In more detail: The letter makes an argument for allocating more funds towards solving less immediate causes of human suffering. In particular, one emerging problem is that we as a species may face a morality apocalypse: Our species’ level of moral responsibility may become laughably insufficient to manage increasingly powerful technologies. We may become like a toddler with a flamethrower, resulting in suffering on a massive scale.
More detail yet: Technology allows us to impact the world more drastically, and can as easily be used for good as it can for evil. Technology is growing at an accelerating rate, while moral progress is plodding. Already our technological power outstrips our ability to use it responsibly (e.g. are we morally developed enough as a species to be entrusted with nuclear weapons?). A mistake would be to view morality as a fixed part of the human condition — there may be technological ways to enhance empathy or decrease our species’ tendency towards greed, revenge, and moral flexibility under duress. Without intervention to remedy our morality (perhaps through technological means), humanity may be at significant risk for horrific outcomes as our technical abilities more drastically eclipse our moral ones.
For now, I'm assuming yes. Aside from the questions on how to define good morals, and how such morals are best passed on, the main issue I had with the article is that it seemed to be a case of 'when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail'. Have you considered that technology may, in this case, not be the best tool for the job? I'd say the arts and our common culture has more room to be a positive influence on our collective consciousness than the application of some sort of clinically derived morality-inducing technology. Humanity doesn't need to be "fixed", it needs room to grow. Look at what holds back that room to grow and you'll have a much clearer picture of what can be done.
OK, I understand the problem being proposed, but what is the solution here? what solution is being suggested by the author? I understand that we are gaining more and more power without as good of understudying and self control to use it, but what can the Gates do to help?
Something about the idea of an "open letter" always bothers me. I don't know who Joel is, or why I should trust that this issue is important. The coming of a "morality apocalypse" is pure speculation, with no data or even anecdotal examples to back it up, and seems straight out of 60s Cold War MAD paranoia with little to add since then.
Open letters are only ever used correctly by those with enough power/influence to address their audience as a public entity.
Therefore, the main reason why those lacking power, in this case Joel, write 'open letters' is in the hope of gaining enough attention from others peeking at a letter addressed to a private individual.
I think this is a very interesting question, but there's a pretty strong tendency in the human psyche to assume that the answer is more or less to replicate $MY_CLAIMED_MORALITY out to the rest of humanity, which this essay does nothing to avoid. ($MY_CLAIMED_MORALITY stands in contrast to $MY_ACTION_MORALITY, i.e., how one behaves, which this essay does discuss there being a difference in, to its credit.) Fiddling with morality may have large potential benefits, but it can also cause catastrophe, yes, even worse than what we have now.
"Increasing empathy" sounds great, right? But it can cause excessively local decision making brought on by a particular case of acute pain, while missing the greater good that may be done elsewhere. It may allow a morality-parasite leader to come to power to manipulate everybody via their increased empathy to do something awful. (Indeed, I'm sure many people here have found that even in current society, there's certain areas that you must deliberately reduce your empathy in; you simply can not afford to be manipulated by every picture of a starving child you come across, or you'll become broke... and with no guarantee that your donations are doing anything but lining a pocket somewhere, if you're too busy giving to do background checks on who you're giving to....) And of course it's not a knob; what "increases empathy" in the lab may in the field "increase empathy for my tribe", as we are so wired for that.
Tribalism is bad, right? Perhaps so, but "let's just turn down the tribalism" does not clearly work. We are tribal for a reason. Unless you can flip the switch all at once, you run the risk of the selfless a-tribals getting parasitized by the still-tribal, meaning it may not be stable. It may not be stable even if you could flip the switch all at once; you still have to worry about morality parasites.
To say nothing of what happens once you have the power to twiddle with human morality, and then those of altered morality start twiddling the knobs themselves, which would be inevitable.
Yes, it is likely that some morality changes will have to occur for human survival... no, it probably is not the case that you can predict them trivially now, no, it probably isn't as simple as "Why can't we all just love each other?", and I very strongly suspect that if we could get a preview of that new morality, we'd all probably find it repulsive in some way... it's simply inconceivable that the answer is as easy as taking somebody's modern morality (which does not come from any magically better morality source, it's as broken as everybody else's) and stamping it out on everyone else.
I agree completely that this is a delicate issue; my main hope is to raise some awareness that the disconnect between technological progress and progress in morality/ethics deserves greater research focus. I am not in favor of blindly imposing anyone's particular and likely flawed understanding of morality universally, but that this could be an urgent issue for our species' survival.
1) At the risk of seeming trite, I liken this to your typical change management program. That is, simply rolling out a new tool across the organization and expecting people to use it in accord with the the vision it was conceived is unrealistic. People need to be educated and, depending on the circumstances, given incentives for using the new tool. Ask anyone who's been involved in one of these projects on a large scale and they'll tell you it often takes longer to realize the behavior change than it takes to develop the tool.
2) The field of moral psychology tackles these very types of problems, by, among other things, surfacing our moral contradictions and forcing us to consider why seemingly equivalent moral outcomes are not considered so (take the Trolley Problem as one, now nearly cliched, example). i.e. I think there's more work being done in this domain than perhaps the author gives credit. That said, I don't disagree that more could be done.
One person's tribalism is another's cultural heritage. I think the case has been made that stamping out unique cultures needlessly is immoral.
The biggest problem with this whole discussion is the idea that everyone even agrees on one morality. On top of that, even if everyone shared a common morality, it's questionable that it could be approximately quantified and graphed in a meaningful way.
To underscore this point, OP and many of the comments here state that there has been moral progress lately. Again, I'm not sure you can quantify morality like that, but I do know that a respectable amount of people believe that Western culture is regressing morally.
The gap between technological capability and the ability to deal with the consequences illustrates a problem with our collective intelligence and the ability or inability to contain the more volatile members of our species when they make use of technology for their own selfish gain.
Morality (the desire to render many shades of grey into black or white decisions) is not going to save you. The only solution that mortality has to offer at this point is to limit technology or attempt to put a halt to further progress until humanity has had a chance to catch up. To a certain extent this is being tried already in various conservative movements around the globe - from opposing stem-cell research to limiting the effectiveness of vaccination programmes.
