But how different is telling a drone "kill the person with this face" to telling a missile "fly here and blow up". The video seems to show ez-assassination technology (tm) being used by "the wrong" humans, not AI going rogue and deciding who lives and who dies on its own.

To me, the video is scary not because of AI, but because of how easy and inconsequential it portrays murder. It makes you wonder if that isn't sort of the end goal of advanced warfare technology - the more surgical it becomes the further it deviates from our idea of what war is - this is drone warfare and it's nebulous legality taken to the very extreme.

What I perhaps find unsettling in myself is that I find this somehow worse than open warfare - as if its not the loss of life that bothers me, but the sinister efficiency of it. Is that really a valid criticism? Why is it "more ok" to fly a plane to drop a bomb on some foreigner than for a drone to do it - is it because it simply costs/risks us more, that technology like this cheapens human life?

The AI takin over is scary too. I just hope they work out in time that the only winning move is not to play.

I'll go further. I'd rather be burgled than kill someone.

If someone broke into my house and tried to steal my TV, as long as they weren't trying to hurt me or my family, hell, I'd help them carry it.

It's just stuff and it's not worth taking a human life over.

I'd like to point out that this is exactly how science is supposed to work. A flaw found in a model is corrected and the model is recast.

Climate change isn't as precise as say standard physics, but I have a lot of faith in these people and know that our world has to change to continue to support human life. How we get there can be up for debate, but that we have to change is not.

Many, if not most, that oppose places like Planned Parenthood, and oppose most methods of birth control, oppose it, because they think it encourages promiscuity. Sex is of course limited only to marriage in their world view, which is why heavy red states have abstinence only education... which tends to result in them having the highest teen and repeat teen pregnancy rates. And some would argue that the only function of sex is for procreation. The Bible even forbid pulling out (Gen. 38:8–10), though one could argue that was for one guy in particular. Anyhow, basically they see pregnancy as part of God's design and purpose for sex. The fact it has physical pleasures, is a gift from God for the married couple.

In the case of IUDs, they believe the old myth that the IUD causes abortions, that it lowers the chance that a fertilized egg will implant. The reality is that it doesn't at all, at least for modern, non-copper clad IUDs. Once upon a time, the old copper ones did have a very small impact on the chance a fertilized egg could implant, and even modern ones that have far less copper cladding on a wire around it, can have a very very small chance of decreasing implantation. But those ones aren't really used that often. Basically, the IUD is the most effective form of birth control, but it is opposed to stereotypes and lies. Modern IUDs work to prevent fertilization in the first place, via the hormones in them and design, if an egg is fertilized, it still has the same chance of implantation... however the chance of an egg being fertilized is very low, as sperm mobility is seriously hurt, and of course the woman's body lowers egg release too.

Plan B also doesn't stop implantation, or if it does, it is near modern copper clad wire IUDs (and more recent evidence shows it is likely even far less than that). It prevents the women's body from releasing an egg... if an egg is released already, it won't do any good. However, once again, facts don't matter to those on the right, and they promote it as a morning after abortion pill.

Of course, a healthy young woman, who's optimally fertile, only 30-40% of her fertilized eggs will implant, meaning that God Himself aborts about 60-70% of babies (since they define it as a full baby and human life at conception) in optimally fertile women. Now.. you have to add to that, natural miscarriages for other reasons... and the odds of having a baby really are against you naturally. (There are links to medical journals here: http://ask.metafilter.com/203529/What-of-fertilized-human-eggs-die and in this Healthcare Triage video about IUDs: https://videosift.com/video/IUDs-Are-Pretty-Great-So-Why-Arent-They-More-Popular)

Well, some times you have to draw a line.

I'm a speciesist.

Specifically, I am a human supremacist. I even feel strongly about it. I actually believe it is morally wrong to not hold up human life as inherently more valuable than that of any and all other species.

I don't find it hard to believe that people disagree with that. I'm not even surprised there are people that would want to liken that to being a racist. I am surprised that I begin to see society on the path to where my view becomes a minority view and I could potentially be looked down upon for being so backwards and closed minded.

