Post #3899222

2026-07-18 00:33 UTC

@ori I don't think you can do that with the atom bomb. In the 1970s paper it highlights a good example. The Nazi Death Camp in its design is not neutral. it is embedded with evil values. I don't think there's a neutral death camp.

Replies (1)

@ori@hj.9fs.net 2026-07-18 00:52

Yes. My grandmother and her sister survived Auschwitz. Their ten other siblings did not. I know more than I'd like about those places. The gas used to exterminate them was initially designed to increase crop yields, and reduce loss to pests. The label "pest" got reapplied by the surrounding society, while the technology remained unchanged. The process to produce the gas was evolved from processes designed by the (Jewish) Fritz Haber, well before the Nazi party rose to power. Did he encode his values into his work? What about the synthetic fertilizers that are still in use today? There's engineering at the fringes when optimizing a tool for a specific purpose, but at that point, there's usually some repurposable technology already ready to generalize to other uses. Because the generality of technology, it's genuinely difficult to encode "good" values into it unambiguously. CC: @OliviaVespera@spacey.space

Open ##3899221