Category: Technology

Peaceful protest is an integral part of America. As is murder. Back in 2016 the two collided in Dallas, Texas: after a peaceful protest, five police officers were murdered. While some might see it as ironic that police rushed to protect people protesting police violence, this reminds us about how police are supposed to function in a democratic society. This stands in stark contrast with the unnecessary deaths inflicted on citizens by bad officers, deaths that once caused the nations to briefly consider that such deaths might be worth preventing.

While violence and protests are worthy of in-depth discussion, my focus will be on the ethical questions raised by the use of a robot to deliver the explosive device was used to kill one of the attackers. While this matter was addressed by philosophers more famous than I, I thought it worthwhile to look back to 2016 to see if my thoughts have changed.

While the police robot is called a robot, it is more accurate to say it is a remotely operated vehicle. After all, the term “robot” implies some autonomy on the part of the machine. The police robot is remote controlled, like a sophisticated version of RC toys. In fact,  one could do the same thing  by putting an explosive on a toy.

Since there is a human operator directly controlling the machine, the ethics of the matter are the same ass if  conventional machines of death (such as a gun) had been used to kill the shooter. On the face of it, the only difference is in perception: a killer robot delivering a bomb sounds more ominous and controversial than an officer using a firearm. The use of remote-controlled vehicles to kill targets was nothing new as the basic technology has been around since at least WWII and the United States has killed many people with drones.

If this had been the first case of an autonomous police robot sent to kill (like an ED-209), then the issue would be different. However, it is a case that falls under established ethics of killing, only with a slight twist in regards to the delivery system. That said, it can be argued that the use of a remote-controlled machine is a morally relevant change.

Keith Abney raised a very reasonable point: if a robot could be sent to kill a target, it could also be sent to use non-lethal force to subdue the target. In the case of human officers, the usual moral justification of lethal force is that it is the best option for protecting themselves and others from a threat. If the threat presented by a suspect can be effectively addressed in a non-lethal manner, then that is the option that should be used. The moral foundation for this is set by the role of police in society: they are supposed to protect the public and should take every legitimate effort to deliver suspects for trial. They are not supposed to function as soldiers sent to defeat enemies. There are, of course, cases in which suspects cannot be safely captured and lethal force can be justified. A robot (or, more accurately, a remote-controlled machine) can radically change the equation.

While a police robot is an expensive piece of hardware, it is not a human being (or even an artificial being). As such, it only has the moral status of property. In contrast, even the worst human criminal is a human being and thus has a moral status above that of an object. If a robot is sent to engage a human suspect, then in many circumstances there would be no moral justification for using lethal force. After all, the officer operating the machine is in no danger. This should change the ethics of the use of force to match other cases in which a suspect needs to be subdued but presents no danger to the officer attempting arrest. In such cases, the machine should be outfitted with less-than-lethal options.

While television and movies make subduing someone safely seem easy, it is difficult to do. For example, the classic rifle butt to the head is a fictional favorite for knocking someone out, when doing that in the real world would cause serious injury or even death. Tasers, gas weapons and rubber bullets also can cause serious injury or death. However, the less-than-lethal options are less likely to kill a suspect and thus allow them to be captured for trial, which is supposed to be the point of law enforcement. Robots could be designed to both withstand gunfire and securely grab a suspect. While this is likely to result in injury (such as broken bones) and could kill, it would be less likely to kill than a bomb. An excellent example of a situation in which a robot would be ideal would be to capture an armed suspect barricaded in a structure.

It must be noted that there will be cases in which the use of lethal force via a robot is justified. These would include cases in which the suspect presents a clear and present danger to officers or civilians and the best chance of ending the threat is the use of such force. An example of this might be a hostage situation in which the hostage taker is likely to kill hostages while the robot is trying to subdue them with less-than-lethal force.

While police robots have long been the stuff of science fiction, they do present a potential technological solution to the moral and practical problem of keeping officers and suspects alive. While an officer might be legitimately reluctant to stake her life on less-than-lethal options when directly engaged with a suspect, an officer operating a robot faces no such risk. As such, if the deployment of less-than-lethal options via a robot would not put the public at unnecessary risk, then it would be morally right to use such means.

While most current body hacking technology is gimmicky and theatrical, it does have potential. It is, for example, easy enough to imagine that the currently very dangerous night-vision eye drops could be made into a safe product, allowing people to hack their eyes. There is also the cyberpunk future envisioned by writers such as William Gibson and games like Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. In such a future, people might body hack their way to being full cyborgs. In the nearer future, there might be augmentations like memory backups for the brain, implanted phones, and even subdermal weapons. Such augmenting hacks raise moral issues that go beyond the basic ethics of self-modification. Fortunately, these ethical matters can be effectively addressed by the application of existing moral theories and principles.

