I once had a chemistry professor who used to work as a senior drug researcher at a major pharmaceutical company. He often joked about how the company treated the monkeys used for testing far better than the PhDs. If a monkey suffered a negative reaction there was a major investigation. I'm incredibly surprised Musk can be killing monkeys left and right and hasn't been thrown in jail.
The difference is that guy was working at a major pharmaceutical research firm with animal advocates and whistle-blowers and accrediting board all over them. Musk's group is new and is still in the fucking around phase. As soon as they have to answer to any outside org, suddenly this will be a huge liability.
You're looking at a tweet from well over a year ago. They've killed well over 1500 animals at this point, and I think you might want to look up "neuralink" on literally any news site.
You are confusing taking a class with actually having ethics. No amount of attending a lecture about ethics will convince you if you do not, as a basic premise agree with the ethical principle that loss of life is a bad thing. And to be very clear, ethical principles are subjective. There is no objectively right or wrong thing as far nature is concerned.
Ethics class gives you tools to analyze a problem. Any good class is part of the philosophy department and leans on the classic philosphers approaches to analyze the problem. Many engineers would have no exposure to this otherwise and i think its a good part of any Universities' engineering curriculum.
Classes don't solve the problem entirely, but they're a start and without them in this case a company so large and powerful that it has a space program and foreign policy planks is being guided by nothing but the intuition of someone who grew up spending money earned by child slaves and who thinks that scuttling an army's mission in-progress is pacifism
Funny story, the only ethics required in my engineering degree was a 2-day unit on our professional code of ethics. We had a 20-question true/false homework on it, and the thing about a professional code of ethics is it's not super intuitive. Most of the class thought they could gut feel their way through it, but you actually had to read the code because the wording was very specific sometimes. When it turned out that everyone failed the homework, the professor let us try again.
Eveyone needs it. Aristotle starts out his Nicomachean ethics stating that virtuous acts are first and foremost for the benefit of the virtuous person.
Platonic ethics should also really be taught widely, even more so than Aristotle's because they're easier to receive. Even if he has some hard to accept views such as that commiting injustice is worse than suffering it, everyone would benefit if children grew up with the notion that everyone does what they think best, and that those who do "wrong" things do so out of ignorance of what is good, rather than what we currently have where everyone knows what is objectively good, and those who don't do it are willfully wrongdoers and you just need to punish them enough and they'll become good.
Although you can have the best educational plans in the galaxy if the educarional system is crap. I don't know about the rest of the world, but where I'm from all education from primary school to a master's degree is just a bunch of information being thrown at you with 0 context and reasoning behind it, and when you're able to reproduce that information on demand (without any context): congratz, you're educated!
"Oh let's just reuse the code and forget the hardware breakers on the machine it'll be fine."
Like I have no ethics training but they even had a (human operated) control rod in the first chicago pile who trusts a radiation gun to a SOFTWARE toggle?
I only learned about it from the "Well There's Your Problem" podcast. Can't believe my school never talked about it. We did hear all about Challenger though as well as a few other disasters where the lesson was "If you cut corners, or take chances, people can DIE"
I personally enjoy ethics as a subject, but has it been shown that studying ethics in uni actually leads to people behaving more ethically? I agree that ethics should be applied to science, but science should also be applied to ethics to determine the effective approach.
Philosophy should be taught from very early. The hability to think, argue, relate to others and understand others while being capable of express your ideas is extremely important.
Yea stopping animal testing sounds great, but animal testing is the backbone of drug and medical breakthroughs. So at least for now that's not possible
I absolutely would. I'd not line up to be among the first, but controlling devices via a brain interface is an inevitable step of technological evolution.
It will provide such an immense performance boost, that many professions may become unattainable without having one. Possibly within our lifetime.
Oh, I thought it was a meme similar to the old "Bush or chimp"-days, back when dubya was president, and was thinking: "surely they could have found a monkey that looked more like Elmo" but that's not the point of these pictures, it seems 😕
Because then you’ll be able to dismiss the ethics while being aware of the implications of your research.
Disregarding the ethics while not knowing them grants you no extra points, whilst deliberately ignoring the ethical ramifications but understanding them gets you all the points