Genocide to make the world a better place?/was Re: [extropy-chat] Neural Engineering

[Technotranscendence]

On Friday, March 19, 2004 12:10 AM Robert J. Bradbury
bradbury at aeiveos.com wrote:
> Now, many of you may remember my
> rather infamous "lets nuke Afghanistan"
> post of a couple of years ago.  This was
> based on my utilitarian/extropic argument
> that it would simply be more efficient to
> eliminate Al Queda (and secondary non-
> involved individuals) than to be chasing
> them around for who knows how long
> (allowing them to inflict more harm at
> random as appears to be pointed out by
> recent events in Madrid and Bagdhad)).
> [Remember I'm not letting you off the
> hook here -- if you want to spend $100B
> in slow methodical minimal casualty
> cleanup of radicals (such as suicide
> bombers in Afghanistan or Iraq then that
> is $100B you can't spend on the treatment
> of AIDS or Malaria in Africa, starvation
> around the world, etc.  I have yet to see
> anyone propose concrete return-on-
> investment guidelines that would conform
> to the Extropian principles.]

First, the number of people killed by Al Queda, etc. is much smaller by
several orders of magnitude than the number who would have died in your
war of extermination.  The overall damage caused by terrorists, too,
would be several orders of magnitude smaller than that caused by such a
war of extermination.  Your scenario is like getting rid of a criminal
gang in Seattle by obliterating the whole city.

Second, what if we applied the same logic all around?  What do you think
the reaction would be of potential "secondary non-involved individuals"?
Would they side with you or would they start to look for ways to destroy
their potential destroyer, plunging the whole planet -- which, btw, has
not lifeboats -- into a war that likely would wreck our civilization.

Third, such a war would also make the terrorists look like heroes and
actually would change the support much more in their direction.  For
religious nuts among them, this would not decrease their fervor.

Fourth, there're the moral arguments about individual human worth of
those innocents.  Your ROI argument would not work for them.  Would it
work for you?  What if someone were to claim that eliminating you were
more efficient than letting you live?  (I'm not making a threat here,
just trying to follow the logic of your view in a way that I hope gives
you pause.)  Efficient for whom?  Definitely not for you.

Regarding the monies spent, this is an entirely different issue.  It's
not like there were and are only two strategies available: very
expensive imperialist war and occupations vs. nuclear extermination.
There were and are other strategies that would be cheaper than both.
(The same applies to AIDS, malaria, and starvation.  There are more
alternatives than just the same old government programs.)

Regards,

Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/MyWorksBySubject.html