Underseer
Contributor
Warning: major spoilers below!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell:_Stand_Alone_Complex_-_Solid_State_Society
Quick synopsis of the relevant part of this movie.
The government comes up with a system to deal with bed-ridden seniors who have no living relatives to take care of them (Noble Rot). They stay home in their beds and get the bare minimum robotic care to stay alive, and cybernetic internet connections so that they have something to do. Thus, they can be "cared" for with absolute minimum human intervention.
Over time, the "Noble Rot" seniors form an internet community/gestalt mind and figure out that thousands of children in their country are dying from child abuse every year, so the old fogies come up with their own solution to the problem.
In this future, human minds are connected to the internet, which means hands can be hacked.
The Noble Rot gestalt mind hacks the parents likely to kill their own children and the necessary government officials and hospital staff to implant cybernetic devices in the children. The parents are then hacked so that they deliver their own children to a senior, then the parents have their memories excited so that they don't remember having that child at all. The children also have their memories excited so that they forget their parents. The children become legally adopted with new identities by Noble Rot seniors, who now have an heir to leave their stuff to instead of the government.
On the one hand, the seniors are probably saving thousands of children per year from death from abuse by their own parents. Plus, the seniors get to feel like they are contributing to society again, and the children gain an inheritance.
On the other hand, the idea of simply editing the memories of parents and children so that they forget each other is fundamentally horrifying.
Worse, this all happens off the books, which means a lot of data the government keeps on abuse will be wrong. Among other things, over time, the government will become worse and worse at identifying abuse and the actions they take to fix things will get worse and worse simply because their information is very incomplete and will become more incomplete over time as the seniors kidnap more and more children, whole hiding all evidence of what is happening from government records.
Now for the point of the thread: what would you do if you found out seniors in your country were doing something like this?
Do you think it would be ethical to stop them or to not stop them? Why?
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Bah! Ghost, not Goat in the title! Me so stupid. Am have bad English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell:_Stand_Alone_Complex_-_Solid_State_Society
Quick synopsis of the relevant part of this movie.
The government comes up with a system to deal with bed-ridden seniors who have no living relatives to take care of them (Noble Rot). They stay home in their beds and get the bare minimum robotic care to stay alive, and cybernetic internet connections so that they have something to do. Thus, they can be "cared" for with absolute minimum human intervention.
Over time, the "Noble Rot" seniors form an internet community/gestalt mind and figure out that thousands of children in their country are dying from child abuse every year, so the old fogies come up with their own solution to the problem.
In this future, human minds are connected to the internet, which means hands can be hacked.
The Noble Rot gestalt mind hacks the parents likely to kill their own children and the necessary government officials and hospital staff to implant cybernetic devices in the children. The parents are then hacked so that they deliver their own children to a senior, then the parents have their memories excited so that they don't remember having that child at all. The children also have their memories excited so that they forget their parents. The children become legally adopted with new identities by Noble Rot seniors, who now have an heir to leave their stuff to instead of the government.
On the one hand, the seniors are probably saving thousands of children per year from death from abuse by their own parents. Plus, the seniors get to feel like they are contributing to society again, and the children gain an inheritance.
On the other hand, the idea of simply editing the memories of parents and children so that they forget each other is fundamentally horrifying.
Worse, this all happens off the books, which means a lot of data the government keeps on abuse will be wrong. Among other things, over time, the government will become worse and worse at identifying abuse and the actions they take to fix things will get worse and worse simply because their information is very incomplete and will become more incomplete over time as the seniors kidnap more and more children, whole hiding all evidence of what is happening from government records.
Now for the point of the thread: what would you do if you found out seniors in your country were doing something like this?
Do you think it would be ethical to stop them or to not stop them? Why?
- - - Updated - - -
Bah! Ghost, not Goat in the title! Me so stupid. Am have bad English.
