[datsci_est_2015]

This almost makes it funnier? As if it’s the folly of creators to believe that their creations are by virtue untethered to morals and ethics, and it’s only through their use by amoral or unethical actors that they become so.

[db48x]

Tools are always neutral. The hammer doesn't become evil merely because you used it to bash someone's brains in. Tools do not make choices; humans do.

[datsci_est_2015]

This is reductionist. Surely you’ve heard of the Torment Nexus?

This is along the lines of “If I don’t do it, someone else will get paid to, so it might as well be me that gets paid to do it” which I personally find morally abhorrent.

[Dracophoenix]

The "torment nexus" is just as reductionist a claim. It is almost always an ad hominem selectively invoked under arbitrary standards. If one consistently follows the argument raised in the meme to its ultimate conclusion, then nothing should ever be invented or accomplished for fear of some speculative harm at some undefined point in the future.

[datsci_est_2015]

Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition. I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.

[Dracophoenix]

> Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition.

If the conclusion of a meme is ridiculous, it stands to reason that the claim it makes is similarly so. Memes are not substantial enough to be considered as evidence or proof of moral pronouncements any more than other popularly-invoked and contextless aphorisms are.

> I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.

The character attack comes from the implied framing of the invention of the so-called "torment nexus" as the direct product of a person or people exhibiting moral failure through action or inaction. What that particular moral failure is or whether it is a moral failure one at all isn't even given a cursory examination by those crying torment nexus.

[salawat]

Reasonably foreseeable is the tonic to cure your attempt at a dilemma. There's a certain beyond which you don't build things because it's evident that society can't be trusted with it.

I have unfortunately lived long enough to see my passion cross this line.

[Dracophoenix]

If you don't mind answering, what exactly was this particular passion of yours?

> There's a certain beyond which you don't build things because it's evident that society can't be trusted with it.

Where does one draw the line and under what conditions? Reasonable minds can differ on the definition of foreseeable.

After all, Some of the most beneficial inventions to mankind have also aided its worst tendencies. For instance, the 20th and 21st centuries as we know them wouldn't exist without the combustion engine. Simultaneously, it's this same device that has significantly contributed to the pollution of the air.

Secondly, how does one mean to stop society or any individual from learning and building on new ideas in the Information age? Is such a thing even possible?

[drdaeman]

> Torment Nexus

You’re bringing in something that’s (vaguely and poorly, for no one knows what it actually could be) defined as something that fits the narrative and present it: “see, if we think up a tool that’s inherently evil by definition of it, it cannot be neutral”. We might, but could such tool actually exist?

(And before we joke about building it, we can think up of its polar opposite too, something unquestionably good that just cannot be evil in the slightest. Again, I suspect, no such thing can exist in reality.)

[datsci_est_2015]

Isn’t the purpose of all thought experiments to define something that is relevant to what you’re trying to philosophize about? “Fitting a narrative” is a thought-terminating cliché.

If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil - without a morsel of moral justification, then surely there exists a moral spectrum on which all inventions lie, and the inventors (and builders) are not absolved of their sins by virtue of not having actually used their inventions. Maybe you disagree that even in the case of the Torment Nexus the inventor has no moral reckoning (yikes). Maybe you disagree that it’s a spectrum, and rather binary: Torment Nexus immoral, everything else moral (weird).

That’s why I invoked the Torment Nexus.

[drdaeman]

> If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil

My issue is that your use of the phrase "exists ... theoretically" quietly steps across the boundary between ideal (where anything is possible), and real (where only some things are possible).

In other words, I think that Torment Nexus doesn't exist. Only its idea does, and I don't see how that's possibly sufficient. Kinda like faster-than-light travel - it would change a lot of things - but only it if would be a real thing. AFAIK to best of our understanding it's not. Even though the idea surely exists.

I rather think that it's the meme of Torment Nexus is the actual thought-stopper, because exploring what it could possibly be is what the meme warns one about.

[datsci_est_2015]

It’s really not that difficult to come up with a Torment Nexus that, given enough money, could be built today. I’m not sure why you’re convinced it could not exist. Just browse a bunch of Wikipedia articles about torture and ethnic cleansing and general injustice and connect some dots.

Another point of the Torment Nexus is that it’s dark humor that science fiction writers especially will ideate something in their writing, and spend great lengths discussing the inevitable harm it unleashes, only to wait a few years and watch as someone actually builds the thing they basically warned everyone about. It’s a placeholder for “thing so bad that I don’t actually want to describe it lest some psychopath actually builds it.”

[wahnfrieden]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7DjEsFTlic it's also settler logic

[yndoendo]

Let say someone creates a tool, an android which is designed to kill everyone that believes in a religion the creator does not like. Is that tool neutral?

Only way to repurpose that tool is to destroy part if the tool and replace parts. It is now a different tool.

I say intention of the tool design dictates if the tool is "neutral". That hammer analogy is tool simplistic to the tools we can now create and are attempting to create.

[J_McQuade]

This is an incredibly silly thing to say. If someone makes a knife that is terrible at carving wood or cutting food but is the perfect shape for, say, clitorectomies... then maybe that tool is bad and we should probably stop making it.

Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right?

[db48x]

This hypothetical knife that you've invented still doesn't make any choices. A person still makes the choice of how and when to use it. That's all that matters. Only things that can choose to act can be judged as ethical or unethical.

[evan_]

The tool is a lump of metal apart from ethics, but making the cliterectomy-knife was a choice someone made. We can judge that decision.

[Dracophoenix]

Morality requires agency and conscious agreement. A machine/device doesn't choose to be made or operated nor can it act against its maker/operator any more than rocks can act against the Earth. Regardless of motive, a moral conclusion can't be reached about the object.

[antonvs]

It depends on your moral framework. For example if you believe killing is always wrong, then guns are not neutral - they're a tool designed for evil uses.