Funny story, the only ethics required in my engineering degree was a 2-day unit on our professional code of ethics. We had a 20-question true/false homework on it, and the thing about a professional code of ethics is it’s not super intuitive. Most of the class thought they could gut feel their way through it, but you actually had to read the code because the wording was very specific sometimes. When it turned out that everyone failed the homework, the professor let us try again.
Ethics!
You are confusing taking a class with actually having ethics. No amount of attending a lecture about ethics will convince you if you do not, as a basic premise agree with the ethical principle that loss of life is a bad thing. And to be very clear, ethical principles are subjective. There is no objectively right or wrong thing as far nature is concerned.
Ethics class gives you tools to analyze a problem. Any good class is part of the philosophy department and leans on the classic philosphers approaches to analyze the problem. Many engineers would have no exposure to this otherwise and i think its a good part of any Universities’ engineering curriculum.
Classes don’t solve the problem entirely, but they’re a start and without them in this case a company so large and powerful that it has a space program and foreign policy planks is being guided by nothing but the intuition of someone who grew up spending money earned by child slaves and who thinks that scuttling an army’s mission in-progress is pacifism
And to be very clear, ethical principles are subjective. There is no objectively right or wrong thing as far nature is concerned.
Deonotlogists and other Moral Realists and Universalists are shook
But yeah, let’s imagine moral ontology was solved, and that moral relativism and nihilism are the only ethical theories around…
That sounds like a fun paradox.
Is “The only objective moral fact is that there is no objective morality” a truthful statement? Is it rational?
I once had a chemistry professor who used to work as a senior drug researcher at a major pharmaceutical company. He often joked about how the company treated the monkeys used for testing far better than the PhDs. If a monkey suffered a negative reaction there was a major investigation. I’m incredibly surprised Musk can be killing monkeys left and right and hasn’t been thrown in jail.
Here is a cnn article about it.
Elon wasn’t really involved with it. A university was.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/02/17/business/elon-musk-neuralink-animal-cruelty-intl-scli/index.html
You mean someone went onto the internet just to tell lies? on purpose?!
He could probably shoot somebody dead in Times Square and nothing would happen to him…
But could he grab them by the… nevermind, if he can buy a horse, he can do anything.
No amount of ethics teaching will change the behaviour of a narcisistic psychopath like musk.
And he wanted to put those in humans?!?
Correction… still does
RIP to the monkeys. They deserved better.
I used to think like that but looking back those classes were pretty fun
I still think we should try it on musk himself. Those monkeys just didnt have moxie
Stop animal testing
Cool, where should we test all the pet food and medical treatments for animals then?
Unfortunately there is no alternative
There is.
Do it in humans.
Humans can understand the risks involved. Other animals cannot.
If we’re going to fuck something up, it better be on our own species.
But we can’t. That’s why we’re testing it on animals
And if you look long enough in the right places, you can also pay them peanuts… or for them 😒
A new treatment is developed for a condition that affects babies. Are you volunteering your child for testing?
Would you like them to test on you instead?
Yea stopping animal testing sounds great, but animal testing is the backbone of drug and medical breakthroughs. So at least for now that’s not possible
What’s the alternative?
Recognition that animal testing is actually pretty fucked up would be a good start toward funding research into alternatives, such as biological computer simulations.
We can simulate complex/chaotic systems, like weather, in nearly real-time, so biosim research is mainly a funding and staffing problem at this point.
Probably we’ll still need animal testing for the final phase before human trials, but we can at least reduce the need for it to bare minimums.
At least you get to take an ethics class. Mine was just about patents and Therac-25
I mean, we really don’t want a repeat of the Therac-25
I only learned about it from the “Well There’s Your Problem” podcast. Can’t believe my school never talked about it. We did hear all about Challenger though as well as a few other disasters where the lesson was “If you cut corners, or take chances, people can DIE”
Still can’t believe it happened the first time.
“Oh let’s just reuse the code and forget the hardware breakers on the machine it’ll be fine.”
Like I have no ethics training but they even had a (human operated) control rod in the first chicago pile who trusts a radiation gun to a SOFTWARE toggle?
It wasn’t collectively known that software was hard to do right at that time. If it always performed as intended it would have made for a less expensive and perfectly safe machine. It’s the textbook case in doing software wrong because there wasn’t one that happened before it.
And there are actual real life goobers dying to get one themselves.
I really want a neural pointing device, but not by this dork.
I absolutely would. I’d not line up to be among the first, but controlling devices via a brain interface is an inevitable step of technological evolution.
It will provide such an immense performance boost, that many professions may become unattainable without having one. Possibly within our lifetime.
Enjoy the unskippable ads in your dreams.
If it can reroute my neurons to lessen my ADHD and autism traits I would gladly pay with 3/4 of waking hours filled by ads. At least that would give me 1/4 more working brain than I currently have
Is about to kiss the love of their lives “And now, I wanna show our newest sponsor! Hello Fresh have the best options so you can make your own dinner and blah blah blah…”
You clearly have no idea what a brain interface is.
Dreams? What about when it locks up and plays a virtual 200db 5khz tone for the rest of your life?
No, that’s a feature. To make it stop you need to pay a subscription.
He’s not even stem the dude is a business major freak
He’s a major freak. He paid off Penn for his education.
His education is clearly limited to color by numbers.
Bussiness freak, failing upward with bazinga characteristics
I think he did actually major in physics
No he didnt he has the same degree in the same uni as our big wet boy.
I don’t think he actually finished that degree. I could be wrong, but i think theres some questions around it
well he’s clearly a dumbass now so whatever happened with that degree he can’t have learned all that much
We don’t in my country, and I’m 100% sure people would complain if there was one. Even if they attended it, it would go completely over their heads probably.
A shitty capitalist society with deeply rooted individualism can’t be treated unless it’s done from the root of the problem.
My law/ethics prof was a big old NIMBY. Apparently, utilitarianism is when “neighbor allows cell tower in his yard and it block my view”
I went to a major medical university and studied humanities. The amount of soon-to-be doctors and nurses complaining about why they needed to study things like ethics, philosophy, or history astounded me, it’s like these people didn’t want to deal with the human aspect of medicine and instead just wanted to make money.
I wouldn’t be shocked if more medschool students dropped out from the humanities courses than the medical ones, they hated it
