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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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Technology
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Yes. Let's consider guns. Is there any objective way in which to measure the moral range of actions one can understand with a gun? No. I can murder someone in cold blood or I can defend myself. I can use it to defend my nation or I can use it to attack another - both of which might be moral or immoral depending on the circumstances.
You might remove the trigger, but then it can't be used to feed yourself, while it could still be used to rob someone.
So what possible morality can you build into the gun to prevent immoral use? None. It's a tool. It's the nature of a gun. LLM are the same. You can write laws about what people can and can't do with them, but you can't bake them into the tool and expect the tool now to be safe or useful for any particular purpose.
You can't build morality into it, as I said. You can build functionality into it that makes immmoral use harder.
I can e.g.
Society considers e.g hunting a moral use of weapons, while killing people usually isn't.
So banning ceramic, unmarked, silenced, full-automatic weapons firing armor-piercing bullets can certainly be an effective way of reducing the immoral use of a weapon.
Those changes reduce lethality or improve identification. They have nothing to do with morality and do NOT reduce the chance of immoral use.
Well, I, and most lawmakers in the world, disagree with you then. Those restrictions certainly make e.g killing humans harder (generally considered an immoral activity) while not affecting e.g. hunting (generally considered a moral activity).
They can make killing multiple people in specific locations more difficult, but they do nothing to keep someone from being able to fire a single bullet for an immoral reaspn, hence the difference between lethality and identification and morality.
The Vegas shooting would not have been less immoral if a single person or nobody died. There is a benefit to reduced lethality, especially against crowds. But again, reduced lethality doesn't reduce the chance of being used immorally.