Instead I'd put my money on creating more effective institutions and better levels of organization in order to limit any adverse effects until human intelligence is able to progress at a similar pace.
"It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism." -- H.L. Mencken
Morality is the wrong word to use. It is also highly subjective. Whose morality is this guy even talking about? What does it mean to increase morality? Mencken again:
"Immorality is the morality of those who are having a better time. You will never convince the average farmer's mare that the late Maud S. was not dreadfully immoral."
Morality is the right word, though; this is not ethics. It is unethical no matter what for psychologists to date their patients. It is not unethical for you to date one of their patients. Maybe a given psychologist is definitely not abusing their power/role in their relationship with a patient, and is sure that they are still an effective psychologist for their patient/lover. Then it may be morally OK (depending on your moral code), but it is still unethical.
The author says that scientific and technological progress in certain fields is outpacing human morality, but he or she advocates advancing science and technology toward better understanding human morality. Presumably, this would entail understanding and modifying the chemistry of our bodies to eliminate the "baser animalistic drives" caused by evolution. However, if our species is so immature, how do we know that our modifications are moral? How do we make sure the people wielding this awesome power aren't immoral themselves?
Noting that technical progress and morality begin diverging at the origin, and assuming that the graph is accurate, then the gap is just part and parcel of human existence. Analogous to Issac Bashevis Singer's observation that, "We must have free will - we have no choice," it could be said that we must have a morality gap.
But even more charitably, if such a gap exists it has been known for two and a half millennia.
This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
While the gap between moral and technological progress may be known, the argument here is that it becomes increasingly dangerous as technological progress accelerates relative to moral.
I think it would be a huge mistake to assume that the gap is an inherent part of human existence. Our morality results as a product of our brain and our culture. We can potentially use technology to remedy parts of our brain or our brain chemistry to enhance morality.
Of course, this in itself is a dangerous moral undertaking, but it is a possibility, one that perhaps needs greater research attention.
The zeitgeist of each civilized age is that the world is on the highway to hell. The quote from Plato wasn't accidental, the Athenians condemned Socrates. Though something from Confucius or Rousseau would also have worked.
However, leaving literary and cultural arguments aside, the argument that natural selection has not or will not create a good balance for the human ecological niche seems to show no more faith in science than an appeal to a divine creator. Likewise, the idea that humans are somehow exempt from natural selection in a way which allows them to shape it, similarly relies on some notion of our holding some unique biological status.
If you're selling brain state materialism, then you lose traditional notions of morality and culture. That's just the price of radically redefining traditional notions of the mind.
Even more to the point, the idea that morality cannot cope needs to show why the Hobbesian view - developed during a time when the movable type printing press enabled spreading Protestantism to violently play itself out in the English Civil War - is not the correct path. In other words, the morality gap depends on the absence of political progress - an argument difficult to wage in light of modern history and the diminishing of colonialism, slavery and monarchy, and the rising of the idea that there are universal human rights and more recently pressure for their extension to other species.
Seriously. It's a known issue, almost a cliche, and has been for a while. If somebody had some suggestions, they'd get to the point quickly. Let me re-write it with some (bad) ideas:
Humans evolved with sticks and stones, and their resulting evolved sense of morality cannot be trusted with guns and bombs and nuclear weapons, etc. Therefore I propose the following.
First, as stopgap measures:
1. Putting female hormones in the world's water supply.
2. Decommissioning all nuclear power plants and all machinery capable of refining uranium.
3. Placing every military under the direct control of the United Nations.
Second, as an eventual permanent solution:
1. Neutering all violent criminals on their first offense, as well as all past violent offenders. Neutering all other criminals who have been identified as having antisocial personality disorder. Since this will be required in all countries, the authority to do this will be placed with the United Nations.
2. An unlimited budget will be allotted for the purpose of researching and enacting a method for mining the entire planet's reserve of uranium and rendering it inoperable or unobtainable.
It is not a matter of morality. Suppose you have 100 billion robots, each programmed not to press a world-ending button. Some of them will press the button. It's a matter of statistics and the moral framework of the other robots doesn't even enter into the equation. That's exactly the situation we're in.
Moral progress has always trailed behind our capabilities, and if I may say something heretical here, maybe it's also been driven by technological progress.
From the moment on where the first knife was used to attack a fellow human being, our capability to do harm has always been greater than our moral inhibition to do so. And it still is like this, by the way, with the humble knife. It seems we've never mastered the art of handling it responsibly, people are still being stabbed to death.
However, I think it's also important to point out that we're dealing with outliers. Knife murder is not something a person typically does during the average day, nor is it being a bomber, or a Bond-type villain researching world-ending microbes. At the same time though it's important to recognize that the potential of these outliers to do harm to large numbers of people is only going to grow. Concocting the next deadly plague that might kill millions is now within the grasp of determined single crazy people. It's kind of astonishing how little the media has caught on to this profound game changer that has been decades in the making.
We live in an age where a single person could very well wage war against a huge group of (possibly defenseless) people. That's why the morality argument here is so weak: even supposing an ethically perfect society, we'll never have the statistical certainty to exclude destructive outliers.
I don't have a solution for this dilemma, of course, but it's not as "simple" as merely complaining about the slow pace of our collective morality; or, more insidiously, calling for technological regression as a measure to uphold the common good. The growing disproportional power individual crazy people are wielding makes a reasonably good explanation for the causes behind the Fermi paradox, so I don't think we'll get past this any time soon - at least not until reasonable technological protection is available that doesn't at the same time enslave the civilization it's supposed to protect.
In closing, I think there's hope. The cold war was a first testing ground for the whole effect, and the fate of the world rested repeatedly on the moral actions of individuals. I'm still somewhat incredulous that it all worked out in the end. By the same token, even though inflicting mass casualties is now definitely within the reach of single people, there's a distinct absence of world-ending catastrophes, and more importantly: there's even an absence of people who actually tried to do it.
We might be OK, we might not. But it's not down to large-group morality somehow playing catch-up with technology. The call to artificially inhibit technology "until we're ready" seems a downright unethical proposition to me. It could be many, many generations until things like religious delusions finally die out, but you can be absolutely certain that will never happen in a world that is artificially tech-restricted. I thoroughly believe the only way forward is, you know, the way forward.
