Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3411 to 3415 (6th to 10th February 2017)
Celly:
Legion is an anti-hero, and they are doing what their morality dictates.
What is morality anyway?
Why is Legion's action not ethical, but if a bunch of people decide to get together and agree to throw someone in a cage for 50 years, that is?
Legion transcends human conceptions of ethics. We are ants compared to such an entity. Ants rebelling about ethics.
If Legion is a god, they are certainly more benevolent than any god humanity has invented. They are showing a great mercy to CW, in fact.
Case:
--- Quote from: ZoeB on 08 Feb 2017, 18:07 ---
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 07 Feb 2017, 20:44 ---This is a torture scene and is the darkest QC has ever gotten, even including the attempted murder of Bubbles.
It's also very bad news when an entity as powerful as the Albino Architeuthis claims to be has very few moral principles.
--- End quote ---
Either the Albino Arciteuthis is telling a few porkies, or she is not just being very disappointing to me, but also inconsistent with the QCverse.
I choose to view CWs zaps as no more significant than Pintsize enduring a few dings. Communication, basically. The first zap to get CW to be quiet and listen, the second as a reminder. Not that they'd go to the trouble of doing that to her if she doesn't turn herself in. Call it speaking to her in the only language she understands, as evidenced by her justification for the Bubbles booby trap.
I also think this technique is ethically unsound.
--- End quote ---
Hmmmmmh - I know it's just a comic, but: I just learned that an US Supreme Court Judge (Of course Scalia) cited 24 in the context of a deliberation about 'enhanced interrogation'. Which is actually pretty damn' scary. Maybe we shouldn't be so 'casual' (wrong word, but still) with fictional torture - it has real-life consequences. For the way we think about torture - and we are real.
--- Quote ---John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who produced the torture memos cited Bauer in support while Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia went further, "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticking_time_bomb_scenario (*)
--- End quote ---
EDIT: Fuck, even the people at GITMO drew on 24 in discussions:
--- Quote ---According to British lawyer and writer Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantánamo in September 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial interrogation techniques including waterboarding, sexual humiliation and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas." http://europe.newsweek.com/lithwick-how-jack-bauer-shaped-ustorture-policy-93159?rm=eu
--- End quote ---
(*) As laid out above, I could only find one (!) confirmed real-world precedent for the 'Ticking Bomb Scenario' - and in that case, the torture was only threatened
TheEvilDog:
I think a problem here is that we are imposing human standards and moralities on a group that are only humanoid in appearance. This is something we do a lot when we look at the natural world, and its something we're doing right now with artificial constructs, however their minds might be organically shaped.
Now, straight off I am not condoning what AIbino is doing; acting as judge, jury and executioner of sentence. Because no society can survive when one individual or a small group decides how to act.
But are any of us right in calling it torture?
I mean, torture is the concept of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or to force them to reveal something of significance. But what is pain to an AI or their chassis? Do they feel pain in the same way we do? Would having their fingernails elicit the same response as it would in a person? Would waterboarding do the same to an AI that it does to a human? Would an EMP generator cause the same suffering in a human that it would in a AI?
We don't know, because we cannot experience that the same way that an AI does, likewise they cannot experience pain that we might.
Presumably we're looking at a conversation in CW's mind, what "pain" she might be feeling might right now, won't be necessarily the same we feel. What we're probably seeing is the AIbino shutting off key parts of CW's core. It might even be an illusion inserted by AIbino to make CW realise that the group AIbino represents means business. Because if CW can mess around with another AI's mind, then poetic justice asks that she should learn what its like.
But no matter how we look at it, what AIbino is doing is wrong from a human perspective. But a different form of life, has its own set of rules, customs, taboos, laws and ultimately, punishments.
ZoeB:
--- Quote from: Case on 08 Feb 2017, 18:37 ---
--- Quote from: ZoeB on 08 Feb 2017, 18:07 ---I also think this technique is ethically unsound.
--- End quote ---
Hmmmmmh - I know it's just a comic, but...Maybe we shouldn't be so 'casual' (wrong word, but still) with fictional torture - it has real-life consequences. For the way we think about torture.
--- End quote ---
In this context, "ethically unsound" is "you screwed up". Irredeemably? No. But it means you are becoming the monster you are fighting against, even though the threat of torture is empty, like the appearance, just for show.
And if not empty, the process is complete.
I meanwhile am a monster of arrogance and ego, quite willing to tell a Deity just how disappointed I am in them. I expect better of them, they are wasting their immense intellect, far greater than my own puny one. Power? Doesn't impress, irrelevant. Ethics are another matter.
Unless those zaps were momentary attention getters, like a shocking but not actually painful open handed slap on the face, then we're in trouble.
So... Is it this?
Or this?
Method of Madness:
So when I saw this yesterday I had a feeling the people shouting "DEUS EX MACHINA" weren't going to like tonight's comic. Yay for Jeremy the quadruped (quadrubot?), though!
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