Personally while I'm opposed to programmer certification, systems like these certainly make me wish such a thing existed.
To put this another way: the most efficient way we could have possibly found to get the use of nuclear arms in war globally banned, was to have someone use one. The Cold War would have been far riskier if the world hadn’t seen Hiroshima and Nagasaki—it would have been a stand-off to the use of weapons we would have as-yet had no understanding of the consequences of using. It probably would have ended with the use of hundreds of bombs, rather than just two.
It’s sort of the moral equivalent of a “work to rule” strike: the best way to get through the lesson that something is bad, is to stop pushing back against it and just let it happen for once.
I suppose doubling down of fossil fuels and burning of rainforest is great, we’ll just have to adapt quicker to the super extreme weather. But we can adapt with more aircon! Yay!
Maybe we are just monkeys who can’t actually learn from things that we haven’t experienced but then we’ll be replaced by nature any day now. I’d rather learn things the easy way, if at all possible.
Being a sociopath could be considered as a person's life choice, but it's not something to be considered bad. It's merely a medical condition.
It'd be nice if humanity was smart enough and empathetic enough to avoid the horrible mistakes we've made, but we're really not.
Not trying to hijack and turn things political here, but it was just an observation. Sometimes you need some chaos to bring about change for the good...sometimes the thing we fear most is what we NEED to happen in order for those in power to pivot and change their ways.
The problems arose when people realized that the same controls and abilities to instill this equity and “fairness” provided the platform to enable wide scale exploitation in the other direction. Want more profit? Change a variable that was a single number whose action would cause great stress for many people, but would produce a desired result. The goals and metrics would always start out resonable but eventually would cross a certain point, and once they did, there was no going back to the way things were.
Draw your own conclusions to the similarities in this system to our modern day technical web triumphs.
I would file this under 3. Moral Disengagement - A generalized cognitive orientation to the world that differentiates individuals' thinking in a way that powerfully affects unethical behavior.