Although I am not advocating a technological slowdown (nor do I think one is even possible) -- I think a wiser people would inhibit technology "until we're ready." If the result of technological growth vastly outpacing our ability to responsibly handle its power is extinction, then it is easier to make an argument for the morality in technological caution.
I'm not sure you read my comment (I admit it's quite long), but I'm trying to make the point that "until we're ready" is malicious crap that doesn't solve anything. To begin with, the potential for abuse is insanely high. I also made the point that by rights we're not even ready for knives yet, and statistically we'll never be. Even if "wiser people" existed to benevolently keep us at a level somewhere between animal and higher life form for what seems an indefinite time, even then this idea offers only downsides and not a hint of actual protection against the things it's supposed to slow down.
Inhibiting technology isn't realistic. It's equivalent to asking people to "stop asking questions." It will never happen.
Further, we should be less concerned about the 'selfish' individual who acquires a nuclear weapon than about the sociopath or psychopath who acquires the same. No amount of "moral innovation" will help that person. Indeed, only our ability to diagnose and treat such pathology - both realized only by technology - will save us.
To which angels do you propose we entrust the power of evaluating "until we're ready"? The matter under discussion here is a case in the field of governance, and the entire problem in that field is how fallible humans govern other fallible humans without making disaster inevitable. Were angels available to govern, the field wouldn't exist at all, because we'd never have had the need to invent it. Suggesting that someone should "inhibit technology 'until we're ready'" reduces to suggesting that all human forms of government should be replaced with angels. Sure, no argument, that would work a lot better than anything we have now! Does it matter?
Unfortunately, humans don't seem to have the qualities necessary for this to happen. The more institutions cooperate to inhibit technological progress, the more there will be to gain by defecting.
Unless, that is, there're sufficiently solid reasons for all players to believe that defecting is like starting a nuclear war: destructive for everyone in very close future.
(I feel there should be a term for this situation.)
>It is not a matter of morality. Suppose you have 100 billion robots, each programmed not to press a world-ending button. Some of them will press the button.
Am I missing something? If they are (a) robots, (b) each "programmed not to press a world-ending button", then none will.
Yes. The problem is the number of robots and the wide range of physical and mental defects they will exhibit statistically. Some of them will fail.
Sorry if it wasn't clear from the original post, but the hypothetical array of robots is an analogy intended to depict a perfectly moral society, the best case civilization achievable if you will, for the sake of argument. The larger argument goes that even such a "perfect" society cannot ever be deemed ready for its technological responsibilities - hence leading to the conclusion that the problem at hand is not one of morals to begin with and that the suggestion of holding back technological progress is a malevolent proposition on many levels.
Are you 100% certain? I mean programs do have bugs and it's not impossible to run into bugs that have catastrophic circumstances.
I hear stories of minor bugs that bankrupted companies (bad development practices) so what make you 100% certain that no robot will ever press the button?
The most inhuman acts of ignorance and hatred have traditionally been committed by societies, not individuals.
Individuals may have the ability to commandeer jet planes and fly into buildings, but only a nation can build a nuclear missile system capable of annihilating the planet.
The problem isn't with individuals. The problem is with society. And on that front — societal ethics seem to be keeping pace with technological growth. It might be technology that is propelling our societal ethics forward.
We'll always have broken men and women who do terrible things, but we might not always have broken societies that lynch, torture, pollute, and war.
And again I don't think I've made myself clear enough, sorry for that. The TL;DR of my hypothesis is: we'll never be "ready" as defined by the author. Even a perfectly ethical society wouldn't be ready. Plus, we're moving into an age where atrocities traditionally committed by larger groups can now be executed by individuals. Technical regression isn't the solution, and neither is some group of angelic wise men who get to decide what technological freedoms we're ready for. We aren't even ready for simple hand tools. No amount of moral progress is going to be enough.
Every attempt to compel humanity towards some higher degree of morality, or to accelerate this process, either through force or through law or by throwing money at the problem, fails. Our morality is increasing, but slowly. It is a developmental process. Steven Pinker's observation that violence has actually declined over the course of human history, despite anecdotal evidence to the contrary, attests to this fact.
Unfortunately, like the stages of economic development, there are no shortcuts here. The moral development of our species will be exactly proportional to our development of moral feelings, like empathy, and no faster. And since this kind of psychological change - from generation to generation - happens exceedingly slowly, there's no way around the fact that our moral development is also exceedingly slow. But slow is better than non-existent.
This letter manages to rub me the wrong way three times before it even begins.
First the title, why is this addressed to Bill and Melinda Gates? What they spend their money and (more important) their time and energy on is wholly their own business. I'm of the opinion that their work is most admirable and important.
Second the graph is comparing magnitude of morality with magnitude of technological progress over time, which just doesn't make any sense. The term 'morality apocalypse' is equally ridiculous and over-the-top, I was half expecting to find the term 'war on immorality' somewhere in the letter, which would have been quite ironic.
Finally the TLDR seems to suggest we ought to stop or slow down technological progress because 'we can't handle it' which might be the most immoral thing to do, seeing how many people's lifes have been saved by advances in technology and medicine. Instead of holding back progress on the technology front (which is futile anyway) we might do better increasing morality by simply educating people (probably making use of technology). Explain to the toddler what the consequences of using the flamethrower are, it is not impossible.
I think it is not so much a question about morality, but about our societal structures.
In the past few centuries, human history has been driven by technological advances. But the major defining development of the 21 century will not be technological, but social. Society will either radically change for the better, or for the worse.
What was the defining development of the 20th century? I can think of many big ones that weren't technological in nature, for example the causes of the world wars.
There were too many to pick out a single one - ubiquotious electrification, running water, modern logistics, modern medicine (esp. antibiotics)...
The thing with the political developments is that they were IMHO dependent on previous technological and economical developments.
Fascism was only possible in a modern nation-state. In a feudal world, the peasants didn't care much which king ruled over their land, they didn't identify much with their nation. That changed when everything grew closer together. I think new means of communication and transportation greatly helped with building a national identity (and later were used for propaganda). The rise of capitalism and the bourgeois/civil society were also neccessary factors. Why do I say this was driven by technology? Because the begin of modern capitalism is inseparable from the industrial revolution. In the end of course it's not just a causal chain, but a very complicated development.
