Be the richest person ever, buy them, and then shut them down.

And then my brain remembers that stress is bad for your heart, leading to being anxious about the consequences of own anxiety disorder

And star trek

I’d argue this kind of notion is comparable to ideas like “benevolent dictators” or surveillance supposed used only for people’s protection, in that, in theory if you had someone who both had access to sufficiently perfect information and was incorruptible with everyone’s best interests at heart running it- and their successor and all later ones also fit that description, then logically it ought to be beneficial. The problem being, of course, that in the real world that never happens.

People don’t have a perfect understanding of medicine and it’s difficult to tell if a deviation from one’s personal norms is beneficial or harmful or neutral, especially if you cannot ask the person involved for their feelings on it, since you’re determining if they should even be born or not. It’s not necessarily even an objective standard, one person might dislike living with a trait that another person might consider valuable. People are innately biased, even when they are aware if this and try not to be, and as such it’d be much easier to see the negative side to any trait one finds aesthetically unpleasing, even if that person is determined to ignore aesthetics.

Now, there’s a counterpoint that can be made that, while we may be imperfect at determining it, there are still quite a few conditions that are unambiguously harmful and undesired by effectively everyone, and that some of these things are genetic and therefore heritable. The entire concept of “genetic diseases” exists for a reason after all, and therefore one could argue that we could just test for these, and just limit eugenics to keeping people with those specific genes from reproducing, and that maybe then the potential benefits might outweigh the harm.

But even then, I don’t think it can be justified. The sorts of technologies that would let us determine if someone is a carrier for genetic disease also open up potential pathways for those people have children if they want them without passing on that specific gene, like ivf with an embyro chosen that didn’t inherit the disease, or potentially genetic manipulation of a zygote or gamete cell to change the specific gene responsible for an illness (that one might not be entirely ready now, but given how long human generations are, it certainly should be by the time old school selective breeding would make a difference even with hypothetically perfect intentions).

Those ideas have their ethical troubles too of course, before someone brings up “Gattaca” or the like, but my point is that given technology exists, or can be reasonably be expected to be available before enough generations have passed for selective breeding to do much, that offer any theoretical benefit a eugenics program might have, without having to forbid people from having children (which inflicts significant distress and therefore harm on those people by taking away their agency), there is no longer any point to it even if you could, somehow, prevent it from being used to further racism and the like (and again, I’m very skeptical of that being doable anyway). As a technology, it’s already obsolete, on top of it’s terrible track-record, and is simply not worth considering.

I assumed the point was more “we selectively bred those and their health sucks, so, selectively breeding humans would be unlikely to result in healthier humans, just ones with some aesthetic traits desired by whoever is in charge even to the detriment of the resulting people”

I mean, there’s no rule that says that one must consider nature, as a whole, to be ethical. It’s perfectly possible to believe that nature itself is “messed up” in a moral sense and merely outside the capacity of humans to change for the foreseeable future. One’s own behavior is much easier to impact by contrast.

It, if it is imagined as using a similar underlying technology, would also be an example of that technology that is both far more mature and understood (at least until the writers want to use it as an excuse for whatever shenanigans of the day) than current AI tech, and more capable, and also not shoved into everything in an attempt to force people to use it so that it’s owners can extract more of everyone else’s shrinking supply of money, and also not part of an economic house of cards that people are told will eventually impoverish masses of people when it inevitability collapses.

It’s like saying that in the 21st century we have decorative plants and everyone loves those, to a dutch person from the 1630s who has complaints about the tulip industry.

It really depends on the product Id think. For an extreme example, a packaging company making packaging that does not degrade after a reasonable time contributes to landfill waste in a way that a packaging that eventually breaks down would be less responsible for.

If a product’s useful life is limited by some other fundamental reason to the thing simply breaking (I don’t mean planned obsolescence here, but more objects only needs for a certain period of time and which customers are almost certain to throw out afterwards), then making the product last longer than needed just turns the extra material needed to get that robustness into extra waste.

If we are talking planned obsolescence, that reasoning flips around to making longer lasting stuff cause less waste obviously, though nothing is truly needed for or able to last forever so there is always going to be a point where making the thing tougher is not going to help the end user any further.

• design a thing with a reward system that trains it to take a certain action *

• get upset at your creation because you didn’t want it to do what your design led it to do *

Sounds kind of like what some of those AI company people do.

I mean, given the different but not random patterns to them, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone thought them to be a writing system. They’re not entirely far off from one, just one designed for computers.

Unless its a mudskipper. Then it’ll lord its ability to barely climb the bottom of a mangrove root over all the other fish to feel better about itself, despite still being pretty bad at it as far as tree-climbing animals go.

If you are the government, then I guess becoming ungovernable technically just means “remove rule-of-law”.

The pedant in me cant help but point out that that isnt how shark anatomy works. Male sharks have two analogous structures, called claspers, and they are located on the back of their pelvic fins.

To be fair, some of the marked locations are near the great lakes, so if having a large water source is one of the metrics those ones at least still fit.

Sort of but not in a way that probably fits the intent of the question (have drawn some for some friends with OCs that they use to represent themselves online)

I think its a satire on AI company people saying we’re close to a technological singularity, given the “we’re asking for a pause” is a phrase commonly associated with that

Abstract concepts dont tend to have the capacity for surrender, after all.

Pretty much. Ive personally seen “Dr. Thirsty” and “Dr. Percky” as well.

I wonder if these are simply regular off-brand/store brand alternatives, like one would expect in any country, or if they are a “make our own version of foreign products in response to sanctions or boycotts by the supplying company” type thing. If the later, it’d be ironic for fanta given that that brand was founded under the same kind of circumstances, as a ww2 German alternative to coca cola.

I wonder what growing the pumpkin in a space station would do, the fruit wouldn’t have to be able to support its own weight at that point