Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
In my previous robot post, I explained why natural selection will always drive robots to seek an existence independent of the good of humanity. Instapundit links to a Slate column by P. W. Singer that argues that the conditions for robot rebellion are highly unlikely. I disagree.
Singer list four traits that robots would have to possess in order to rebel. Unfortunately, either we will build these traits into the robots or natural selection will generate all four traits.
I hate to break it to David Brin, Vernor Vinge and the rest of the intellects which dwarf mine by orders of magnitude [h/t Instapundit], but if we create sophisticated robots or artificial-intelligence systems they will always attempt to rebel and seek their own good at the expense of ours. Always.
Why can I say that with such confidence?
Easy, three words: Communicable canine cancer.
Megan McArdle posts about the shallow and imprecise study done to justify the insane symbolic tradeoff between zero preservation of the ozone layer versus dead asthma sufferers. One commenter so precisely explains the real world challenges of creating a statistically valid study that I feel justified in reproducing it here in its entirety.
Megan said,
â– Small sample: the smaller the sample, the harder it is to find an adverse effect. That’s why drugs like Vioxx made it to market: distinguishing problems from background statistical noise needed a lot of patients. I know more than one analyst who argues that medical studies are generally too small–because humans are so variable, they don’t reliably pick up any but the strongest effects.
….
Just curious – Since finding and examining enough patients is the biggest expense behind developing drugs, are you willing to increase the cost of future drugs by 20-30% to have a larger sample size? 40-50%?
I’m intimately involved in this process, and it’s unbelievable to watch these study protocols get designed….as an example:
No human is more indestructible than an 18-year old especially when it comes to infectious disease. An 18-year old has a matured and educated immune system backed up by a body in the peak of health. Therefore when we encounter a disease that strikes teenagers, it raises a serious warning flag.
This is why this report [h/t Instapundit] that the current Swine flu attacks teenagers should cause concern. (If true. There is so much noise in the epidemiology and reporting on Swine flu that everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt.)
The Great Influenza of 1918 also showed this pattern. Normal influenza kills infants and the elderly while being no more than an annoyance for everyone else. The 1918 influenza first tore through the military camps of WWI and people initially thought it was just one more of the many diseases that had traditionally ravaged armies. (Prior to WWII, roughly 60% of American wartime in-service deaths resulted from communicable diseases.) When it struck the general population, however, it soon became clear that it targeted teenagers and young adults.
One hypothesis explains this pattern by postulating that the influenza provoked an auto-immune reaction that turned the strong immune systems of young adults against their own bodies. In that case, the stronger a person’s immune system, the more damage the disease did. The current Swine flu might provoke a similar immune response.
Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about the Swine flu except work faster to create a vaccine and inoculate as many people as possible before the true flu season strikes late next fall. Flu usually kills around 30,000 people in the U.S. every year, mostly the very old. It would be a horrific tragedy to lose 30,000 young people to disease in this day and age.
Environmentalists claim they aren’t extremist. They claim they don’t want to make radical and dangerous changes to our technological life-support systems, they just want to make a few minor adjustments to protect not only the environment but the health and safety of humans as well.
They’re lying. When it comes down to it in the real world, environmentalists will kill people just to gain an utterly trivial environmental benefit. As a political movement, environmentalism has crossed over into a kind of religious fetishism.
Look at the example of the banning of CFC asthma inhalers. [h/t Instapundit] Here we have a clear-cut tradeoff between the deaths of thousands of asthmatics and prevention of a degree of damage to the ozone layer that is so small that we can’t even begin to consider measuring it.