Anyway, what I was trying to say is that when people have hopes for the future, they often think of great technological breakthroughs, continuing the progress of the 20th century. A cure for cancer, fusion energy, robots and AI, .... I think the biggest breakthroughs will be on another field: How can we make a global economy that is not so riddled by crises? How can we distribute wealth better? Can we build a society without money? How do we make better descisions as a society (E.g. the political system in the US is clearly broken right now)? How do we ensure the freedom and libery of everybody? How do we prevent wars? etc. etc.
There were a bunch of ideas in the last few centuries in this field, some better, some not - constitutional monarcy, the republic, democracy (parlamentary, or council), socialism, communism (the dozen or so ideas and sytems that called themselves such), social market economy, the stuff they're doing in china right now, and so on. In the last few decades, the consensus seemd to be that these are mostly ideologies, and ideology is dead and capitalism+western democracy has won. Now, we are seeing our system fail slowly, too, and we seem pretty helpless about it. It won't help to throw ever new technologies at it. But I think by learning from the mistakes of past societies, but also from what they got right, we should be able to gradually develop a new kind of society that ensures prosperity, freedom, fairness and peace.
I hope this was not too incoherent to understand :-)
Not exactly morality and not exactly an apocalypse, IMO. It seems that our brains can't keep up with our technology - for example, 200 years ago, one person could realistically learn the workings of most of existing technologies - nowadays, it's literally impossible even if you specialize.
You need to work in large groups, yet living as individuals, it's hard to keep track of what you create.
And that's the problem - maybe the Gates foundation could invest in mapping the brain and figuring out how to improve it.
Once we're smart enough to understand more of the implications of our technologies and ways of life, morality will be easy to fix.
I understand the sentiment. What I don't think a lot of people understand is that people like the Gates have probably gone over all this at least in their minds. And they've come to the same conclusion everyone else has: we have to evolve out of it. Unfortunately, evolution is a terribly inefficient way to deal with the problem. Maybe genetic engineering to remove the lizard brain from the next generation of humans might work.
Before the 1960's, when God was in schools, both Blacks and Whites, didn't have to lock their doors.
Before the 1960's, there was no iron bars on windows, dead bolt locks, car, home and business alarms, and no security cameras in the home, business or city wide.
Those are the facts, especially for the atheists and agnostics.
Morality without God is a meaningless conversation, because without authority moral choices are completely voluntary.
No matter how much progress we make as human beings, we are still 100% dependent on God. My favourite apocryphal story illustrates this point:
---
One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.
The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."
God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist was done talking, God said, "Very well, how about this, let's say we have a man making contest." To which the scientist replied, "OK, great!"
But God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam."
The scientist said, "Sure, no problem" and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt.
God just looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!"
This is a very sensible and well-reasoned, if ridiculously windy[1], essay which has its basis in one completely erroneous assumption, which is that it's possible to answer, save after the fact, a question like "[A]re we morally developed enough as a species to be entrusted with nuclear weapons?"
That's a very simple question to answer, but you can only do so in hindsight. Did we exterminate ourselves with nuclear weapons? If we did, then we weren't morally developed enough to be entrusted with them; if we didn't, then we were.
And even in that, there's another bogus assumption, which is hidden behind the word "entrusted". No one entrusted the human species with nuclear weapons; there was no event in which God, or angels, or sufficiently advanced aliens, descended from on high, amidst clouds of incense or rocket exhaust, and bequeathed unto us the knowledge of what happens when you squeeze a ball of uranium very tightly. It may seem absurd to point this out, but only until you consider that "entrusted", in implying a higher power which did the entrusting, implies also a higher power which could reverse that decision; there being no such power, it is impossible to reason accurately about the morality of any technological development when such reasoning involves the implicit assumption that there is such a power.
[1] Those familiar with my comments on HN may be astonished to see me calling anything "windy", much less ridiculously so. In my defense I can only say that I reserve the use of that adjective and its adverb for cases of extreme provocation, the nature of which should be obvious to anyone attempting to wade through the text I've so described.
> And even in that, there's another bogus assumption, which is hidden behind the word "entrusted". No one entrusted the human species with nuclear weapons; there was no event in which God, or angels, or sufficiently advanced aliens, descended from on high, amidst clouds of incense or rocket exhaust, and bequeathed unto us the knowledge of what happens when you squeeze a ball of uranium very tightly.
---------------------
From the perspective of the vast majority, scientists entrusted us with the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons. They could have kept quiet on that score.
The perspective of the vast majority has no slightest bearing on what is or is not true.
You imply either that scientists are angels, or that every particle physicist is a member of a world-girdling conspiracy, which exists as a sort of caucus which decides, presumably by some highly precise and objective method, what every member shall or shall not do. Neither is even remotely plausible. Try again, please.
I simply imply that people are responsible for their actions. People were given the knowledge to make nuclear weapons by those smarter than them.
The fact that others may very well have eventually given them the same is neither here nor there, and your weird obsession with requiring it be angels and aliens does nothing to alter that. If you assume many groups of aliens, each species of which might have given out nukes, then you're in the exact same position as our theoretical physicists - 'of course humans weren't entrusted with nuclear weapons, after all, aliens aren't all part of a great alien conspiracy....'
The two scenarios are functionally analogous but for the fact that ALIENS is posted into the second.
The point of involving angels and aliens is to make clear the absurdity of assuming some superhuman agency which handed down the knowledge from on high. Scientists are human beings, too, with all the fallibility and lack of prescience that is our common heritage, and the fact that "others may very well have eventually given them the same" is the very crux of the matter at hand.
From our perspective, with the benefit of hindsight, it is trivially obvious that the Third Reich made no significant process toward the attainment of nuclear weapons, and that such weapons were not necessary to guarantee the Allies a victory in Europe. Do you think that was trivially obvious in 1942? It was nothing of the sort, and for all those who worked on the Manhattan Project could know, their efforts were absolutely vital to their nation's successful prosecution of the war. In such circumstances, what you would no doubt consider a principled refusal to participate in the project would, in fact, constitute moral cowardice of the highest order, on the part of anyone who found Allied victory in any sense preferable to Axis. They could not have known, after all, that the Third Reich had no realistic hope of developing an atom bomb, given the time and resources available to them, and judging them on the basis of what we know now, seventy years after the Third Reich's abject defeat and dissolution, is purely foolish.
