The article is "Cyborg cockroaches are coming, and they just want to help/Inspired by insects, robotic engineers are creating machines that could aid in search-and-rescue, pollinate plants and sniff out gas leaks" (WaPo).
Here's the chunk of text that I found:
When it comes to cyborg insects, not everyone is excited. Jeff Sebo, an animal bioethics professor at New York University, said he worries how live insects might feel being controlled by humans while carrying heavy technology. It’s unclear if they feel pain or distress from it, he said, but that doesn’t mean humans should ignore that.
“We’re not even paying lip service to their welfare or rights,” he said. “We’re not even going through the motion of having laws or policies or review boards in place so that we can halfheartedly try to reduce the harms that we impose on them.”
There seems to be a theme in NYU bioethics: When you see the empathy going one way, search for other possible recipients of empathy. Challenge people to widen their scope of empathy and not to become over-attached to what has the most obvious appeal to your emotions.
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42 comments:
Cyborg insects. What could possibly go wrong?
Empathy for cockroaches. That's new.
"Jeff Sebo, an animal bioethics professor at New York University, said he worries how live insects might feel being controlled by humans while carrying heavy technology. It’s unclear if they feel pain or distress from it, he said, but that doesn’t mean humans should ignore that."
Shhh, no one tell him there's a movement afoot to get people to eat them. Oh fiddlesticks...ods and bodkins...what happens when insect rights collide with minimizing methane emissions from cow farts? Such a toughie. If you want a green environmental omelet, I guess we're gonna need some roach slaves.
1 in 6?
Let me be the first to point out that projects that have no scope limitations have no specific point, no specific goal, no hope of success, and most important, no hope of ever mercifully finishing. Eventually, the beatings will cease when morale improves.
Morale only gets worse. Therefore the beatings must continue.
Yet another element in how we got to where we find ourselves today.
---There seems to be a theme in NYU bioethics: When you see the empathy going one way, search for other possible recipients of empathy. Challenge people to widen their scope of empathy and not to become over-attached to what has the most obvious appeal to your empathy. [AA]
Maybe. But I bet there are still two slots available in the Sanitation Dept. if they ever got inspired to do real work.
these robots, will be armed.. Right? i mean; they can't REALLY help us, unless..
They are self aware
They are ARMED
They have the ability to travel back in time, so that they can find Sarah Connor
I had a dream last night that was living in the future. In the dream some people were releasing swarms of tiny robotic flying insects and some that were bigger, the size of birds. I put my hand up into a passing swarm and they all flowed around it but didn't hit my hand.
Then I cracked a tooth on a 3D printed sensor while eating my morning bowl of Roach Crispies and I cursed Bill Gates.
“We’re not even paying lip service to their welfare or rights,” he said. “We’re not even going through the motion of having laws or policies or review boards in place so that we can halfheartedly try to reduce the harms that we impose on them.”
How am I supposed to divorce this worry the NYU bioethics professor has, from the worry I have of human minors getting gender reassignment surgery, without any of the safety measures he proposes for... insects?
Wait. Where's my insect politics tag? Althouse slipping.
As Orwell said, one would have to be an intellectual to believe anything so stupid.
Hahaha! What do the roaches feel when I gas them and smash them with a shoe? Haha! Thanks for the laugh.
When the bioethicist decides to consider how humans feel, they could find an interesting problem. Am I, someone who wants all insects I encounter dead, going to accept robot versions that will trigger the same atavistic reaction to kill?
Or maybe the theme is go against humanity at every turn.
Cyborg cockroaches, as in the spy roach used in Fifth Element? That movie is fast approaching Idiocracy-level predictions of the near future.
And applying anthropomorphic concepts of welfare and rights to creatures like roaches, that cannibalize each other without a moment's concern (among the least disgusting of their innate behaviors) is missing a major point about how different critters are from humans. Jeff Sebo is playing the old bioethicist game of making shit up to get some money and power.
Ethics is a one upmanship play honored in the breach. The courses in college are there to prove they are irrelevant BS. But the Profs, by being examples of that, do earn their salaries.
Does he weep for the death of every roach? I strongly suspect a roach is far more likely to feel pin or distress.
Everybody send their cockroaches to the professor. Remember that Jesse Jackson was roachphobic.
Not sure I can ever feel the love for roaches. Butterflies, yes —we just helped some Monarchs go through the chrysalis phase and emerge to fly south— but roaches? Nah.
This “bioethics” stuff is very fin de siecle IMHO.
I am more concerned about the versions that can replicate quickly.
Considering the future, I am more concerned about how how live humans might feel being controlled by insects while carrying heavy technology.
So the first post about the attack in the park has nothing to do with bioethics and public health. This one has nothing to do with bioethics either -- except to the extent that it argues that insects have rights needing protection while the rest of "bioethics" for decades now has trended toward justifications for why killing human beings is ethical if not morally obligatory.
