His death already happened. They were not saying someone should go and kill him, they were celebrating the lack of Kirk going forward, the reduction in harm. It is not morally right to plan and execute a murder, but objectively speaking there will be less harm now that he is dead and that is a relief.
To be clear, I can’t talk for all people, so this is just my opinion. Charlie Kirk definitely caused violence that killed people. He was an agitator and escalated violence against vulnerable people. He lied about all sorts of things including gun violence and worked for his whole career to undermine the safety of people he disliked.
When he died the overall hatred against trans people was reduced. The opposition to gun control was reduced. The trolling and doxing was reduced. His entire ecosystem was disrupted when he died.
If an individual does something wrong by killing someone that has a certain moral valence to it. If they do the same to a group of people I don’t see any difference, they are still acting towards people with violence, it is just diluted and obscured. The fact that one violent right wing person used a gun to kill another right wing person is ironic and has a certain symmetry, but the part that makes me feel no sympathy for Kirk is that his actions were causing harm up to and including death to people and when he was killed the overall level of death was reduced, not increased.
No state should have the power to kill citizens. This is not justice or a good thing to have in your society. But in a society where murder happens there definitely are worse and better instances, and this particular instance was a net reduction in deaths. All of the people who would have been killed by Kirk’s rhetoric are alive because he died. It wasn’t right, but it was less wrong.
So no, he was not the state acting on others, but he was a person acting to kill others just as his assassin. He caused deaths just as surely as the shooter and there was irony in it being by a white right winger with a gun. The reduction in deaths was worth celebrating just as commuting the sentences of those on death row is. It is morally right to want less death and torment, and while it would be morally wrong to cause a death, from a utilitarian perspective I would not quibble over the results here.
I both agree and don’t about the certification.
Most of the reason we have certifications and the like is not actually to prevent harm to the user of the product, it is for managing liability. If you make a product and it causes harm that creates a litigation risk and companies try to avoid being sued because it reduces profit.
In the open source community people want to make good things. They want to solve a problem by making the software or hardware they are working on. It isn’t about the profit motive, it is about making something good because you want that thing to exist.
Under that set of motivations I think certification can still be useful, but it is much less important than it is for companies making a profit. You don’t need to balance the drive to make profit against the risk of causing harm because the profit motive is not involved.
Medical equipment. The software for medical equipment is super arcane stuff, locked behind patents and licensing that only serves to drive the price up. For someone in a less economically powerful country the cost is increased and the quality of care is reduced massively by this licensing. If an open source version of the software for things like an MRI, CAT scanner, ultrasound, and so on could be made it would enable the updating of old hardware to keep it running longer and also make repairs much more affordable. I also think that internal defribulators would benefit enormously from being open source as under the current system they are hackable and can be exploited to wirelessly trigger a shock which can be fatal.
Also consider continuous glucose monitoring and insulin pumps. By combining those two technologies you can essentially make an artificial pancreas and make diabetes much more manageable. The hurdle here is not technological, it is legal. The thing that has slowed down the production of an artificial pancreas is software licensing and legal risk management, nothing technical. Consider this applied to the possibility of a continuous allergy monitoring device which could detect anaphylaxis and administer adrenaline, or maybe markers of a seizure approaching to trigger a much smaller dose of an anti epileptic medication. All unavailable because the development of that technology would not be feasible under the current licensing and liability system we have.
To be clear, I am not saying any of these cure the underlying condition, just that if medical software (and ideally hardware) was required to be open source more of these tools could be developed to help people live better lives independently and safely, and at a lower cost.
The white one is the foot from a pedestal fan. They have pair of legs at the bottom which cross at 90° and on the ends of the legs they have these little plastic snap in feed. They raise the metal off the ground and balance the whole fan, but if you step on the leg the foot bit flies out like a weapon.
If I, and Australian citizen, had gained access in the same way I would be facing charges. Those charges would likely be under the Cybercrime Act of 2001.
s.478.1(1) Criminal Code—unauthorised access to, or modification of, restricted data;
That carries a maximum 2 year sentence and it clearly a significant threat to an individual.
Will Sam Altman face this charge? No. The purpose of the AI in this situation is not to do the actual hacking. The purpose it to abrogate the blame, to shield the owners of it from legal repercussions. Altman and co can do whatever they want and shift the blame to the AI.
“We didn’t fire missiles at those children, the AI made a mistake and identified them as hostile actors”
“We didn’t deny your dead partner’s healthcare, the algorithm incorrectly labeled the procedure as unnecessary and due to the delay your partner died, but that wasn’t our fault, it was the algorithm.”
Sorry, I don’t understand, could you clarify the c. f. part?
I mean it as an observation. When Pat Robertson died it was not a murder, so the moral problems with encouraging violence are not involved. His death objectively made the world less hateful. His propaganda stopped and other people with less skill and less of a following stepped in to replace him, but it was an overall reduction. I think it is fair to say that in that situation his death was good for society. That doesn’t mean we should not fund gerontology and research how to keep older people healthy, we should be trying to prevent harm wherever we can. He died of natural causes at 93 so nobody shortened his life, it is morally empty.
When Kirk died the same change in the world occurred. His death meant the removal of the propaganda he was spewing. In the same way as with Pat Robertson we should not cause more of this type of death, in fact we should avoid and prevent as many as we reasonably can. That said, his death reduced harm and that reduction of harm can be celebrated.