All of this goes to demonstrate your basic error, which is to consider "scientists" a single, unified category which can, or can be expected to, act as a whole in whatever it believes, again as a whole, to be the best interests of mankind. This produces a sort of "us and them" mentality, which implicitly elevates your "scientists" category to the level of the superhuman actors whose existence my "angels or aliens" formulation makes explicit. It is this mentality which permits you to expect knowledge and behavior of scientists which you do not expect of humans, and it is precisely this mistake the original author makes.
Humans are fallible, but some humans are massively more fallible than others. Humans lack foresight, but some humans lack a lot more foresight than others. Viewing humanity as a whole, without respect to local variations in morality and other qualities, over-simplifies things.
You have a group of individuals who come across a power that the majority lack, they also happen to be a lot better educated than the average, and their choice is whether to give away the secret of that power. Perhaps they're not well equipped to make that choice, but that's neither here nor there in framing the basic question - and the answer to that question can then be used to form other questions. If they turn out to be ill-equipped to make the choice, then that's at least something that can be worked on. How do you improve the qualities you'd want of a decision maker in this regard?
That's a lot more useful, realistic line of thinking to go down than just shrugging and going 'All humans, we should expect the same knowledge and behaviour.' The behaviour you expect of a randomly chosen human should be different to behaviour you expect of a semi-randomly chosen human from a specific subset. Heck, even the arguments you can have - you can't talk about probability with most people, they're not going to understand what you mean when you say 'standard deviation' or anything like that. Most people do not do much thinking.
You don't need scientists to be super human. You just need them to be a group you can start asking questions about. Get an angle of attack on the problem through. If they turn out to be average or substandard or whatever in some particular area, then there are ways that can be addressed.
Given the way you keep ignoring my argument, I don't see this going anywhere useful, so I'm going to curtail my further participation. I'd like to say it's been a pleasure, but...
Part of the issue is that many societies, even the ones in pretty comfortable position, operate on "survival mode" where power is perceived cool and having more is always better.
It's unclear to me that "moral progress" is well defined, as it seems to imply that there's some universal, generally accepted notion of an ideal morality which we can aspire to. And yet I seriously doubt that we could find any agreement on what that could be.
People will be surprised how blurry the constructs of society really are. Science really IS easier compared to politics. You don't need scientific advancements, but they're welcome too, and in the end they matter a lot.
Marketing technological advances while aiming to help the poorest is I think the best way to show everybody how technologies can really help us, and not enslave us. Technologies must be designed with political goals too. You could naively say the iPhone is creating more political problems than it solves, and you'd be right. What Bill Gates does is creating incentives for research in the way the NASA did. And I think it's awesome.
I guess that's what makes Bill Gates smarter in the end. You'll moan about antitrust laws and go watch JOBS, but today the people who make difference are businessmen who knows their basics of science.
If you're unhappy about politics, don't tell Bill Gates, that's not what he does. His giant financial resources won't help solving political problems.
Maybe he could pour money into making some media communications projects about science and studies just like Al Gore did, but again, I doubt Bill Gates really has the proper connections to do this.
there may be technological ways to enhance empathy or decrease our species’ tendency towards greed, revenge, and moral flexibility under duress.
Congratulations OP, you have reasoned yourself into transhumanism! To me the argument the OP described is one of the best ways to come to human-augmentation advocacy because it becomes obvious that we should be using technology to improve our capabilities.
To delve more deeply into transhumanism from this perspective, I would caution to not get preoccupied with current transhuman threads which are largely based on prosthetics and physical limitations.
Rather, I would look more towards nootropics and other technologies that help maintain or improve brain function and technologies which help reduce biases. In my opinion there is not enough being done to help the average person make better decisions on a daily basis, though there are some things. The fact that this is becoming a discussion point is great!
edit: I should also mention that the field of behavioral economics positively emphasizes the idea of "nudging" people toward better decision largely through design.
What is meant by "moral progress"? Is it the illusion, (or less argumentatively, the perception) that we living today are somehow more enlightened than those in the past?
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadTLDR: Don’t give a toddler a flamethrower.
In more detail: The letter makes an argument for allocating more funds towards solving less immediate causes of human suffering. In particular, one emerging problem is that we as a species may face a morality apocalypse: Our species’ level of moral responsibility may become laughably insufficient to manage increasingly powerful technologies. We may become like a toddler with a flamethrower, resulting in suffering on a massive scale.
More detail yet: Technology allows us to impact the world more drastically, and can as easily be used for good as it can for evil. Technology is growing at an accelerating rate, while moral progress is plodding. Already our technological power outstrips our ability to use it responsibly (e.g. are we morally developed enough as a species to be entrusted with nuclear weapons?). A mistake would be to view morality as a fixed part of the human condition — there may be technological ways to enhance empathy or decrease our species’ tendency towards greed, revenge, and moral flexibility under duress. Without intervention to remedy our morality (perhaps through technological means), humanity may be at significant risk for horrific outcomes as our technical abilities more drastically eclipse our moral ones.
For now, I'm assuming yes. Aside from the questions on how to define good morals, and how such morals are best passed on, the main issue I had with the article is that it seemed to be a case of 'when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail'. Have you considered that technology may, in this case, not be the best tool for the job? I'd say the arts and our common culture has more room to be a positive influence on our collective consciousness than the application of some sort of clinically derived morality-inducing technology. Humanity doesn't need to be "fixed", it needs room to grow. Look at what holds back that room to grow and you'll have a much clearer picture of what can be done.
Therefore, the main reason why those lacking power, in this case Joel, write 'open letters' is in the hope of gaining enough attention from others peeking at a letter addressed to a private individual.
