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It used to be that airliners broke up in the sky because of small cracks in the window frames. So we fixed that. It used to be that aircraft crashed because of outward opening doors. So we fixed that. Aircraft used to fall out of the sky from urine corrosion, so we fixed that with encapsulated plastic lavatories. The list goes on and on. And we fixed them all. So what are we left with? According to Steve Coast that just leaves the weird events like disappearing 777s, freak storms and pilots flying into mountains. Engineers have been hammering away at the remaining problems by creating more and more rules. [ Ed note: Link is to a playboy.com article. ]
"As illustration, we created rules to make sure people can't get into cockpits to kill the pilots and fly the plane into buildings. That looked like a good rule. But, it's created the downside that pilots can now lock out their colleagues and fly it into a mountain instead. This is a clean and understandable example of why adding more layers, and more rules, to a problem doesn't always work," says Coast. "The worry should be we end up with so many rules we become sclerotic like Italy or France. We effectively end up with some kind of Napoleonic law – everything is illegal unless specifically made legal."
According to Coast the primary way we as a society deal with the mess of over-regulation is by creating rule-free zones. It's essentially illegal for you to build anything physical these days from a toothbrush (FDA regulates that) to a skyscraper, but there's zero restriction on creating a website. Hence, that's where all the value is today. To paraphrase Peter Thiel, new technology is probably so fertile and productive simply because there are so few rules. "If you are starting a computer-software company, that costs maybe $100,000," says Thiel. But "to get a new drug through the FDA, maybe on the order of a billion dollars or so."
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 10 2015, @12:19PM
And once you start setting that precedent, saying its acceptable to violate others' human rights for the "greater good", just who decides what counts as the "greater good"? A despot would claim that ensuring his family's survival would be for the "greater good", bigots would claim that committing genocide on everyone who isn't the same as them would be for the "greater good", etc. Its a despicable road and we already know where it leads, and that it doesn't lead anywhere we want to be. The ends do not justify the means.
It'd do well to remember that ethics is an end in itself of dubious value, here, with the means being a somewhat premature death of seven billion people and counting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2015, @04:38PM
What do you consider "premature"? Anything before 120 years? Dying at all? Average lifespan has been increasing for a long time due to discoveries in medicine and other areas, but there's no guarantee that its even possible to make everyone live to 120 because we don't even know why some people live that long, and if its due to things like exercise, diet, and avoiding substances which harm one's body like alcohol and tobacco, ie personal choices, then no amount of medical advances will matter, some people will continue smoking and drinking themselves to an early death, unless you're proposing continuing prohibition indefinitely "for their own good". If its due to winning the genetics lottery, what, forced genetic modification? All the knowledge and advances in the world don't matter unless you're planning for everyone to be slaves. The idea that dying of natural causes earlier than another person's naturally-caused death is "premature" is ridiculous.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 10 2015, @10:25PM
What do you consider "premature"?
None of us know. But I think a better approach could probably double human lifespan in a human lifespan.
Average lifespan has been increasing for a long time due to discoveries in medicine and other areas, but there's no guarantee that its even possible to make everyone live to 120 because we don't even know why some people live that long, and if its due to things like exercise, diet, and avoiding substances which harm one's body like alcohol and tobacco, ie personal choices, then no amount of medical advances will matter, some people will continue smoking and drinking themselves to an early death, unless you're proposing continuing prohibition indefinitely "for their own good".
This is an example of thinking that might be obsoleted in a century or two. Diet, exercise, and those modestly negative lifestyle choices probably are things that we could engineer the human body to do without such an active effort from us (and without such little gain for the effort involved!).
If its due to winning the genetics lottery, what, forced genetic modification?
Or unforced genetic modification.
All the knowledge and advances in the world don't matter unless you're planning for everyone to be slaves.
You're free to revert to a traditional primate lifestyle with all the non-slavery you think you'll be able to get with that. But if we're going to have all this knowledge and all these advances anyway, then let's use them in a timely manner rather than being idiots about it.
The idea that dying of natural causes earlier than another person's naturally-caused death is "premature" is ridiculous.
You're not even wrong. I think eventually we could naturally live to millions of years rather than less than a century - which is a hell of a lot of lifespan to throw away. But it'll take profound medical and engineering developments to get to that point. Further, current aging is horrible and a huge drain of our resources. Premature death is a real problem here and one which we could change profoundly. Further, hindering medical developments is not a one time thing, but a process that will continue indefinitely, unless we do something about it, now or later.
And as I noted earlier, when we place such huge hurdles in the way of ethical research, then that creates a huge incentive to do unethical research. This is a huge trap of modern medical ethics and regulation that has yet to be addressed.