Not a lot of thought went into it, is what it usually tells me.
But you're right about me not putting a lot of thought. I didn't think this would need more arguing than that.
I still believe that tech is fundamentally neutral, and as such so is its development. Even if a developer intends to give it bad use, the use and development are separate questions.
In the space between both equivocations (yours and the other guy's), lies the potential for moral abuse.
Using it was achieved by different kid level argument "It will prevent even more death and suffering"
The difference is of course a well thought out weighing of options, to feel into the issue and make your choice. Taking my immediate surroundings, a lot of people don’t engage in that level of philosophy. Knee jerk reactions are still very common in our species.
My position is that development is not unethical. I'm not trying to justify this position because I don't think it needs to be. When I said "others will do it anyway", it's not a justification and my original comment wasn't even about my position on this. My comment was referring to the usefulness of stopping the implicit always-ethically-neutral development of a tech in order to stop the potential misuse of it. I'm saying that even if they stopped the development of this one repo, or a few, or all others implementing this tech, it'd be ineffective. This repo is just one bit of the tech. Most of the tech is in its dependencies. If someone wants it and has nefarious uses in mind, they don't really really need this repo for that.
* action x is legal, but results in a worse world for everyone. * doing action x benefits the first 1000 people who do it. * much more than 1000 are capable of doing x, including me. * if I do it now, I will be one of the first 1000.
If these are true, I think one should do action x. I believe one would be completely justified in doing it.
I think the answer is inherent to the question of whether it's "justified", and the fact that you're being downvoted.
If Prisoner's Dilemma is played once, the optimal strategy is to defect. If it's repeated an unknown number of times, the optimal strategy is tit-for-tat.
Now, if you're an identifiable actor in a pool of tit-for-tat-players, and you have a history of defecting first, you're going to face opponents who normally play tit-for-tat start to defect against you first, too. In the end, you will end up as one of the worst peformers in the player pool.
So when you're asking if it is "justifiable" to defect in a game like this, it is the same as asking "will I be treated worse if I defect in this game". The downvote confirms this, I think. It means that in this population pool, bad behavior is punished (or people pretend it is)
Now, if defecting can either be done secretly or if you're in a popluation pool where everyone defects anyway, then always-defect is probably the nash equillibrium. In that case, defecting will be seen as justifiable.
> (...)In that case, defecting will be seen as justifiable.
Exactly! My argument basically boiled down to this. In certain situations, defecting may be the way to go. I would not blame the defector for doing what is in their best interest.
And “someone would have done this anyway” could very well be what's turning a situation into a prisoner's dilemma, so it could actually be a valid justification in some cases.
But yeah, it could depend on what is meant by "justification" exactly.
- If I catch this escaped slave, I can get the bounty instead of someone else!
- One of us Auschwitz guards will shoot that escaping prisoner; why shouldn’t I get rewarded for it?
So on and so forth.
If a piece of technology is going to be 90% bad 10% good and you can push it to 80% bad then it is completely justifiable to go for it.
Once I’m rich and powerful I can afford to be ethical, isn’t that the way of billionaires anyway?
You know, the most difficult part of this tech is probably the facial tracking, which is probably also used for the animation of 3d avatars. The jump is probably not huge.
Let's say that the tech around this DeepFaceLive repo develops to the point that the repo can become just a 10-line file of glue that makes a 3d model that's just a grid plane with a picture on it that moves according to a webcam feed. Such a repo is redundant and anyone that wants this tech can just apply the repos mentioned in the previous paragraph to do the equivalent.
Are those repos now bad? If not, it seems the ethical question can be resolved by some restructuring of code so bad uses are not made so obvious, while being almost as easy.
I do not agree with this assertion.