Since the basic ethics of self-modification were addressed in the previous essay, this essay will focus solely on the ethical issue of augmentation through body hacking. This issue does, of course, stack with the other moral concerns.

In general, there seems to be nothing inherently wrong with the augmentation of the body through technology. The easy way to argue for this is to draw the obvious analogy to external augmentation: starting with sticks and rocks, humans augmented their natural capacities. If this is acceptable, then moving the augmentation under the skin should not open a new moral world.

The easy and obvious objection is to contend that under the skin is a new moral world. That, for example, a smart phone carried in a pocket is one thing, while a smartphone embedded in the skull is another.

This objection does have merit: implanting technology is morally significant. At the very least, there are moral concerns about potential health risks. However, this moral concern is about the medical aspects, not about the augmentation itself. This is not to say that the health issues are not important, they are very important; but fall under another moral issue.

If it is accepted that augmentation is, in general, morally acceptable, there are still legitimate concerns about specific types of augmentation and the context in which they are employed. Fortunately, there is established moral discussion about these categories of augmentation.

Two areas in which augmentation is of concern are sports and games. Athletes have long engaged in body hacking, if the use of drugs can be considered body hacking. While those playing games like poker generally do not use enhancing drugs, they have attempted to cheat with technology. While future body hacks might be more dramatic, they would seem to fall under the same principles that govern the use of augmenting substances and equipment in current sports. For example, an implanted device that stores extra blood to be added during the competition would be analogous to existing methods of blood doping. As another example, a poker or chess player might implant a computer that she can use to cheat at the game.

While specific body hacks will need to be addressed by the appropriate governing bodies of sports and games, the basic principle that cheating is morally unacceptable still applies. As such, the ethics of body hacking in sports and games is easy enough to handle in the general and the real challenge will be sorting out which hacks are cheating and which are acceptable. In any case, some interesting scandals can be expected.

The field of academics is also an area of concern. Since students are adept at using technology such as AI to cheat, there will be efforts to cheat through body hacking. As with cheating in sports and games, the basic ethical framework is well-established: creating is morally unacceptable. As with sports and games, the challenge will be sorting out which hacks are considered cheating, and which are not. If body hacking becomes mainstream, it can be expected that education and testing will need to change as well as the was counts as cheating. Using an analogy, calculators are usually now allowed on tests and thus the future might see implanted computers being allowed for certain tests. Testing of memory might also become pointless. If most people have implanted devices that can store data and link to the internet, memorizing things might cease to be a skill worth testing. This does, however, segue into the usual moral concerns about people losing abilities or becoming weaker due to technology. Since these are general concerns that have applied to everything from the abacus to the automobile, I will not address this issue here.

There is also the broad realm composed of all the other areas of life that do not generally have specific moral rules about cheating through augmentation. These include such areas as business and dating. While there are moral rules about certain forms of cheating, the likely forms of body hacking would not seem to be considered cheating in such areas, though they might be regarded as providing an unfair advantage, especially in cases in which the wealthy classes are able to gain even more advantages over the less well-off classes.

As an example, a company with might use body hacking to upgrade its employees so they can be more effective, thus providing a competitive edge over lesser companies.  While it seems likely that certain augmentations will be regarded as unfair enough to require restriction, body hacking would merely change the means and not the underlying game. That is, the well-off always have advantages over the less-well-off. Body hacking would just be a new tool in the competition. Hence, existing ethical principles would apply here as well. Or not be applied, as is so often the case when money is on the line.

So, while body hacking for augmentation will require some new applications of existing moral theories and principles, it does not make a significant change in the moral landscape. Like almost all changes in technology it will merely provide new ways of doing old things. Like cheating in school or sports. Or life.

While body hacking is sometimes presented as being new and radical, humans have been engaged in the practice (under other names) for quite some time. One of the earliest forms of true body hacking was probably the use of prosthetic parts to replace lost pieces, such as a leg or hand. These hacks were aimed at restoring a degree of functionality, so they were practical hacks.

While most contemporary body hacking seems aimed at gimmicks or limited attempts at augmentation, there are serious applications that involve replacement and restoration. One example of this is the color blind person who is using a skull mounted camera to provide audio clues regarding colors. This hack serves as a replacement to missing components of the eye, albeit in a somewhat unusual way.

Medicine is, obviously enough, replete with body hacks ranging from contact lenses to prosthetic limbs. These technologies and devices provide people with some degree of replacement and restoration for capabilities they lost or never had. While these sorts of hacks are typically handled by medical professionals, advances in existing technology and the rise of new technologies will result in more practical hacks aimed not at gimmicks but at restoration and replacement. There will also be considerable efforts aimed at augmentation, but this matter will be addressed in the next essay.

