But you have to engage with it before you can find out whether you like it.
>If you can't tell the difference, and it's entertainment stop worrying about it.
At the end of the day it's a philosophical/existential choice. Not everyone would step into the awesome-life-simulator where you can't tell the difference. On similar grounds one might decide on principle to consume only human-made media, be a part of the dynamical system that is real human culture.
We have always been in the life simulator philosophically speaking. Everything is a construct, and the universe is mostly an existential horror. You're only chasing misery by trying to be the information vegan.
It was, and worked well with rtf. I vaguely recall it being better than notepad if you were for example looking at strings in binary files, something like that, I forget...
I often used it to convert unix style line endings to windows. Notepad choked on those, wordpad could load them easily, and just resaving them as a txt file converted them to windows line endings.
IIRC Wordpad was the only always-installed program which could open text files with Unix line endings and display them properly. Until at least Vista, Notepad would treat them as if containing a single line.
Whenever someone argues the uselessness or redundancy of a particular word we just have to remember that the word exists because at least two parties have found it useful to communicate something between them.
What's the problem? Someone submitted it for people to read but it didn't catch on, now it's resubmitted and people can read it after all. Everyone happy. Don't be so attached to imaginary internet points.
Note that kids can't choose for themselves, only their parents. How parents define "improvement" might not always be in line with what the kids would want for themselves either.
Yeah, this is one area where I find the ethics especially confusing. If you try to make your kid taller, and end up giving them bad joint problems, who is to blame? Does the kid have the right to sue their parents? There are already "wrongful life" lawsuits after all.
What if their parents are really proud of their red hair and then give their kid bright red hair that their kid wished they didn't have? It becomes weird when you can no longer point to luck for the reason you are a certain way, but instead have actual people that you can blame. And that becomes especially weird when you are talking about preferences that are not inherently good or bad, like height, hair or eye colour.
It won't happen explicitly of course. The root comment mentioned "depression", for example, which is at least in part caused by inadequate work-life balance, poor quality of life in general, lack of social fabric, etc... So if you would genetically engineer people to be less depressed, even if you just empirically looked at what genes depressed people have in today's world (as the root comment is proposing), you could end up engineering people that are OK with working long hours for little pay, eating slop, sitting at home doing nothing, never socializing with anyone, obedient to their boss, etcetera etcetera. This would be, in effect, "genetically engineering an under-class", yet it would be easy to defend in the newspapers by just saying "we're only getting rid of depression, how can you be against it?" It's just a logical conclusion if you can think more than two steps ahead.
If the outcome is the same does it matter that there was never a secretive cabal organizing it behind the scenes? You'll happily march towards a dystopia because at least noone intended it to be that way? Is it really unintended if we can foresee it right now and decide to go ahead anyway? I don't get this attitude at all.
If it is unintended, then when we notice it happening we will change course. We will see that the specific gene edits had negative effects, and we will avoid those gene edits in the future. The effect size will probably also be a lot lower than if you were specifically aiming to make people as agreeable and authority-following as possible.
Additionally, the people with the gene edits would only make up only a small percentage of all the people in a society. They will get some form of herd immunity when combined with people born naturally, older generations, and people without the gene edit.
This is a dramatically different situation to someone intentionally trying to engineer a servant class.
There is simply no hope to get 99% of the population to accept that a piece of software could ever be conscious even in theory. I'm mildly worried about the prospect but I just don't see anything to do about it at all.
(edit: A few times I've tried to share Metzinger's "argument for a global moratorium on synthetic phenomenology" here but it didn't gain any traction)
Give it time. We'll soon have kids growing up where their best friend for years is an AI. Feel however you like about that, but those kids will have very different opinions on this.
>If you can't tell the difference, and it's entertainment stop worrying about it.
At the end of the day it's a philosophical/existential choice. Not everyone would step into the awesome-life-simulator where you can't tell the difference. On similar grounds one might decide on principle to consume only human-made media, be a part of the dynamical system that is real human culture.
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