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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Russian Communist Party MP and Nobel Prize-winner Zhores Alferov has urged restrictions on internet access, saying unlimited access to information can harm people's morals and mental health.
"The internet must have limitations and it must not be available to everyone," Alferov stated in a recent interview with Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily. He went on to explain that in his opinion the total lack of control and restrictions of the net can affect people's behavior and damage publicly-accepted moral guidelines.
"By making fools of our population today we will have a lot of problems," he said.
In the same interview, Alferov said he personally did not expect any conflicts between humanity and artificial intelligence in future, but stated that it was wrong to "fully trust a machine."
Alferov is a world-renowned physicist, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is also a State Duma MP representing the largest opposition party, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF).
But... Who will I argue with if there aren't any commies on the Internet?
Source: https://www.rt.com/politics/418544-internet-should-not-be-accessible/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 13 2018, @05:35AM (1 child)
Note that he is not alone in proposing that. China is already shaping the Internet big time. Yes, a strong person, intelligent and independent, will not care about calls to $somethingBad. But the truth is that many (or some) people are too fragile to understand. Our way of handling this is to give everyone the full potential to raise themselves or to sink themselves and become homeless drunkards in the extreme case. These fragile people bought tulips, south seas shares, and now bitcoins. We do not try to save them from themselves - in part because someone will be saving us one day against our wishes. Free people (or believing to be relatively free) refuse such control. We want to make our own mistakes. But at the same time we (except the nearest friends, if they know) allow fragile people to incur catastrophic losses. This is the morale of free people.
But this is not the only moral system in the world, as the axioms of Euclid are not the only set of axioms, and we are not constrained to a plane. Alferov & communists, including Chinese, use a different set of axioms. They do not postulate personal freedom, but they postulate universal happiness (so to say.) To that end their system takes control over personal freedoms in order to flatten the differences. It worked in USSR so well, that only few inventors would care to invent anything. This moral system is as valid as any other - it is just alien to us, as would be a social setup of a hive civilization, for example.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 13 2018, @05:49AM
No it fucking isn't. That screed ignores human nature entirely. We *aren't* a hive civilization and trying to make us one will just result in mass death, as it has the last several times the hardcore Communists tried that.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...