Hacker News Reader

> Do you really believe that future humans will condemn us for killing less than 1 rat per human lost to try and stem the loss of human potential?

I think it's possible that they could condemn us for forcing rats to suffer and die for our own benefit. I don't think it's as likely as future humans looking down upon us for the awful way we treat animals we eat and maybe eating meat at all, but I can see it happening.

It seems like there's a tradeoff between ethics and the pace of progress. After all, if we only cared about progress then we'd experiment on humans. On the other hand, medicine would probably stall without any experimentation on live animals, and so we choose to do it on rats.

If our descendants our truly more enlightened than we are, I doubt that they would condemn us for our comparatively barbaric behavior in the same way that we dont judge predators for playing with their prey. Just as playing with the prey improves their hunting ability, so to do we learn from our mistakes, eventually. The Romans are not universally condemned for causing the extinction of the Tencteri, Usipetes, Carthaginians. Similarly, we do not condemn our ancestors for the likely genocide of the Neanderthals, Denosivans, and all the other hominids.

Judging people from the pass through the scanner of modern morality is counter-productive ti understanding history. The historian, Herbert Butterfield, put it best when he said "real historical understanding is not achieved by the subordination of the past to the present but rather by making the past our present and it's tempting to see life with the eyes of another Century than our own"

In the end, society is what makes us civilized. We are still the same species we were 70,000 years ago. If society fell and we somehow experienced the same material conditions as they did, we would behave more or less the same. When we have wars and conflicts that are so intense that civil society breaks down, every one of us is more than capable of committing the most horrific atrocities. The 20th century is littered with examples of that. If you need any more evidence, I'll leave you with this description of what happened to a 13 yr old peaceful protestor in Syria

Video posted online shows his battered, purple face. His skin is scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would probably have injured but not killed. His jaw and kneecaps are shattered, according to an unidentified narrator, and his penis chopped off.

Speciesism, that's what Peter Singer calls it (the philosopher, not the roboticist). We tend to draw an artificial line between human and nonhuman.

The article describes how it selectively can be used in a hybrid setup. I hope they can come up with applications that are new, rather than doing the same experiments over and over again. I often see results and am like duh... It's like running code, changing a few lines, and running it again to see if anything changes.

And now an extremely rough statement. If there are so many people dying anyway we should definitely experiment more with humans. That will make all our experiments likely to be more humane.

Last, I hope robots won't see us as lab animals. To understand their own brain we are likely to be their best test subject though.

We also draw an artificial line between living and non-living. All lines are artificial.

> If there are so many people dying anyway we should definitely experiment more with humans. That will make all our experiments likely to be more humane.

Im not sure I follow: are you suggesting we raise creatures that take longer, are smarter, and are harder to study just because they're us?

That seems to be increasing the total harm just so it happens to humans rather than rats, ignoring the humans we do it to didnt have any more choice than the rat. I find that far more speciesist than recognizong legitimate differences in human mental powers and complexity from rats.

That being said, we do experiment on humans too, including some pretty radical things on already dying ones.

The problem comes in that if we're going to create a broken mind just to study it, we should a) use a simple mind we can actually perform a non-confounded experiment on and b) use the minimal mind possible to minimize suffering.

So rats rather than 3 year old humans.

I'm assuming that if we would treat humans in the same way we treat rats, we would likely raise standards.

Also rats are able to choose by the way. We just don't give them a choice.

Are lab rats treated poorly? My (limited) experience indicates that scientists are generally as humane as they can be, and the rat lifestyle isn't any worse than say... A pet rat. Maybe Im an outlier.

My point is that if your experiment requires a GMO organism, the organism can never have decided to participate, since it would require choice pre-conception.

If GMOing a rat in to a forced experiment is bad, isn't doing that to a human much worse?

It's still worth the cost using humans, but harm reduction would suggest using rats instead.

The question is not about choice w.r.t. a GMO. It's about the underlying moral values behind a seemingly rhetorical question "isn't doing that to a human much worse?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism

Why is it so much better to force non-humans to partake in our experiments? Just swap rats and humans in your sentences and the bias is very obvious.

Due to the intelligence difference it doesn't seem reasonable to even equate one human year to one rat year.

There are no ethical complaints with trashing an artificial neural network.

It could be argued that it is ethical to kill a bivalve because their ganglia is comprised of about 100 nerves. Their "mind" mostly consists of direct signaling from input to response.

But what about 1000 neurons? 100,000? 100,000,000? Humans have 100,000,000,000. There likely isn't some perfect dividing point between conscious animal that should be saved and dumb animal that doesn't have a conscious. The negative utility of killing an animal probably increases continuously as the number of neurons increase.