The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates

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.

"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.

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

TLDR: 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.

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.

Can we measure or track morality similar to technical progress? How could we really know that we're on a "right" or "wrong" track on morality? We could say, "If we kill less of each other, we are on the right track" but how do we know that what might appear a small morale roadblock isn't setting us towards progress? For example: At first blush Hiroshima looked awful, though even there we had some ambiguity as generals defended national interest. But what if the experience in Hiroshima allowed us to keep our wits and not escalate Korea, Vietnam or Afghanistan into a nuclear war? There's no way to know if we made morale progress.

But I do like the question, which is, "How can we make sure we're increasing our ability to get along with each other, as we develop better weapons to hurt each other with?"

Seriously, what the fuck is the graph mean supposed to mean? Is it really trying to show the delta's of technology and morality? How is that supposed to be measured? Or is it some aggregate amount of technology compared to an aggregate amount of morality? And even if it is, how was that measured?

On the other hand, those who have suggested that what is meant by morality is unclear, are mistaken. It is very clear. It is a traditional Abrahamic view - eating from the tree of knowledge is evil. And though we could just blame Eve, it doesn't go with the pseudo-scientific presentation.

So let's blame the Gateses. Gateses took our precious Netscape. Nasty dirty sneaky Gateses. We hates the Gateses.

I hear the word morality and immediately assume the speaker/writer is arguing from a religious point of view.

Conservative moralists argue that we must prohibit something because it's potentially dangerous, while liberal moralists argue that we must encourage it because it's potentially beneficial. Absolutists argue that morality cannot, or must not change, much to the chagrin of the relativists. And all this before we even get into the culturally directed moralities!

Compounding the problem is everyone's surety that THEIR morality is superior, with some even suggesting that their axiomatically superior morality be imposed upon others, by law, or even by force, if necessary.

Am I the only idiot that doesn't understand? How does this get voted to the front page?

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.

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.

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.

Morality was always inside the human. No evolution needed here. But from an evolutionary perspective, the evolution of morality was the defining factor that made us drastically different other species.

Then what causes some people to be Buddha, Jesus, Moses, or Muhammadﷺ while others to be ignorant and vicious? Morality needs to be brought to health and vigor after being subdued because of social or political conflict. This is often termed enlightenment.

And religion has always been a powerful vehicle and force to establish morality in individuals, a vehicle that carries arguably the divine rule, or an evolutionary mechanism that is carried through trial and failure.

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.

If you're going to use ridiculous oversimplifications, please at least use the ones that have been vetted by people who have actually given the matter a decade or two of thought. It's not like there's a shortage of candidates either. But whatever it is, ethics is not a quantity, and it is certainly not a quantity over time.

By the way, Pythagorean Theorem says hi.

Such a thing can not be objectively defined.

I don't think we can expect to get the same sort of moral improvement we do in the fastest-moving areas of technology by throwing technology at the problem of morality. We're still not all that far along in learning how to treat mental illnesses, and using medicine to make people more moral would probably be similarly difficult. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not a solution, just that we shouldn't be surprised if building a solution of that sort turns out to have a difficulty more like curing PTSD than preventing childbed fever.

I also think that making humans act more morally probably has more to do with helping us recognize and think clearly about moral decisions, than making us care more. One of the reasons the Gates foundation is special is that they're trying to help people efficiently. The way human minds are built makes it hard to realize that it's important to be efficient at doing good, rather than just to make an effort.

I guess this is coming from someone whose empathy dial is turned up to eleven anyway, though, so it could also be that different people have different problems to overcome to be more moral. The problems I had were not forgetting about causes of suffering just because they don't happen to be staring me in the face at the moment, and then focusing on the right things.

The website LessWrong has some interesting writing about why humans suck at charity http://lesswrong.com/lw/aid/heuristics_and_biases_in_charity... , and learning how to reason better in general is the main thing they write about. The main effects the stuff I read there has had on my morality-related actions are that I take my career more seriously (I don't actually care that much about more money for me, but I do care about more resources for improving the world), and I worry less about small stuff (I accept inefficiencies in my own life if fixing them doesn't look worth the effort, and don't get distracted by projects that would help people but only a small amount).