"Increasing empathy" sounds great, right? But it can cause excessively local decision making brought on by a particular case of acute pain, while missing the greater good that may be done elsewhere. It may allow a morality-parasite leader to come to power to manipulate everybody via their increased empathy to do something awful. (Indeed, I'm sure many people here have found that even in current society, there's certain areas that you must deliberately reduce your empathy in; you simply can not afford to be manipulated by every picture of a starving child you come across, or you'll become broke... and with no guarantee that your donations are doing anything but lining a pocket somewhere, if you're too busy giving to do background checks on who you're giving to....) And of course it's not a knob; what "increases empathy" in the lab may in the field "increase empathy for my tribe", as we are so wired for that.
Tribalism is bad, right? Perhaps so, but "let's just turn down the tribalism" does not clearly work. We are tribal for a reason. Unless you can flip the switch all at once, you run the risk of the selfless a-tribals getting parasitized by the still-tribal, meaning it may not be stable. It may not be stable even if you could flip the switch all at once; you still have to worry about morality parasites.
To say nothing of what happens once you have the power to twiddle with human morality, and then those of altered morality start twiddling the knobs themselves, which would be inevitable.
Yes, it is likely that some morality changes will have to occur for human survival... no, it probably is not the case that you can predict them trivially now, no, it probably isn't as simple as "Why can't we all just love each other?", and I very strongly suspect that if we could get a preview of that new morality, we'd all probably find it repulsive in some way... it's simply inconceivable that the answer is as easy as taking somebody's modern morality (which does not come from any magically better morality source, it's as broken as everybody else's) and stamping it out on everyone else.
2) The field of moral psychology tackles these very types of problems, by, among other things, surfacing our moral contradictions and forcing us to consider why seemingly equivalent moral outcomes are not considered so (take the Trolley Problem as one, now nearly cliched, example). i.e. I think there's more work being done in this domain than perhaps the author gives credit. That said, I don't disagree that more could be done.
One person's tribalism is another's cultural heritage. I think the case has been made that stamping out unique cultures needlessly is immoral.
The biggest problem with this whole discussion is the idea that everyone even agrees on one morality. On top of that, even if everyone shared a common morality, it's questionable that it could be approximately quantified and graphed in a meaningful way.
To underscore this point, OP and many of the comments here state that there has been moral progress lately. Again, I'm not sure you can quantify morality like that, but I do know that a respectable amount of people believe that Western culture is regressing morally.
Morality (the desire to render many shades of grey into black or white decisions) is not going to save you. The only solution that mortality has to offer at this point is to limit technology or attempt to put a halt to further progress until humanity has had a chance to catch up. To a certain extent this is being tried already in various conservative movements around the globe - from opposing stem-cell research to limiting the effectiveness of vaccination programmes.
Instead I'd put my money on creating more effective institutions and better levels of organization in order to limit any adverse effects until human intelligence is able to progress at a similar pace.
What is your solution?
I hear the word morality and immediately assume the speaker/writer is arguing from a religious point of view.
Morality is the wrong word to use. It is also highly subjective. Whose morality is this guy even talking about? What does it mean to increase morality? Mencken again:
"Immorality is the morality of those who are having a better time. You will never convince the average farmer's mare that the late Maud S. was not dreadfully immoral."
But even more charitably, if such a gap exists it has been known for two and a half millennia.
This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
-- Phaedrus, Plato. http://oll.libertyfund.org/simple.php?id=111
I think it would be a huge mistake to assume that the gap is an inherent part of human existence. Our morality results as a product of our brain and our culture. We can potentially use technology to remedy parts of our brain or our brain chemistry to enhance morality.
Of course, this in itself is a dangerous moral undertaking, but it is a possibility, one that perhaps needs greater research attention.
However, leaving literary and cultural arguments aside, the argument that natural selection has not or will not create a good balance for the human ecological niche seems to show no more faith in science than an appeal to a divine creator. Likewise, the idea that humans are somehow exempt from natural selection in a way which allows them to shape it, similarly relies on some notion of our holding some unique biological status.
If you're selling brain state materialism, then you lose traditional notions of morality and culture. That's just the price of radically redefining traditional notions of the mind.
Even more to the point, the idea that morality cannot cope needs to show why the Hobbesian view - developed during a time when the movable type printing press enabled spreading Protestantism to violently play itself out in the English Civil War - is not the correct path. In other words, the morality gap depends on the absence of political progress - an argument difficult to wage in light of modern history and the diminishing of colonialism, slavery and monarchy, and the rising of the idea that there are universal human rights and more recently pressure for their extension to other species.
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Humans evolved with sticks and stones, and their resulting evolved sense of morality cannot be trusted with guns and bombs and nuclear weapons, etc. Therefore I propose the following.
First, as stopgap measures:
1. Putting female hormones in the world's water supply.
2. Decommissioning all nuclear power plants and all machinery capable of refining uranium.
3. Placing every military under the direct control of the United Nations.
Second, as an eventual permanent solution:
1. Neutering all violent criminals on their first offense, as well as all past violent offenders. Neutering all other criminals who have been identified as having antisocial personality disorder. Since this will be required in all countries, the authority to do this will be placed with the United Nations.
2. An unlimited budget will be allotted for the purpose of researching and enacting a method for mining the entire planet's reserve of uranium and rendering it inoperable or unobtainable.
Moral progress has always trailed behind our capabilities, and if I may say something heretical here, maybe it's also been driven by technological progress.
From the moment on where the first knife was used to attack a fellow human being, our capability to do harm has always been greater than our moral inhibition to do so. And it still is like this, by the way, with the humble knife. It seems we've never mastered the art of handling it responsibly, people are still being stabbed to death.
However, I think it's also important to point out that we're dealing with outliers. Knife murder is not something a person typically does during the average day, nor is it being a bomber, or a Bond-type villain researching world-ending microbes. At the same time though it's important to recognize that the potential of these outliers to do harm to large numbers of people is only going to grow. Concocting the next deadly plague that might kill millions is now within the grasp of determined single crazy people. It's kind of astonishing how little the media has caught on to this profound game changer that has been decades in the making.
We live in an age where a single person could very well wage war against a huge group of (possibly defenseless) people. That's why the morality argument here is so weak: even supposing an ethically perfect society, we'll never have the statistical certainty to exclude destructive outliers.
I don't have a solution for this dilemma, of course, but it's not as "simple" as merely complaining about the slow pace of our collective morality; or, more insidiously, calling for technological regression as a measure to uphold the common good. The growing disproportional power individual crazy people are wielding makes a reasonably good explanation for the causes behind the Fermi paradox, so I don't think we'll get past this any time soon - at least not until reasonable technological protection is available that doesn't at the same time enslave the civilization it's supposed to protect.
