he’s racist… Jinx @chenille
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Isaac Azimov may have simplified it quite a bit with his ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ and in fact, most of his stories come down to unintended consequences from the laws being simplistic, but the fact remains that if we create A.I., and if we expect it to be ethical, we must hard-code it to be better than we are. Humans are very good at giving lip service to ethics, but also notoriously good at finding loopholes and rationalizations in their own ethical codes. A.I. must either be better than us at ethics or worse at loopholes, or we’re done the moment we get too close to its off switch. ChatGPT not being able to issue racial slurs is a feature, not a bug, regardless of how much certain people would love to raise it in their own image.
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And this is why diversity in technical fields matters. As long as it’s a field dominated mostly by white, cis-het, straight dudes from the middle or upper middle class, we’re gonna keep getting this out come. Diversity won’t fix ALL the problems with this stuff, but it will certainly help make these things less racist, misogynistic, etc.
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Just my usual reminder that Asimov came up with the “Three Laws” as a clever plot device to write interesting stories. Not as something that was ever supposed to work in real life. Nothing more, nothing less.
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My great-grandfather fought in the 1916 rising, and luckily his death sentence was commuted or I wouldn’t be here. But he was in Kilmanham Gaol and heard Connolly and the other leaders being shot in the prison yard.
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That’s funny… my grandfather was in Mountjoy. When I was in Dublin in 2019 for my dad’s wake I asked someone “so they’ve got tours of Kilmainham jail” (it was in the movie In the Name of the Father standing in for a prison in England) “can I see Mountjoy?” and the bemused response was “no, not unless you steal a car while you’re here. We’re still using that one.” I ended up taking the Kilmainham tour instead. It was pretty moving seeing the place where they shot Connolly.
My dad’s favorite tuneless song was “Mountjoy Hotel” about an IRA prison break. “Forty Sinn Feiners \ like acrobat trainers \ Went over the wall \ Alive, alive o”. Anyway, similar story, my grandfather had 15 kids and there are more than 40 grandkids, and none of us would be here if they British had carried out the execution.
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But sci-fi writers are in the business of predicting the future! /s
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The Kilmanham tour is fantastic, and the renovations they did - pretty sure they were finished by 2019 are fantastic. My Great-grandad was chair of the reconstruction committee for a while and one of his daughters was a tour guide there her whole life, so it’s extra important to my family and I love that they did it justice at a time when so much of what makes Dublin great is being torn down or washed away in favour of more fucking hotels.
I actually live quite near to the Joy, but luckily never had any reason to go in. There’s a fantastic documentary came out recently called North Circular, it follows people and the neighbourhoods along the road the prison is on that goes from the Phoenix Park down to the docks, and there’s a very poignant piece from an ex-prisoner talking about his time in and out.
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I’m sure I could point to some articles by @doctorow about this too… I think he also notes that sci-fi is about today, not tomorrow…
But yeah. Pretty much. 
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“From the folks that brought you Palantir - our new relationship management software, Roko’s Basilisk”
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Similarly, the point of “ticking timebomb” arguments is to go from “torture is justified to stop a nuclear bomb” to “torture is justified to obtain intelligence”.
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That’s a bingo!
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Yes. The economy (created by humans) should be designed to make life better for as many humans as possible. Humans are not here to support and lay down supplicant to the ECONOMY (or a miniscule number of billionaires)
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Karl Polanyi has entered the chat
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It’s so so frustrating that anyone takes anything Musk says seriously, especially about technology. He’s so clueless. Sigh.
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