CONSCIENCE & THE MACHINE
Conscience and Emerging Technology
We want to believe that technical development is unalloyed blessing. As our tools get better, out lives get better. What could possible go wrong? Why should any new technology trouble anyone’s conscience.
In fact, many of our the most prominent voices in politics and the press predict the imminent arrival of a secular Eden. Mankind’s third great technological leap, they say, is already on our doorstep. It will bring universal prosperity. With abundant food, water, clean energy, and leisure for all, there will be nothing to fight over. Peace will reign over the whole Earth. The long-promised Utopia, the pundits say, at last is at hand.
Is this too simplistic, though? Should we avoid some types of innovation? Should technological development ever trouble conscience? Should we worry that our quest for better living will pave the road to Hell?
Some analysts argue that emerging technologies bring new temptations. Conscience should not make us cowards, afraid of any new tool or technique. But many emerging technologies entail thorny ethical questions. Driverless cars, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and gene-editing could be horribly destructive if used in the wrong way.
Here, we will examine the ethical dilemmas presented by just two emerging technologies: virtual reality and facial mapping.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality:
Since the invention of the printing press, pornographers have been quick to exploit every innovation in information technology. Virtual Reality, combined with sensors attached to the user’s body, could create an immersive experience nearly indistinguishable from actual sex. VR lovers would be physically perfect, always available when wanted, and never present when unwanted. Will most of us prefer VR mates to flawed flesh-and-blood lovers? Will we stop mating? If we do, does the human race have a future?
VR experiences in general, offering realism conventional movies couldn’t match, could become extremely addictive. Will millions of people refuse to leave their VR environments to address problems in the relatively boring and colorless real world?
Information Technologies:
When I was a small child, I often heard people say, “The camera doesn’t lie.” It wasn’t true then, and it’s even less true now. We can lie far more effectively with cameras than without them. Every improvement in information technology can augment deception.
With Face2Face, a digital facial capture and mapping tool, a couple of wags overlaid real-time facial mapping over source video of Donald Trump, making him seem to say hilariously preposterous things– not that he’s incapable of doing so on his own.
With Face2Face, other CGI tools, and advanced audio editing, we could convincingly put words in anyone’s mouth. We could fake almost any event involving almost any character. With such video and audio manipulation in the wrong hands, we may be unable to trust any online videos, so how will we know what’s accurate? Do we have to read source code to be sure?
More to come…
In a future post, we will explore other innovations that provoke vexing questions of conscience. Among these will be gene-editing, radical life extension, driverless cars, and artificial intelligence.
(To keep abreast of technology, you need reliable internet service. Talk to us. We can help.)
(The accompanying image is a still from the Roman Polanski movie: Macbeth.)