In closing, I think there's hope. The cold war was a first testing ground for the whole effect, and the fate of the world rested repeatedly on the moral actions of individuals. I'm still somewhat incredulous that it all worked out in the end. By the same token, even though inflicting mass casualties is now definitely within the reach of single people, there's a distinct absence of world-ending catastrophes, and more importantly: there's even an absence of people who actually tried to do it.
We might be OK, we might not. But it's not down to large-group morality somehow playing catch-up with technology. The call to artificially inhibit technology "until we're ready" seems a downright unethical proposition to me. It could be many, many generations until things like religious delusions finally die out, but you can be absolutely certain that will never happen in a world that is artificially tech-restricted. I thoroughly believe the only way forward is, you know, the way forward.
Further, we should be less concerned about the 'selfish' individual who acquires a nuclear weapon than about the sociopath or psychopath who acquires the same. No amount of "moral innovation" will help that person. Indeed, only our ability to diagnose and treat such pathology - both realized only by technology - will save us.
Unless, that is, there're sufficiently solid reasons for all players to believe that defecting is like starting a nuclear war: destructive for everyone in very close future.
(I feel there should be a term for this situation.)
Am I missing something? If they are (a) robots, (b) each "programmed not to press a world-ending button", then none will.
Sorry if it wasn't clear from the original post, but the hypothetical array of robots is an analogy intended to depict a perfectly moral society, the best case civilization achievable if you will, for the sake of argument. The larger argument goes that even such a "perfect" society cannot ever be deemed ready for its technological responsibilities - hence leading to the conclusion that the problem at hand is not one of morals to begin with and that the suggestion of holding back technological progress is a malevolent proposition on many levels.
Based on that... oh well, just read the post ;)
I hear stories of minor bugs that bankrupted companies (bad development practices) so what make you 100% certain that no robot will ever press the button?
What if one malfunctioned such that a part or appendage fell off and hit the button?
What if one bumped into another that was standing next to the button and accidentally pressed it?
Individuals may have the ability to commandeer jet planes and fly into buildings, but only a nation can build a nuclear missile system capable of annihilating the planet.
The problem isn't with individuals. The problem is with society. And on that front — societal ethics seem to be keeping pace with technological growth. It might be technology that is propelling our societal ethics forward.
We'll always have broken men and women who do terrible things, but we might not always have broken societies that lynch, torture, pollute, and war.
Append: ", so far." and ", yet."
Now you understand the concern.
Unfortunately, like the stages of economic development, there are no shortcuts here. The moral development of our species will be exactly proportional to our development of moral feelings, like empathy, and no faster. And since this kind of psychological change - from generation to generation - happens exceedingly slowly, there's no way around the fact that our moral development is also exceedingly slow. But slow is better than non-existent.
First the title, why is this addressed to Bill and Melinda Gates? What they spend their money and (more important) their time and energy on is wholly their own business. I'm of the opinion that their work is most admirable and important.
Second the graph is comparing magnitude of morality with magnitude of technological progress over time, which just doesn't make any sense. The term 'morality apocalypse' is equally ridiculous and over-the-top, I was half expecting to find the term 'war on immorality' somewhere in the letter, which would have been quite ironic.
Finally the TLDR seems to suggest we ought to stop or slow down technological progress because 'we can't handle it' which might be the most immoral thing to do, seeing how many people's lifes have been saved by advances in technology and medicine. Instead of holding back progress on the technology front (which is futile anyway) we might do better increasing morality by simply educating people (probably making use of technology). Explain to the toddler what the consequences of using the flamethrower are, it is not impossible.
In the past few centuries, human history has been driven by technological advances. But the major defining development of the 21 century will not be technological, but social. Society will either radically change for the better, or for the worse.
The thing with the political developments is that they were IMHO dependent on previous technological and economical developments.
Fascism was only possible in a modern nation-state. In a feudal world, the peasants didn't care much which king ruled over their land, they didn't identify much with their nation. That changed when everything grew closer together. I think new means of communication and transportation greatly helped with building a national identity (and later were used for propaganda). The rise of capitalism and the bourgeois/civil society were also neccessary factors. Why do I say this was driven by technology? Because the begin of modern capitalism is inseparable from the industrial revolution. In the end of course it's not just a causal chain, but a very complicated development.
Anyway, what I was trying to say is that when people have hopes for the future, they often think of great technological breakthroughs, continuing the progress of the 20th century. A cure for cancer, fusion energy, robots and AI, .... I think the biggest breakthroughs will be on another field: How can we make a global economy that is not so riddled by crises? How can we distribute wealth better? Can we build a society without money? How do we make better descisions as a society (E.g. the political system in the US is clearly broken right now)? How do we ensure the freedom and libery of everybody? How do we prevent wars? etc. etc.
There were a bunch of ideas in the last few centuries in this field, some better, some not - constitutional monarcy, the republic, democracy (parlamentary, or council), socialism, communism (the dozen or so ideas and sytems that called themselves such), social market economy, the stuff they're doing in china right now, and so on. In the last few decades, the consensus seemd to be that these are mostly ideologies, and ideology is dead and capitalism+western democracy has won. Now, we are seeing our system fail slowly, too, and we seem pretty helpless about it. It won't help to throw ever new technologies at it. But I think by learning from the mistakes of past societies, but also from what they got right, we should be able to gradually develop a new kind of society that ensures prosperity, freedom, fairness and peace.
I hope this was not too incoherent to understand :-)
You need to work in large groups, yet living as individuals, it's hard to keep track of what you create.
And that's the problem - maybe the Gates foundation could invest in mapping the brain and figuring out how to improve it.
Once we're smart enough to understand more of the implications of our technologies and ways of life, morality will be easy to fix.
Before the 1960's, there was no iron bars on windows, dead bolt locks, car, home and business alarms, and no security cameras in the home, business or city wide.
Those are the facts, especially for the atheists and agnostics.
The arc of history is long, but it turns toward justice, and away from onanistic nostalgia.