Yeah, well fuck your tire and your radiator. I hate ALL human life. Meanwhile, the laughs and the jeering and whistling. YOU WILL ALL BE DESTROYED BY THE ANCIENT SPIRIT BULL.

The thruth of this world is that most ideals are bullshit. Let's look at the idea that human life is sacred, the sanctity of human life. God disapproves of murder.
The death penality is older than scripture. It existed before we had written words. It is still a thing.
How can that be if we are so developed, so evolved, so civilized?
Human life isn't sacred. We shit on that on a daily basis. Murder is committed every day. For petty reasons. For political reasons. For stupid reasons.
Your holy book, the Bible, tells me to kill people for adultery.
How can you defend this?
That's why I'm a cynic, that's why I'm a dissapointed idealist. I'd like to believe but I can't. Belief makes me inhuman, makes me cruel, makes me kill adulterers. It commands me to be a murderer.
For what?
For betrayal? For sex? For deceit? For breaking promises?
I'd rather be a cynic. I choose humanism over homicide.
Your book is evil. Your faith leads to evil.
I chose compassion. I chose cynicism.

"But Catholic priests, bishops, and cardinals don’t give “reproductive advice”; they articulate the truth about human life and reproductive ethics in accord with Catholic teaching. A teaching promulgated and practiced for centuries by an entire religious group is fundamentally distinct from a panel of “virgins in bathrobes” dictating to women what they can and cannot do."

I'm...failing to see the difference... It all seems like an appeal to tradition. The fact virgins in bathrobes have been telling women what to do for centuries doesn't actually make them right.

also "truth" LOL

FFS, I'm not trying to make an argument. As for watching the video, that wasn't a waste of my time, it was entertaining and informative unlike the article which was desperately trying to excuse an awful situation.

But fine, you want an argument? Let's do this.

"If one doesn't want the very small set of restrictions that go with some (not all) religiously affiliated hospitals, don't go there. One does have a choice."

You have that backwards. If you don't provide all the services required of a hospital, you don't get to call yourself a fucking hospital.

How would you feel if there was a Jehovahs Witness hospital that didn't do blood transfusions? Or a Christian Science hospital that refused to do medical treatment?
Both of those are real world examples where people died.

There's a big bloody difference between "not equipped" and "unwilling". In a local area, there might be several smaller medical facilities, but finding two major care centres across the road from each other is pretty rare.

And it's a bit fucking rich to bring up false equivalencies when you just compared unavailability of potential life-saving medical treatment to someone whinging over not getting a big mac at kfc.

As for the article:

"First, Bee ignores the fact that Catholic teaching on human life and reproduction is a fundamental, longstanding tradition of the Church, passed down from one generation to the next for centuries. "

Irrelevant. Next...

"But Catholic priests, bishops, and cardinals don’t give “reproductive advice”; they articulate the truth about human life and reproductive ethics in accord with Catholic teaching."

Really? They "articulate the truth"... as I said before, this is self-evidently complete and utter fucking bullshit.

"the claim that women will be without care if they are refused service at a Catholic hospital."
Er, even the article acknowledges that Bee understands this point and makes the point that in an emergency situation, you go to the nearest available centre that can treat you.

"This is another straw man. In most cases, when women want a particular reproductive service, they have ample time to locate and attend a non-Catholic hospital. "

Yes, and in most cases, people do. BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT WE'RE FUCKING TALKING ABOUT.

"Even in the few emergency situations — which Bee presents as if they are the vast majority of cases"

No, she really doesn't.

"Though it sometimes might be inconvenient for a woman to travel to a non-Catholic hospital, the inconvenience surely does not outweigh the importance of conscience rights, which demand that Catholic hospitals not be forced to provide procedures that Catholicism deems morally wrong."

Yes, "inconvenient" is exactly the right word for a woman who is probably in the middle of the worst day of her life.
I mean, she might end up "inconveniently" dead, but hey, we wouldn't want to stop catholics telling other people how to live, would we?

"In reality, a direct abortion (in which a doctor intentionally kills a child) is never medically necessary to save a mother’s life. If a woman is having a miscarriage, having her child killed in an abortion will do nothing to improve her health or save her life."

