ARTIFICIAL LIFE The Norn Torturer Last week I wrote about Vilmonic, an artificial life sandbox game. While talking to the game’s creator, Mark Stramaglia, he told me that the lifeforms he’d created for Vilmonic were “heavily influenced” by the “norns” in a 1990s game called
One of the main plot elements in one of Iain Banks' "Culture" novels, "Surface Tension," is a "War in Heaven" over whether to allow torture in virtual realities.
It's an interesting topic. Whether or not the creatures are things that can feel the torture, damage is done by torturing. Damage is done to the person doing the torturing in terms of what is created in those moments, what is ingrained in the mind, and what the person is while doing those things. That stuff doesn't just go away. It's a major part of the rationale for working on Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Behavior, etc., in Buddhism. What one is intending and doing in the moment is what one is in the moment to simplify, and that stays with one in some form or another and thus moves on to affect the rest of the world in one way or another. So separate from just feeling really vile when abusing virtual things (I'm aware of the hypocrisy that I usually feel ok when I play beat-em-ups or shoot villains in other games) I do not think it's "ok" in any way that is independent of intention, but since that holds true for absolutely everything I guess this is not a particularly incisive observation. I can think of cases, like doing research on this subject, where the karmic/psychic effect of the actions could be on the balance positive and might be "worth it" (a totally subjective thing), but that doesn't mean that bad karma/ongoing-psychic-and-possibly-even-material effects isn't still generated by the acting out of torture.
I find something in your article from 1998 interesting in light of more recent discussions regarding social media. Obviously, phenomenons like trolling, hate mail, disinhibition due to relative anonymity and distance on the internet are not new but existed from the earliest days of the internet or the web. Modern social media algorithms might amplify negativity but it is something intrinsic to humans.
I had a similar thought about the ethics of torturing an AI at the end of an episode of Blank Mirror called Hang the DJ from memory. Spoiler alert - the episode seems to be about a society where people are matched to a partnership for a fixed period, whether they think they like the person or not. But the twist is that it is really a dating app that runs 1000 simulations of a potential partnership to see if they find a walk to be together despite the dystopian forced matching. So while the dystopian matching society is not real I did wonder about whether the AI has feelings that are real enough that it might be unethical to subject it to the experiment. I think the argument is coming from a similar place as animal welfare but much less tangible of course. So it is interesting that people were so outraged by this.
One of the main plot elements in one of Iain Banks' "Culture" novels, "Surface Tension," is a "War in Heaven" over whether to allow torture in virtual realities.
It's an interesting topic. Whether or not the creatures are things that can feel the torture, damage is done by torturing. Damage is done to the person doing the torturing in terms of what is created in those moments, what is ingrained in the mind, and what the person is while doing those things. That stuff doesn't just go away. It's a major part of the rationale for working on Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Behavior, etc., in Buddhism. What one is intending and doing in the moment is what one is in the moment to simplify, and that stays with one in some form or another and thus moves on to affect the rest of the world in one way or another. So separate from just feeling really vile when abusing virtual things (I'm aware of the hypocrisy that I usually feel ok when I play beat-em-ups or shoot villains in other games) I do not think it's "ok" in any way that is independent of intention, but since that holds true for absolutely everything I guess this is not a particularly incisive observation. I can think of cases, like doing research on this subject, where the karmic/psychic effect of the actions could be on the balance positive and might be "worth it" (a totally subjective thing), but that doesn't mean that bad karma/ongoing-psychic-and-possibly-even-material effects isn't still generated by the acting out of torture.
I find something in your article from 1998 interesting in light of more recent discussions regarding social media. Obviously, phenomenons like trolling, hate mail, disinhibition due to relative anonymity and distance on the internet are not new but existed from the earliest days of the internet or the web. Modern social media algorithms might amplify negativity but it is something intrinsic to humans.
I had a similar thought about the ethics of torturing an AI at the end of an episode of Blank Mirror called Hang the DJ from memory. Spoiler alert - the episode seems to be about a society where people are matched to a partnership for a fixed period, whether they think they like the person or not. But the twist is that it is really a dating app that runs 1000 simulations of a potential partnership to see if they find a walk to be together despite the dystopian forced matching. So while the dystopian matching society is not real I did wonder about whether the AI has feelings that are real enough that it might be unethical to subject it to the experiment. I think the argument is coming from a similar place as animal welfare but much less tangible of course. So it is interesting that people were so outraged by this.