No matter how much progress we make as human beings, we are still 100% dependent on God. My favourite apocryphal story illustrates this point:
---
One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.
The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."
God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist was done talking, God said, "Very well, how about this, let's say we have a man making contest." To which the scientist replied, "OK, great!"
But God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam."
The scientist said, "Sure, no problem" and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt.
God just looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!"
That's a very simple question to answer, but you can only do so in hindsight. Did we exterminate ourselves with nuclear weapons? If we did, then we weren't morally developed enough to be entrusted with them; if we didn't, then we were.
And even in that, there's another bogus assumption, which is hidden behind the word "entrusted". No one entrusted the human species with nuclear weapons; there was no event in which God, or angels, or sufficiently advanced aliens, descended from on high, amidst clouds of incense or rocket exhaust, and bequeathed unto us the knowledge of what happens when you squeeze a ball of uranium very tightly. It may seem absurd to point this out, but only until you consider that "entrusted", in implying a higher power which did the entrusting, implies also a higher power which could reverse that decision; there being no such power, it is impossible to reason accurately about the morality of any technological development when such reasoning involves the implicit assumption that there is such a power.
[1] Those familiar with my comments on HN may be astonished to see me calling anything "windy", much less ridiculously so. In my defense I can only say that I reserve the use of that adjective and its adverb for cases of extreme provocation, the nature of which should be obvious to anyone attempting to wade through the text I've so described.
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From the perspective of the vast majority, scientists entrusted us with the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons. They could have kept quiet on that score.
You imply either that scientists are angels, or that every particle physicist is a member of a world-girdling conspiracy, which exists as a sort of caucus which decides, presumably by some highly precise and objective method, what every member shall or shall not do. Neither is even remotely plausible. Try again, please.
The fact that others may very well have eventually given them the same is neither here nor there, and your weird obsession with requiring it be angels and aliens does nothing to alter that. If you assume many groups of aliens, each species of which might have given out nukes, then you're in the exact same position as our theoretical physicists - 'of course humans weren't entrusted with nuclear weapons, after all, aliens aren't all part of a great alien conspiracy....'
The two scenarios are functionally analogous but for the fact that ALIENS is posted into the second.
You're just dancing with semantics.
The point of involving angels and aliens is to make clear the absurdity of assuming some superhuman agency which handed down the knowledge from on high. Scientists are human beings, too, with all the fallibility and lack of prescience that is our common heritage, and the fact that "others may very well have eventually given them the same" is the very crux of the matter at hand.
From our perspective, with the benefit of hindsight, it is trivially obvious that the Third Reich made no significant process toward the attainment of nuclear weapons, and that such weapons were not necessary to guarantee the Allies a victory in Europe. Do you think that was trivially obvious in 1942? It was nothing of the sort, and for all those who worked on the Manhattan Project could know, their efforts were absolutely vital to their nation's successful prosecution of the war. In such circumstances, what you would no doubt consider a principled refusal to participate in the project would, in fact, constitute moral cowardice of the highest order, on the part of anyone who found Allied victory in any sense preferable to Axis. They could not have known, after all, that the Third Reich had no realistic hope of developing an atom bomb, given the time and resources available to them, and judging them on the basis of what we know now, seventy years after the Third Reich's abject defeat and dissolution, is purely foolish.
All of this goes to demonstrate your basic error, which is to consider "scientists" a single, unified category which can, or can be expected to, act as a whole in whatever it believes, again as a whole, to be the best interests of mankind. This produces a sort of "us and them" mentality, which implicitly elevates your "scientists" category to the level of the superhuman actors whose existence my "angels or aliens" formulation makes explicit. It is this mentality which permits you to expect knowledge and behavior of scientists which you do not expect of humans, and it is precisely this mistake the original author makes.
You have a group of individuals who come across a power that the majority lack, they also happen to be a lot better educated than the average, and their choice is whether to give away the secret of that power. Perhaps they're not well equipped to make that choice, but that's neither here nor there in framing the basic question - and the answer to that question can then be used to form other questions. If they turn out to be ill-equipped to make the choice, then that's at least something that can be worked on. How do you improve the qualities you'd want of a decision maker in this regard?
That's a lot more useful, realistic line of thinking to go down than just shrugging and going 'All humans, we should expect the same knowledge and behaviour.' The behaviour you expect of a randomly chosen human should be different to behaviour you expect of a semi-randomly chosen human from a specific subset. Heck, even the arguments you can have - you can't talk about probability with most people, they're not going to understand what you mean when you say 'standard deviation' or anything like that. Most people do not do much thinking.
You don't need scientists to be super human. You just need them to be a group you can start asking questions about. Get an angle of attack on the problem through. If they turn out to be average or substandard or whatever in some particular area, then there are ways that can be addressed.
https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/sites/lawreview.uchicago.edu/...
Marketing technological advances while aiming to help the poorest is I think the best way to show everybody how technologies can really help us, and not enslave us. Technologies must be designed with political goals too. You could naively say the iPhone is creating more political problems than it solves, and you'd be right. What Bill Gates does is creating incentives for research in the way the NASA did. And I think it's awesome.
I guess that's what makes Bill Gates smarter in the end. You'll moan about antitrust laws and go watch JOBS, but today the people who make difference are businessmen who knows their basics of science.
If you're unhappy about politics, don't tell Bill Gates, that's not what he does. His giant financial resources won't help solving political problems.
Maybe he could pour money into making some media communications projects about science and studies just like Al Gore did, but again, I doubt Bill Gates really has the proper connections to do this.
Congratulations OP, you have reasoned yourself into transhumanism! To me the argument the OP described is one of the best ways to come to human-augmentation advocacy because it becomes obvious that we should be using technology to improve our capabilities.
To delve more deeply into transhumanism from this perspective, I would caution to not get preoccupied with current transhuman threads which are largely based on prosthetics and physical limitations.
Rather, I would look more towards nootropics and other technologies that help maintain or improve brain function and technologies which help reduce biases. In my opinion there is not enough being done to help the average person make better decisions on a daily basis, though there are some things. The fact that this is becoming a discussion point is great!
edit: I should also mention that the field of behavioral economics positively emphasizes the idea of "nudging" people toward better decision largely through design.
Such a thing can not be objectively defined.