And here we come to strawman of all strawmen. The problem is NOT that a woman needs a "direct abortion", it's that she may a surgical procedure that kills the child inadvertently. And this isn't theoretical, women have died from this.

The fundamental point is that religion has no place in medicine. If a patient wishes to refuse certain treatments because of their beliefs, well, they're an idiot, but it's their choice to be an idiot.

But a hospital doesn't get to refuse treatment based on some bronze-age belief. If the treatment is legal in its jurisdiction and they have the capability to provide it, they must provide it. Businesses should not be allowed to refuse service on religious grounds ("I am religiously opposed to treating gay people or blacks!!")

As you said yourself "If you don't like it, go work somewhere else".

it's not a question of whether or not it's a living being. It's a question of personhood, which is a philosophical argument, not a biological one. Children don't have the same rights as adults, it's not that they aren't living beings, it's simply philosophical argument, children don't have the same abilities as adults, so an age was set, and viola.

sperm are living entities too, so are bacteria, don't see men getting jailed for masturbation, or people getting jailed for using anti-bacterial soap.

The right wing pro-life argument rings hollow when they show how little they care for human life after it leaves the womb.

And pro-tip, you're not going to get a rational discussion from bob. he's full of truthiness

He is not. He is making the point that we made it up. There is a difference. There is no god, we made all that up. Sorry. There is no "sanctity of life" either, its an incoherent phrase that doesnt pass even a shallow honest analysis (as shown in this video)

BUT, and there is a big but, Life is a continuos process, full of degrees and nuances (which, by the way, Carlin makes a point of in the continuation of this clip), and the value of say, a human life, is something that we should estimate on the grounds that we have brains, feelings, relatives, friends and so on.

Saying shit like "Life is Sacred" is both simplistic, hypocritical and complete bullshit. In fact, it is ultimately disrespectful to living creatures whose life should be respected, a point which the ramblings of the anti-abortion team never ceases to illustrate perfectly

This reminds me a lot of a term paper I wrote in college about "the fallacy of the 'value of human life'"...I got an A and we spent two days in class discussing it.

MASSIVE LONG POST WARNING: feel free to skip this

I usually like Vsauce a lot, but I disagree with just about every assumption and every conclusion he makes in this video.

Anthropogenic vs external extinction event -
I think the likelihood of an anthropogenic extinction event is low. Even in the cold war, at the apex of "mutually assured destruction" risk, IF that destruction was triggered I think it would have been extremely unlikely to make humans go extinct. The US and USSR might have nuked each other to near-extinction, but even with fairly mobile nuclear fallout / nuclear winter, etc. I think that enough humans would have remained in other areas to remain a viable population.

Even if ONE single person had access to every single nuclear weapon in existence, and they went nuts and tried to use them ALL with the goal of killing every single human being on the planet, I still bet there would be enough pockets of survivors in remote areas to prevent humans from going utterly extinct.

Sure, an anthropogenic event could be devastating -- catastrophic even -- to human life. But I think humanity could recover even from an event with an associated human death rate of 95% or more -- and I think the likelihood of anything like that is real slim.

So that leaves natural or external extinction events. The KT extinction (end of the dinosaurs) is the most recent major event, and it happened 65 million years ago. Homo sapiens have been around 150-200,000 years, and as a species we've been through some fairly extreme climatic changes. For example, humans survived the last ice age around 10-20,000 years ago -- so even without technology, tools, buildings, etc. we managed to survive a climate shift that extreme. Mammals survived the KT extinction, quite possible that we could have too -- especially if we were to face it with access to modern technology/tools/knowledge/etc.

So I think it would probably take something even more extreme than the asteroid responsible for KT to utterly wipe us out. Events like that are temporally rare enough that I don't think we need to lose any sleep over them. And again, it would take something massive to wipe out more than 95% of the human population. We're spread out, we live in pretty high numbers on basically every landmass on earth (perhaps minus Antarctica), we're adapted to many many different environments ... pretty hard to kill us off entirely.


"Humans are too smart to go extinct" @1:17 -
I think we're too dumb to go extinct. Or at least too lazy. The biggest threats we face are anthropogenic, but even the most driven and intentionally malevolent human or group of humans would have a hard time hunting down *everybody, everywhere*.


