From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Jul 25 2003 - 11:26:14 MDT
John K Clark wrote:
> "Lee Corbin" <lcorbin@tsoft.com>
>
> > Suppose that I suddenly found myself in the year 1936 about
> > fifty miles outside Berlin, and I had in my hand a remote
> > control switch that would detonate a Hiroshima-sized device
> > in the capital of Germany, and that I knew that this would
> > be my only chance to kill Hitler and his henchmen.
> > I would scarcely hesitate, even though it would mean the
> > immediate deaths of 100,000 people.
>
> In 1936 you would know that Hitler was a very bad person but the trouble is
> you would not know that very soon he would cause the death of 30 million
> people; nor in 1936 would you know if incinerating the German capital would
> lead to something even worse than Hitler by demonstrating to the world
> 9 years early that nuclear weapons are possible and practical. Even today I
> don't know.
Yes, ethical questions like "Would you go back in time and kill Hitler as
a five-year-old?" are very much along the lines of "Why don't you buy the
winning lottery ticket, 1,5,31,38,47,3, and feed starving children with
it? It would just cost a dollar! What kind of heartless bastard are
you?" The uncertainty is the *whole point*. The real question is, "Would
you, as a general policy, kill all five-year-olds who had done as much net
wrong as the five-year-old Hitler at that point?"
Despite the plausibility, appealing intuitiveness, and ease of imagination
of the story, the protagonist of such a time-travel adventure *is not
human* with respect to ethical decisions - that whole mode of existence
and choice is alien to our own world of strictly forwards causality.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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