Since humans have been body hacking for replacement and restoration for thousands of years, the ethics of this matter are well settled. In general, the use of technology for medical reasons of replacement or restoration is morally unproblematic. After all, this process is simply fulfilling the main purpose of medicine: to get a person as close to their normal healthy state as possible. To use a specific example, there really is no moral controversy over the use of prosthetic limbs that are designed to restore functionality. In the case of body hacks, the same general principle would apply and hacks that aim at restoration or replacement are morally unproblematic. That said, there are some potential areas of concern.

One area of both moral and practical concern is the risk of amateur or DIY body hacking. The concern is that such hacking could have negative consequences. This might be due to bad design, poor implementation or other causes. For example, a person might endeavor a hack to replace a missing leg and have it fail catastrophically, resulting in a serious injury. This is, of course, not unique to body hacking, this is a general matter of good decision making.

As with health and medicine in general, it is usually preferable to go with a professional rather than an amateur or a DIY approach (at least in serious matters). Also, the possibility of harm makes it a matter of moral concern. That said, there are many people who cannot afford professional care and technology will afford people an ever-growing opportunity to body hack for medical reasons. This sort of self-help can be justified on the grounds that some restoration or replacement is better than none. This assumes that self-help efforts do not result in worse harm than doing nothing. As such, body hackers and society will need to consider the ethics of the risks of amateur and DIY body hacking. Guidance can be found here in existing medical ethics, such as moral guides for people attempting to practice medicine on themselves and others without proper medical training.

A second area of moral concern is that some people will engage in replacing fully functional parts with body hacks that are equal or inferior to the original (augmentation will be addressed in the next essay). For example, a person might want to remove a finger to replace it with a mechanical finger with a built in USB drive. As another example, a person might want to replace her eye with a camera comparable or inferior to her natural eye.

One clear moral concern is the potential dangers in such hacks as removing a body part can be dangerous. One approach would be to weigh the harms and benefits of such hacking. On the face of it, such replacement hacks would seem to be at best neutral, that is, the person will end up with the same capabilities as before. It is also possible, perhaps likely, that the replacement attempt will result in diminished capabilities, thus making the hack wrong because of the harm inflicted. Some body hackers might argue that such hacks have a value beyond functionality. For example, the value of self-expression or achieving a state of existence that matches one’s conception or vision of self. In such cases, the moral question would be whether these factors are worth considering and if they are, how much weight they should be given morally.

There is also the worry that such hacks would be a form of unnecessary self-mutilation and thus at best morally dubious. A counter to this is to argue, as John Stuart Mill did, that people have a right to self-harm, if they do not harm others.  That said, arguing that people do not have a right to interfere with self-harm (provided the person is acting freely and rationally) does not entail that self-harm is morally acceptable. It is certainly possible to argue against self-harm on utilitarian grounds and based on moral obligations to oneself. Arguments from the context of virtue theory would also apply as self-harm is contrary to developing one’s excellence as a person.

These approaches could be countered. Utilitarian arguments can be met with utilitarian arguments that offer a different evaluation of the harms and benefits. Arguments based on obligations to oneself can be countered by arguing that there are not such obligations or that the obligations one does have allows from this sort of modification. Argument from virtue theory could be countered by attacking the theory itself or showing how such modifications are consistent with moral excellence.

My own view, which I consistently apply to other areas such as drug use, diet, and exercise, is that people have a moral right to freedom of self-abuse and harm. This requires that the person can make an informed decision and is not coerced or misled. As such, I hold that a person has every right to DIY body hacking. Since I also accept the principle of harm, I hold that society has a moral right to regulate body hacking of others as other similar practices (such as dentistry) are regulated. This is to prevent harm being inflicted on others. Being fond of virtue theory, I do hold that people should not engage in self-harm, even though they have every right to do so without having their liberty restricted. To use a concrete example, if someone wants to spoon out her eyeball and replace it with an LED light, then she has every right to do so. However, if an untrained person wants to set up a shop and scoop eyeballs for replacement with lights, then society has every right to prevent that. I do think that scooping out an eye would be both foolish and morally wrong, which is also how I look at heroin use and smoking tobacco.

The survival argument for establishing off world colonies has considerable appeal. It begins with a consideration of the threat of extinction. There have been numerous extinction events in the past and there is no reason to think humans are exempt. There are a variety of plausible doomsday scenarios that could cause our extinction, ranging from the classic asteroid strike to the human-made nuclear Armageddon. Less extreme, but still of concern, are disasters that would end our civilization without exterminating us.