Some of what you're talking about here - the idea of giving flamethrowers to children - sounds similar to the idea of existential risk, though on a smaller scale. If you don't already know if it, you may find it relevant.

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.

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.

The main thesis is that it may be possible to apply science and technology to understand and improve human morality, and that this is a most critical human endeavor.

What is your solution?

I see that people are simply becoming more ignorant on the basis that they do not need to study the nature and technology because technology already provides everything to them and, furthermore, and, furthermore, defend their ignorance saying that the technology is so far ahead of the morality that we need to harmonize our relationships better rather than learn (that is, advance) the technology. Modern people do not understand that you cannot distinguish between good and bad and decide what to do with your technology if you are illiterate.

Might be the letter author refers to the linear IQ growth. Ok, but this also concerns me because we have stifled the natural selection with our advances in medicine and improved quality standards, which allow to survive and reproduce anybody whereas only 2/10 did reproduce yet 100 years ago. Since we did not replace the natural selection with artificial one, the biological quality (aka our genome) of new generations is degrading (you believe the opposite, right?), http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/7686. I propose to solve this problem not letting the inferior comrades to die but paying for the services with the reproduction right: if you are genetically unhealthy and, thus, take more from the society than give to it, you should let to produce people to the other, those who maintain the civilization and advance the technology. This is in your interest.

The article speaks a lot about possible misuse of the technology. But the most astounding fact is that the civilized nations have the technology to organize the comfortable live efficiently, but use it to kill the nature on the daily basis and do not notice it!

But I can tell you how you is personally guilty abusing the technology every day: The technology allows you to burn all the precious resources very fast and this is considered as a good thing. The freedom culture and technology gives you cheap gasoline, car and house and I bet that you believe that you are absolutely sure that this is good to have a personal house, separate from the others and waste more because more waste is more consumption, better economy and greener world. Thereby, you hate the consumerism. However, this is the car-house based infrastructure that costs the most to you and to the nature. Once you condense the population into apartments in multifloor buildings, as it was practiced in the Eastern Block, for instance, the resource consumption (lands, for transportation, heating, lighting, and building/maintaining the infrastructure) reduce 10-100 times and we'll fit into the ecological footprint. This is how how you can we make the life of 10 billion sustainable. The 10-100 savings are achieved since the average distances are shrinked dramatically, which, per se allows huge savings but additional savings are because you can use more effective (i.e. public) systems of heating and transportation - sharing the resources as consumers, which contributes another order of magnitude. You can even compost in the New York city apartment, http://sustainability.stackexchange.com/a/2402/476. We can even use trains for inter-city travels instead of planes. Trains do not consume the energy whereas our favorite planes are the paramounts of ineficciency. This way we could reduce carbon emissions, save fuels and stop global dimming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming#Probable_causes. Yet, we wont, right? There are certainly bad people who can use terrible technology for bad and we better write Bill Gates about them. We have a right to be independent, self-reliant, live in a private house and spend a fair amount of gasoline.

I like the communist preaching telling that we should stop consumerism, greediness and other drivers of capitalist hell and turn to sympathy, concern for the others, unfamiliar and the rational social planning environment. I even think robots should do the same, cooperate rather than fight for their egoistic interests. What I do not like is that you remove the part predicting that we'll have consciousness people who will stop wasting lands in 2014 from the Isaak Asimov interview (compare http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.h... and what you have in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6995644). I see quite the opposite to what seen the futurist. Our passion to have a house is strong as usually. It is expedited by the technology and housing bubble , we build ever more cottages and urban spawls (enjoy their sights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl). So, when you speak about some adversaries that will use technology for bad, can I look at you? I always look at you because you are the that criminal.

Do you keep up with the morality to understand what I am talking about? If you do, ask the Gates couple to free the green lands from your houses and roads, moving all activity into the dense, 3D cities.

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.