All Episodes
Previous Next
June 16, 2020 - Davis Aurini
16:50
Triage VS the Trolley Problem

Utilitarianism versus tradition. Originally uploaded July, 2018.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Triage versus the trolley problem.
Now what I'm going to be talking about in this video is the difference between this artificial intelligence and pragmatic ethics, utilitarianism versus common sense.
And why it's worrying me so much that this mechanistic technocrat style utilitarianism seems to be so popular these days.
And a perfect example of it is the trolley problem.
Now the trolley problem, if you haven't heard of it, trolley problem goes like this.
Say you are standing by a railway track and there is a trolley speeding out of control.
Brakes have failed.
It's going to run right past you and it's going to go into a tunnel where there's eight workers present and it's going to kill all of those workers.
Now right next to you is a switch that would put it onto a different track and put it into a tunnel that only has one worker working inside of it.
Ethically speaking, morally speaking, should you pull the switch so that only one person dies versus eight people.
And this is basic utilitarianism.
It's better to only have one person die than to have eight people die.
So you pull the switch and you divert it down the second tunnel.
Now we add a layer of complexity to it.
We ask the question, what if instead of a switch, imagine you're standing on a train platform next to a very fat man.
And you know that if you take, if you push the fat man in front of the trolley, it will slow it down enough to save the eight workers.
It's the same math, one life for eight lives, but people tend to balk at the second option.
Why is that?
Well, some have pointed out, some have pointed out that, well, if you push the fat man, he's not really involved.
See, the workers, they signed up for some risk when they knew they were going to be working on the rail line, etc., etc.
There's a fact that pushing the fat man in front of the train, that's the same logic, to save eight lives, that's the same logic as murder one person and harvest their organs to save eight lives.
It's the same logic.
So why not murder that person?
This kind of points to the flaws in utilitarianism in general, that utilitarianism is only concerned with the quote-unquote maximum good for as many people as possible.
And so by utilitarian ethics, if society would enjoy seeing somebody tortured to death and there's enough people that their happiness quotient outweighs his suffering quotient, then we should do it, right?
Eleazar Yukowski once put it, is it better to have one person tortured to death versus a Googleplex of people getting a moat of dust in their eye?
And he argued that one person should be tortured to death, which is insane.
See, this is where this logic leads.
This is where utilitarianism leads.
And I think that there's a deeper issue behind all of this.
This is somewhat related to a video I did recently about the difference between math, science, and engineering.
It's an issue of how do we understand the world.
Now, in that video, I pointed out briefly that mathematical knowledge, when you prove something in math, you absolutely prove it.
Scientific math, knowledge, scientific knowledge, is tentative, and that engineering is considered with best practice, concerned with best practices.
The trolley problem assumes perfect knowledge.
Especially the second one, where you push the fat man in front of the train.
How would you know that the fat man is going to stop the train?
would you know beyond what if you push him in front of the train and it still kills the eight workers the trolley problem reminds me of the tricorder in star trek
See, the tricorder, you know, the Star Trek people, they pull out their tricorder, they scan the environment, and they tell you all the secret scientific knowledge.
There's a radio wave field here.
The atmosphere is composed of that's not how diagnostics actually works.
Diagnostics, trying to understand the environment, trying to figure out why your damn car isn't working.
Diagnostics is all about understanding relationships.
Let's take the simplest diagnostic, one of the simplest out there, a gauge, a fuel gauge, or a tire pressure gauge or whatever it might be.
Now, these gauges that tell you is the tank full or empty, these are working, well, in the case of a fuel tank, you're going to have a little float, a little float bob in it.
It goes up when it's full, and it goes down when it's empty.
Thus, you get your fuel gauge.
You know, another one might be a pressure gauge, right, where there's a spring, and we know that if it's exerting this much pressure, there must be this many kilopascals inside of it.
This much pressure means even more.
You're determining relationships.
If you're trying to test an atmosphere on an alien planet to figure out what percentage is the oxygen, what percentage is the CO2 and the fluorine, whatever, what you're going to do is you're going to take something and have it react with the environment.
One of the things you have in the oil patch is you have little labels that will change color in the presence of sulfur dioxide.
And so you put these, you put them down by your pants because it's heavier than air, all right?
You don't put them up here because by then the sulfur, it's already all the way up here.
You put them down on your pants, and if you notice them change color, you get the hell out of there.
But then you have to throw it out.
The diagnostic test has been done.
Think about back in science class when you use those little pH strips and you dip them in liquid and the color it changes tells you what the pH of that is.
That is a diagnostic test.
Now, it is theoretically possible that when you put the little strip into acid, well, you didn't mix it very well.
So the right side of the beaker is more acidic than the left side of the beaker.
With your fuel gauge on your vehicle, maybe some water got into the tank and the little valve, oh, it rusted into position.
So you think you got a third of a tank left and actually you're running on empty.
Your car won't start.
Electrics won't come on.
So you change the battery and it starts working.
Does that mean the old battery was dead?
