Category Archives: Op-Eds

Op-Eds

Some Questions from the Edge of Immortality

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There is currently no consensus on how closely...

 

Nectome, a startup headed by two former artificial intelligence researchers, is serious about immortality. They’re touting a process for preserving the human brain at the point of death (by killing the patient with the preservative), with the next (unfortunately still notional) step being to “re-start” that brain as computer software.

The quest for immortality is as old as humankind, and we’ve publicly agonized over its implications since at least as far back as the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 200 years ago. As science  seemingly moves us closer to the goal, especially if the finish line consists of transplanting brain functions from the body to a computer-generated reality, the questions become more important.

What or who is a “person” — a human being whom we recognize as having rights that ought not to be violated?

Is a physical body a necessary component of “personhood,” or would a mind running on a computer likewise enjoy the right to not be robbed or killed, the right to own property, to vote, etc.?

If so, are those rights  contingent upon the mind being the transplanted brain schematic of a former physical human, or would artificial intelligences qualify?

Would the transplanted mind of a former physical human be the same person as that human, or a different entity altogether? And what if it becomes possible for a human to “upload” his or her mind to a computer without dying? Is that second mind the first person’s property, or a new “person” in its own right?

If the process is cheap, might the state ask — or even require — retirees to “upload” and live forever like kings, at far lower cost to taxpayers than the existing Social Security system? Or might  private sector actors offer that option in return for the signing over of government or private retirement benefits? Might life insurance companies offer policies that pay for uploaded immortality instead of paying out death claims to one’s survivors?

If the rent isn’t paid on server space, electricity and computing power for your brain, can you be evicted — and thereby, in effect, killed? Or will there be the equivalent of “low-income housing” for indigent minds, running on slower servers and without as much resource-hogging cool stuff built into the living environment?

What is this possible future, really? Utopia or dystopia? Freedom or slavery? Reality or self-deception? Whatever it is, it’s coming. Time to put on our thinking caps.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

There She Goes Again: Clinton’s Blame Game, Mumbai Edition

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Hillary Clinton in Concord, New Hampshire
Hillary Clinton in Concord, New Hampshire (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s  been James Comey. It’s been Them Russians. It’s been Barack Obama. It’s been misogyny. It’s been WikiLeaks. It’s been social media.  Hillary Clinton has tons of reasons why she lost the 2016 presidential election. And, oddly, none of those reasons are herself or her campaign.

This week, the excuse is that millions of whipped women just did as they were told. Clinton dropped that one on a conference in Mumbai:  “We do not do well with white men and we don’t do well with married, white women ….  part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”

Hillary Clinton loves strong women. Well, sort of. She loves women who are strong enough to vote for Hillary Clinton, but not quite strong enough to speak publicly about their encounters — willing or unwilling, as equals or as mere White House interns bedazzled by presidential attention — with her husband.

It’s not the first time Clinton and her coterie have thrown feminism under the bus.  At a 2016 campaign rally in New Hampshire, former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright announced “a special place in hell” for women who dared make up their own minds instead of just buckling down and supporting Clinton.

One begins to suspect that for Hillary Clinton, everything is all about Hillary Clinton, all the time. That Hillary Clinton’s guiding principle is whatever’s best for Hillary Clinton right now. That Hillary Clinton is never to blame, nor to be held responsible, for anything negative.

If her record of fobbing every problem off on others while publicly stroking her own ego didn’t stretch back decades, and if I hadn’t seem them together, I might have to conclude that she and Donald Trump are the same person wearing different wigs.

Clinton didn’t lose the presidential election because white women don’t have minds of their own. She lost the presidential election because they do.

And because she ran a train wreck of a campaign.

And because she erroneously assumed that organized labor would get out the vote for her in the Rust Belt, an area she mostly ignored and Trump didn’t, where she lost by about 80,000 votes out of more than 135 million cast.

Hillary Clinton lost the election because of Hillary Clinton.

Trump is awful, but America dodged a bullet by not electing her.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Cakes, Guns, Discrimination, and Freedom of Association

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Gun photo from RGBStock

In the wake of the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, a number of businesses have moved to distance themselves from scary-looking weapons like the AR-15, from younger purchasers of weapons in general, and from organizations that don’t support laws violating the Second Amendment to the US Constitution.

Whether these moves are from sincere conviction or mere concern for bottom lines, they’re provoking backlash. Retailers like Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods face multiple discrimination lawsuits from 18- to 21-year-olds over their corporate decisions to stop selling guns to that age group.

These lawsuits are not about gun rights, any more than Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, now before the US Supreme Court, is about same-sex marriage rites.  Both sets of cases, arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, are clearly about freedom of association.

If a baker doesn’t want to make a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding, he shouldn’t have to. It’s his right to do business — or not — with whomever he wants, for whatever reasons are important to him.

If a store owner doesn’t want to sell an AR-15 to an 18-year-old, she shouldn’t have to. It’s her right to do business — or not — with whomever she wants, for whatever reasons are important to her.

Of course, many who take one side on one of the topics above take the opposite side on the other — “conservatives” because they hate same-sex marriage and love guns, “progressives” because they love same-sex marriage and hate guns. Each group considers its desired ends too important to abstain from hypocrisy as to the means of achieving those ends.

The hypocrites’ hobgoblin of choice when arguing the wrong sides of these cases is Jim Crow, a set of racial segregation laws that prevailed in the American south for nearly a century. Allowing people to discriminate in private business decisions, they say, will result in society re-segregating along racial, religious, sexual, and other lines.

What they forget (or would rather not discuss) is the fact that Jim Crow was not a set of social conventions freely adopted by the people of the south. It was a set of laws passed by corrupt politicians to artificially impede the natural tendency of people of all races to mix for both personal and commercial reasons. Rosa Parks wasn’t arrested for disobeying a bus driver. She was arrested for disobeying a law.

Yes, freedom of association brings some bigots, including but not limited to anti-black bigots, anti-gay bigots, and anti-gun bigots, out of the woodwork.  That’s a feature, not a bug. Bigotry thrives in the dark. In the light, bigots lose out both socially and financially.

Boycott (and “buycott”) punish “bad” (and reward “good”) behavior. I personally hope and expect that Dick’s and Walmart will pay a price for their decision to discriminate against would-be gun purchasers and against 18- to 21-year-olds, and that non-bigoted businesses will profit. And please, politicians: Stop grandstanding, get out of the way, and let the people sort these matters out for ourselves.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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