*soapboxes*
Oct. 14th, 2019 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
0denseUnder the cut: unsolicited rambling opinions on agency, responsibility, and ethics of care!
So-
Today I went to a talk on sanctuary cities - precedent, notable cases influencing san francisco's sanctuary status, state vs federal law, whether collective or civil disobedience is acceptable and on what grounds, and so on. But one host brought up the complete lack of agency we have in our birth - regarding ourselves as agential and having responsibility for our own actions, then the contrary is that our facticities are not something we should be taken to task for. Artificial facticities even more so.
So what on earth makes it that an accident of birth can make me more beholden to someone in (for sake of argument) Indiana? I share a community, an environment, my life with people with whom I have everything in common except the accident of our births. I will always care about people in Indiana, but that cannot be taken as grounds to prevent me from caring for the people around me.
I also had my seminar on ethics and AI. We're discussing the singularity lately, and've been tearing into Bostrom. The bit that really baffles me is the assumption that AGI - the unlimited unidirectional expansion sort - will just. Fix everything. We want to cure cancer? AGI can synthesize every bit of information and find what we've been overlooking and spit out the answer. Want to solve world hunger? Our housing crisis? Radically transformative AI's got you. Listen, they tell me. The problem is that we can't read every paper being published, we don't have time to talk to every researcher, we're limited. AGI could actually synthesize everything and have the answers we're missing. Don't worry, they tell me. The singularity is inevitable, and then we'll be fine.
As though if we could just think about it hard enough, we could manage to fix ourselves. As though a lack of human effort is what's holding us back. As though it's that simple-!
So here I am at the end of the day, and what's been echoing in my head is that we are accountable not only for what we do, but what we fail to do.
And I mean that on every scale. We can't pretend that upholding some external allegiance gives us the option to ignore the people next to us. And we can't assume that some hypothetical future taking the responsibility out of our grasp gives us the right not to try our damnedest with the real people around us.
Refusal to act is as much an expression of agency as acting. What we do and what we fail to do; either way, it's our responsibility. That's what I was raised on, that's what I try to live with. And I think we like to forget that second half, too much. It's easy to tell yourself that signing a petition and/or donating to MSF is enough to be a good person, but when that isn't accompanied by immediate empathy, it's not sufficient. You don't get to be a good person if you're also ignoring your own community because that means thankless and unglamorous and maybe even smelly work. Contributing to the ACLU doesn't make me a good person, it's just baseline decent. It can't ever be taken to replace direct care.
So-
Today I went to a talk on sanctuary cities - precedent, notable cases influencing san francisco's sanctuary status, state vs federal law, whether collective or civil disobedience is acceptable and on what grounds, and so on. But one host brought up the complete lack of agency we have in our birth - regarding ourselves as agential and having responsibility for our own actions, then the contrary is that our facticities are not something we should be taken to task for. Artificial facticities even more so.
So what on earth makes it that an accident of birth can make me more beholden to someone in (for sake of argument) Indiana? I share a community, an environment, my life with people with whom I have everything in common except the accident of our births. I will always care about people in Indiana, but that cannot be taken as grounds to prevent me from caring for the people around me.
I also had my seminar on ethics and AI. We're discussing the singularity lately, and've been tearing into Bostrom. The bit that really baffles me is the assumption that AGI - the unlimited unidirectional expansion sort - will just. Fix everything. We want to cure cancer? AGI can synthesize every bit of information and find what we've been overlooking and spit out the answer. Want to solve world hunger? Our housing crisis? Radically transformative AI's got you. Listen, they tell me. The problem is that we can't read every paper being published, we don't have time to talk to every researcher, we're limited. AGI could actually synthesize everything and have the answers we're missing. Don't worry, they tell me. The singularity is inevitable, and then we'll be fine.
As though if we could just think about it hard enough, we could manage to fix ourselves. As though a lack of human effort is what's holding us back. As though it's that simple-!
So here I am at the end of the day, and what's been echoing in my head is that we are accountable not only for what we do, but what we fail to do.
And I mean that on every scale. We can't pretend that upholding some external allegiance gives us the option to ignore the people next to us. And we can't assume that some hypothetical future taking the responsibility out of our grasp gives us the right not to try our damnedest with the real people around us.
Refusal to act is as much an expression of agency as acting. What we do and what we fail to do; either way, it's our responsibility. That's what I was raised on, that's what I try to live with. And I think we like to forget that second half, too much. It's easy to tell yourself that signing a petition and/or donating to MSF is enough to be a good person, but when that isn't accompanied by immediate empathy, it's not sufficient. You don't get to be a good person if you're also ignoring your own community because that means thankless and unglamorous and maybe even smelly work. Contributing to the ACLU doesn't make me a good person, it's just baseline decent. It can't ever be taken to replace direct care.