Doomsday argument -
I must admit that I don't really understand this one. The guess of how many total humans there will be, EVER, seems extremely arbitrary. But anyway, I tend to think it might fall apart if you try to use it to make the same assertions about, say, bacterial life instead of human life. Some specific species of bacteria have been around for way way longer than humans, and in numbers that dwarf human populations. So, the 100 billionth bacteria didn't end up needing to be worried about its "birth number", nor did the 100 trillionth.


Human extinction "soon" vs. "later" -
Most plausibly likely threats "soon" are anthropogenic. The further we push into "later", the more the balance swings towards external threats, I think. But we're talking about very small probabilities (in my opinion anyway) on either side of the scale. But I don't think that "human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of any extinction event thrown at it" (@4:54). Increased human ingenuity is directly correlated with increased likelihood of anthropogenic extinction, so that's pretty much the opposite. For external extinction events, I think it is actually fairly hard to imagine some external scenario or event that could have wiped out humans 100, 20, 5, 2, or 1 thousand years ago that wouldn't wipe us out today even with our advances and ingenuity. And anything really bad enough to wipe us out is not going to wait for us to be ready for it...


Fermi paradox -
This is the most reasonable bit of the whole video, but it doesn't present the most common / best response. Other stars, galaxies, etc. are really far away. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000+ light years across. The nearest other galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.2 million light years away. A living being (or descendents of living beings) coming to us either of those distances would have to survive as long as the entire history of human life, all while moving at near the speed of light, and have set out headed straight for us from the get-go all those millions and millions of years ago. So lack of other visitors is not surprising at all.

Evidence of other life would be far more likely to find, but even that would have to be in a form we could understand. Human radio signals heading out into space are less than 100 years old. Anything sentient and actively looking for us, even within the cosmically *tiny* radius of 100 light years, would have to have to evolved in such a way that they also use radio; otherwise the clearest evidence of US living here on Earth would be undetectable to them. Just because that's what we're looking for, doesn't mean that other intelligent beings would take the same approach.

Add all that up, and I don't think that the Fermi paradox is much cause for alarm. Maybe there are/have been LOTS of intelligent life forms out there, but they have been sending out beacons in formats we don't recognize, or they are simply too far away for those beacons to have reached us yet.


OK, I think I'm done. Clearly I found the video interesting, to post that long of a rambling response... But I was disappointed in it compared to usual Vsauce stuff. Still, upvote for the thoughts provoked and potential discussion, even though I disagree with most of the content and conclusions.

It amuses me when people talk about eternal bliss or eternal damnation. WTF would you know about eternity? Human life resulted from a chance combination of compatible factors to support evolution in a tiny fragment of a vast cosmos. Nothing else makes sense.

Grabbing at a gun is immediate grounds for deadly force in every case, law, home, etc. I only say this because the suspect obviously upped the ante to that zone with no regard for human life. Second, "witnesses" were there to see it all...that's not a good thing and ups the ante far, far more... witnesses are either friends or someone the cop has no idea who they are. That means they are potentially dangerous, especially in a city where blacks (by their own heartfelt admissions) HATE white police officers with a huge passion. I am not saying the racists are not justified, as they clearly have been profiled and such, but this is clearly the case. No confusion should ever arise in dispute of the fact that bystanders are different than potential dangers. If the officer does taze and someone gets involved, he is a dead mother fucker because now he is occupied with a screaming, shitting-self man who is 100% willing to murder him, as already displayed, and someone else. Lastly, the tazer does not always work. And when the tazer does work, immediately afterwards you are 100% capable of using your body to 100% again. Most people think that then tazer magically incapacitates someone for a long time. No--when you release that trigger the tazer's effects are over.
In my opinion deadly force is not the last option. It is the option right before you die.

Now the responses are, for certain, based on stupid choices. The chief trying to minimize was what we all do but pretty dumb. You ever comfort a kid that he might not be hurt so he doesn't feel pain or freak out? Happens, even if the kid is really really hurt and the ambulance is on the way. Stupid choice...and the releasing of the video is iffy at best. What pisses me off most is that it was not meant to calm down the violence, but to appease the nation's view of Ferguson's white people...