In the face of these threats, it can be argued that a rational response is to ensure there is an off-world population of humans that would allow humanity to survive even if the earth were subject to an extinction event. In the less extreme scenarios, the off-world population could preserve civilization and help restore it. These scenarios are all familiar to sci-fi fans.

From a moral standpoint, the argument that we should establish colonies to ensure survival is a utilitarian one. The gist is that while they are expensive, this is offset by the value of increasing the odds that humanity and human civilizations will survive. This sort of ethical reasoning, made famous by J.S. Mill, involves weighing the positive and negative value created by an action. The action that creates the most positive value (factoring the negative) for the beings that count is the right action to take.

The obvious moral counter, which is also utilitarian in nature, is to argue these resources would be better spent increasing our chances of survival on earth. While an obvious concern is climate change, there are many other threats that could be addressed by using resources on earth. The “earth first” argument is often made in terms of the return on investment. For example, spending billions for a moon colony would provide less benefit than spending billions addressing terrestrial threats to survival.

While this is a reasonable moral argument, an obvious counter is that spending on space development need not exclude addressing terrestrial problems. After all, we already expend vast resources on things that do not increase humanity’s odds of surviving (and many that decrease it). There is also the practical fact that buy-in is needed from the upper class that controls the resources, and it is far more likely that the Trump administration would fund a moon base or Mars mission before doing anything to address climate change. As such, while the “the money is better spent on other things” argument is reasonable, it is not an effective practical argument against spending resources towards off-world colonies.

Another reasonable objection is both moral and practical: morally justifying expending vast resources based on the survival argument fails because we lack the technology and resources to create a viable colony intended for survival of the species. While some might use the story of Adam and Eve as an inspiration, creating a viable and self-sustaining colony or even just preserving civilization is incredibly unlikely. The colony would need enough population to be viable and must be able to exist without any assistance from the earth. As such, it would need to grow its own food and produce its own water, air and equipment. Think of how difficult it is for humans to operate in Antarctica; operating a colony on the moon or mars would be vastly more difficult.

A counter is to argue that such a colony is not impossible, although it would require massive investment and perhaps centuries of effort. Which would, of course, take us back to arguments about effective use of resources. It would make more sense, critics would argue, to use those resources improving life on earth.

A third objection is to argue that humans are not suitable for life in an off-world colony. We cannot survive in space or on any of the other worlds in our solar system without life-support. Laying aside concerns about air, food and water, and radiation, there is also gravity. Humans, at least the current model, do not do well living in low gravity.

One counter is to argue that the moon and mars might have enough gravity to make them viable for human habitation. There is also the option of using spin, as in sci-fi, to create “artificial” gravity in orbital habitats. Another counter, which is radical but possible, is to argue we can modify our species to live in such environments through genetic engineering and technological augmentation. Life on earth shows a remarkable ability to adapt to hostile environments and humans could be modified to survive and even thrive in such conditions. Getting into the realm of science fiction, we can imagine radical alterations to humans ranging from complete biological reconstructions to putting human brains into mechanical bodies.

Proposals to modify humans do raise serious questions, including the question of what it is to be human. After all, imagine a modified person who could survive on the surface of the moon just wearing shorts. Would such a person still be human? This raises the concern that going into space for survival might be impossible: if we must cease to be human to survive, then that would be the end of humanity.

One response to this worry is to argue that it is not biology that matters, but some other factors. For example, it could be argued that if the “space people” have cultural and moral ties to the “human people” then the survival of the “space people” would mean the survival of humanity, if not homo sapiens. Of course, the same sort of argument could be made if AI exterminated biological humans; our AI “children” would survive. As a closing objection, there is the classic judgment day problem, one I recall from my first space arguments as a college kid.

The judgment day problem is that God has set judgment day, perhaps as laid out in Revelations. On this view, humanity is perfectly safe on earth until judgment day, because nothing can happen to interfere with it. So, there is no point in expanding off earth for the purpose of survival. There might be other good reasons to expand into space, such as finding aliens to convert or to mine asteroids, but the survival argument would have no weight on such a world view. The challenge is, of course, to prove that this view is correct. The same logic can, of course, be used against doing almost anything: if God has judgment day all planned, there is no sense in coming up with cures for disease or even bothering to try to stay alive at all. That is, the fatalism of this view should be universal.

My overall view is that while the survival argument has merit, it requires taking an extremely long-term view as building a self-sustaining off-world colony would probably take centuries of effort. And there is the problem with surviving long enough for success. As such, a reasonable approach would be to focus on survival on earth while taking steps to expand into space. Of course, the “easiest” solution would be to let AI replace us; AI systems would have little trouble surviving off-world.