"...he worries how live insects might feel being controlled by humans while carrying heavy technology."
So, what exactly is this person's job, to teach students to worry about the feelings of cockroaches for 80 grand tuition and fees a year?
The leftmediaswine and the universities have joined forces to promote insanity.
"Even roaches got to eat."
- Richard Pryor's Grandmother.
Can we consider the possibility that our society directs too many of its limited resources to NYU?
So the Times is stuck with an “animal” bioethicist since NYU doesn’t have a bioethicist who specializes in entomology. Fucking no one does. They are fucking insects.
It’s like a vegetable bioethicist. Let us empathize with each kernel on the cob. We do jot know what each feels. We are limited in our awareness.
Empathy is instinctive. We lack empathy for rocks, molecules, carpenter ants, mosquitos, and many other living and non-living things because we are incapable of genuinely putting ourselves in the place of those things. Perhaps mosquitos long for death. Who knows?
Only in the academic world could someone make a living scolding us for our incapacity to do that which we are utterly incapable of doing.
The em-pathetic appeal of relativistic religions.
How you treat someone or something is a reflection on you, not them/it. Raising animals for food can be humane if done properly. What is humane about stealing the very autonomy from an insect? What is gained by it? Spying. What else? What couldn’t be done better using only robotics? I am no bleeding heart. I will stomp on a roach on my house or even my outside porches. I wouldn’t hunt them in the wild, mate them and use them in some dystopian nightmare unless it was a matter of life or death for higher animals. I’m finding it difficult to imagine what that would be.
Next up: poor Covid.
Does NYU also have a bioethicist that worries about humans killing the Covid-19 virus? It would appear that every bioethicist is batshit crazy.
What are the chances that in the normal course of blogging, I would encounter 2 NYU bioethics professors in a row?
Obviously greater than the chances that either would come across as understanding the concept of ethics.
In several decades working in hospitals, I have found the "Ethics Committee" to be less useful than the proverbial tits on a boar hog. They get consulted when a difficult decision has to be made and there is no one to make it (e.g., homeless patient who needs urgent but not emergent surgery). It takes days to get an answer about something that should be done in hours, and all they ever do is ratify what the care team thinks should be done. They get big bucks to work 9-5, read articles, go to meetings, and soak up resources that could be used to pay nurses or buy medicine. But, they fulfill a need for someone to keep busy and off the street, and are required by accrediting bodies.
They learn how to do this by going to courses taught by these bioethics professors. They do profess, don't they.
Blogger West TX Intermediate Crude said...
In several decades working in hospitals, I have found the "Ethics Committee" to be less useful than the proverbial tits on a boar hog...
As an old farm boy, I hate that 'tits on a boar hog' thing. If a baby boar had fewer that 6 on each side, he would be a barrow... Castrated.
Just guessing from what I know about university ethicists, I would say that bioethicists are apologists for any horror inflicted on humans in the name of protecting other forms of life.
Is bioethics the study of finding and justifying the worst side of an argument?
In the future, cyborg cockroaches will hunt NYU bioethicists for sport and make them fight to the death in cages.
I think this was an X Files episode
"There seems to be a theme in NYU bioethics: When you see the empathy..."
Yes, and the theme is "we're smarter than the rest of you rubes, reflexively going against the rain." GK Chesterton did it a century ago, and did it better, because he included proportion as a virtue.
Are you sure this isn't part of your next post?
I suspect the Babylon Bee is involved in this.
sean said...As Orwell said, one would have to be an intellectual to believe anything so stupid.
There is a variation on Orwell’s observation—no act is so heinous that no ethicist will insist that it’s a moral imperative.
Ethics is a matter of character, not classroom training; ethics as a discipline is the practice of inventing standards and imposing them on people without going through the inconvenience of making a societal decision about it. Which is to say that ethics as a profession is fundamentally dishonest and unethical. Ironically, all ethicists are charlatans.
Anytime I see the word bioethicist in a news article I want to reach for a gun, because they are usually advocating for the death of infants, retards, or old people.
Anytime I see the word bioethicist in a news article I want to reach for a gun, because they are usually advocating for the death of infants, retards, or old people.
There seems to be a theme in NYU bioethics: When you see the empathy going one way, search for other possible recipients of empathy. Challenge people to widen their scope of empathy and not to become over-attached to what has the most obvious appeal to your emotions.
Really?
So they have a lot of articles on "why unborn babies deserve empathy, not abortions"?
And "a new argument for why incels deserve our respect and compassion"?
How about "no 'privilege' for them, an analysis of political and social attacks on white working class males"?
I'm guessing that no, they have no "empathy" for those hated by the Left, and that the only time they want to encourage "empathy" is when it advances their political, anti-American, agenda
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