> Nobody would throw someone out of their home or deny another person lifesaving medicine
Individuals with rental properties and surgeons do this every day.
> Nobody would throw someone out of their home or deny another person lifesaving medicine
Individuals with rental properties and surgeons do this every day.
Quibble, surgeons are not the ones doing this. Surgeons' schedules are generally permanently full. They do not typically deny people lifesaving medicine, on the contrary they spend all of their time providing lifesaving medicine.
The administrators who create the schedule for the surgeons, are the one denying lifesaving care to people.
Triage, whether by overworked nurses or by auction or by private death panel or by public death panel, is not necessarily a problem created by administrators. It can be created by having too few surgeons, in which case whatever caused that (in a time of peace, no less) is at fault. Last I heard it was the doctor's guild lobbying for a severe crimp on their training pipeline, in which case blame flows back to some combination of doctors and legislators.
You heard wrong. While at one point the AMA lobbied Congress to restrict residency slots, they reversed position some years back. However Congress has still refused to increase Medicare funding for residency programs. This is essentially a form of care rationing imposed through supply shortages.
https://savegme.org/
There is no "doctor's guild". No one is required to join the AMA to practice medicine, nor are they involved in medical school accreditation.
Like I said, some combination of doctors and legislators. If doctors lobbied the laws (or budgetary line items) onto the books and they are still in effect, they still have culpability.
Blaming congress too is fine, but let's be clear: someone has to fight to increase every budget and the AMA didn't just know this when they were structuring their proposal, didn't just count on it not happening, they considered this an implementation detail subordinate to the openly admitted primary objective of propping up physician wages as the Greatest Generation passed. That was always the goal, they were extremely open about it, and about 15 years ago I was attending a talk on demographics in medicine with a primarily physician audience, one of them asked what the plans were to change this to staff up for the Boomer wave (the bump was on the slide, begging the question) and the presenter waved his hand and said maybe they could do something... or not, and then he laughed, and the rest of the room laughed with him.
I'm glad that the AMA has changed their stated position now that it's too late to change course (for the Boomers anyway) and their squeeze is bearing fruit for them and suffering for their patients, but I'll always remember that room full of doctors and doctors-to-be laughing about the prospect of intentionally understaffing for profit. I have it filed in my memory right next to the phone call of Enron traders giggling as they ordered power plants offline to scare up prices, except it's about a million times worse.
I'm not even talking about triage. It's not a matter of who has the worst problem, it's about which patient the nurses deliver to the surgeon and anesthesiologist. Literally just who gets scheduled and when.
If all of the surgeons' schedules are full, the administrators are as innocent as the surgeons.
If the surgeons are busy each day, that removes all responsibility for who gets added to their schedule 3 months in advance? Please elaborate.
Surely they could volunteer to do some charity surgery in their own time. They aren't slaves.
Sure! They can volunteer:
- Their skills.
- Their time.
- The required materials to properly perform the surgery.
They can't volunteer:
- The support staff around them required to do surgery.
- The space to do the surgery.
Surgery isn't a one-man show.
What did you mean by "Surely they could volunteer to do some charity surgery in their own time. They aren't slaves?"
There are a lot of individuals who have the ability to provide those resources.
Even if that's a bad example, there are innumerable examples where individuals do choose not to help others in the same way that corporations don't.
Frankly, nearly every individual is doing that by not volunteering every single extra dollar and minute they don't need to survive.
You've now turned a moral willingness-to-help problem into a logistical and coordination problem.
What you suggest requires entire organizations to execute properly. These organizations do exist, such as Doctors Without Borders.
I don't think your original claim is fair, which amounts to "any surgeon who does not participate in Doctors Without Borders is just as bad as a landlord who evicts a family during winter".
What do you think we owe to one another, philosophically?
It's not about what I think. The post I replied made the assertion that individuals don't turn people away like corporations do (essentially).
My point is that individuals choose not to help others constantly. Every time I see a homeless person, I don't offer them a couch to sleep on. I could, at least once, but I don't. We all do that, most days multiple times.
And yes, that does apply to doctors who don't volunteer services. It applies to me too and, I bet, to the OP as well.
Firstly, there's a difference between failing to take an action, such as not offering a homeless person a couch, and actively taking an action, such as kicking someone out of their home.
Secondly, as discussed, the "individuals don't turn people away, corporations do" dynamic really does apply to doctors. If you were, say, on an airplane with a doctor sitting next to you, and you managed to cut yourself or burn yourself or something, I would bet they would render aid.
Basically you're equating turning someone away, and withdrawing something that someone has, with failing to actively seek out people who could need help. But I don't think those are morally equivalent. Maybe you're a utilitarian and that's fine, but I'm a virtue ethicist and I do not agree that equality of outcome means equality of morality.
Not really, because surgeons require operaing rooms and support staff and equipment to do what they do, all of which are controlled bybthe aforementioned hospital administrators.
Yeah, it's the natural empathy myth. Somebody totally would kill somebody else for some reason. It's not inherent to being human that you're unable to be steely-hearted and carry out a range of actions we might classify as "mean" - and those mean actions can have reasons behind them.
So, OK, abdication of responsibility to a collective is a thing. Just following orders. So what? Not relevant to AGI.
Oh wait, this is about "superintelligence", whatever that is. All bets are off, then.
The superintelligence might decide based on things only it can understand that the existence of humans prevents some far future circumstance where even more "good" exists in the universe. When it orders you to toss the babies into the baby-stomping machine, perhaps you should consider doing so based on the faith in its superintelligence that we're supposed to have.
Human beings aren't even an intelligent species, not at the individual level. When you have a tribe of human beings numbering in the low hundreds, practically none of them need to be intelligent at all. They need to be social. Only one or two need to be intelligent. That one can invent microwave ovens and The Clapper™, and the rest though completely mentally retarded can still use those things. Intelligence is metabolically expensive, after all. And if you think I'm wrong, you're just not one of the 1-in-200 that are the intelligent individuals.
I've yet to read the writings of anyone who can actually speculate intelligently on artificial intelligence, let alone meet such a person. The only thing we have going for us as a species is that, to a large degree, none of you are intelligent enough to ever deduce the principles of intelligence. And god help us if the few exceptional people out there get a wild bug up their ass to do so. There will just be some morning where none of us wake up, and the few people in the time zone where they're already awake will experience several minutes of absolute confusion and terror.
And lenders and insurers.