Well, probably, but you haven't opened up the battery and looked at its guts.
All right?
When you think the battery is dead, because that's the symptoms, it doesn't necessarily mean that.
There could have been a loose wire.
So your old battery was fine, but when you put in the new battery, the wire got tightened, it's no longer loose, and your car works.
Unless if you open up the battery itself and investigate its guts, you don't actually know that the battery is dead.
In the real world, there are no tricorders.
Okay, the tricorder is a magical scrying spell.
The Star Trek people, they pull it out and they boop, boop, boop, have perfect knowledge of everything around them.
That never happens.
Especially not with something as generalized as a tricorder.
Fuel gauges are pretty accurate because we put a lot of effort into making them accurate.
They're not 100%, but they're pretty bloody close.
Something as generalized as a tricorder, utterly imaginary.
Utter, utter BS.
You know, how many times have you seen somebody pull out a tape measure on Star Trek?
Okay, tape measures you can trust more or less.
Tricorders, not a chance in hell.
But it seems to me that this Star Trek tricorder inducted a whole generation into this idea of having perfect knowledge.
If you remember my past video, it's, you know, the scientists, they developed the perfect dairy barn, but it only works for spherical cows in a vacuum.
These technocrats love to come up with all of these systems that would work great if perfect knowledge were possible.
And this is the issue with the trolley problem.
Okay, the trolley problem is presuming this perfect knowledge.
And the scary thing about it is that they are trying to program this stuff into artificial intelligences.
So what's the alternative?
Well, triage.
When medics are dealing with a mass casualty event, they break people down into three categories.
The first is people that are injured, but it's non-life-threatening.
They're not going to die in the next 30 minutes.
The next group is those that are injured and are probably going to die no matter what you do.
And the third is people that are injured, but life-saving medical treatment might save their lives.
So when the medics rush in, they're making this judgment, boom, boom, boom, boom.
They are using a very complex array of priors, heuristics, instincts.
You know, Quintus Curtius has written some interesting posts about medical treatment during the classical age.
And these doctors, these medics back then, didn't have the same scientific knowledge that we have now.
But there are so many cases that he is cited where the doctor would go up to one person with an arrow through the skull, you know, after the battle.
He's still alive.
He's riding his horse with an arrow sticking through his head.
Goes up to that guy and says, okay, yeah, you're going to be fine.
We're just going to have to get that arrow out.
And he goes up to the next guy, who seems to have a rather minor wound, but he's like, I'm sorry, you're not going to live through the night.
Tricorders don't exist.
Perfect scientific, objective knowledge doesn't exist.
However, human assessment, human instincts are absolutely amazing.
When you get somebody that's a real master of their field, they can often tell you things that they don't even know how they know them.
You know, I've run this with myself a few times.
When it comes to fixing cars, I sometimes just know what's wrong with the car above and beyond any diagnostics.
And this is because I've spent a long time fixing cars.
You just have this gut instinct, we call it.
Because the stuff going on in the back of our brain is so complex that we can't understand it.
We just, we know.
And so when this medic rushes into the mass casualty event, that's what he's doing.
He's not pulling out a tricorder and saying, well, this person has a blood pressure.
No.
He is looking at the person and boom, snap judgment.
This person doesn't need help.
That person is beyond help.
person, I can help.
And I will take triage over the trolley problem any day of my life.
See, the trolley problem, this whole idea that we can have this perfect knowledge and use rationality to make moral decisions, and we can program computers to do it first, so we don't have human failings.
You're handing yourself over to Leviathan if you do that.
These technocrats, they want to believe that they're smarter than anybody who's ever lived.
That they're smarter than anybody alive today.
That they can make better decisions than experts.
People, when I say experts, I don't mean the guy has 12 degrees.
I mean the guy's got his hands dirty.
Like the guy that drilled four pins into this hand might not take his diet advice, but when it comes to drilling pins into a hand, when it comes to hand surgery, this guy's a bit of a maestro.
I'm going to trust his instincts because he seemed like he knew what he was doing.
And I'm going to trust his instincts over an artificial intelligence that has been designed to drill the perfect holes for pins to go into your hand so long as we're dealing with spherical hands in a vacuum.
We are far too ready to discount human instinct and understanding.
I don't mean instinct is...
This is the most powerful computer in existence.
Nothing holds a candle up to the processing power of this thing right here.
And this thing right here takes into account not just thousands and millions of diagnostic heuristics when you just look at something.
You don't even know.
Maybe it's the skin's a little bit pale.
You know that guy's going to die.
Who knows what it is?
All you know is that you know that that guy's going to die.
This thing's freaking amazing.
And on top of that, it includes moral judgments.
It includes empathy.
It includes everything.
Humans might not make the perfect decisions all the time, but I'll promise you this.
They'll make better decisions than an artificial intelligence you program with the trolley problem that winds up cutting off all of our faces and putting wires in them to make us smile for all eternity because that's what we told it to do.
Don't overestimate your rationality while underestimating this thing in here and this thing in here.
▲
Export Selection