From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus, 40

In other words, are we capable to be three feet back of our head and look at the whole thing – the scene and the items in it, ourselves included – from outside and from above? Artificial personalities are more selfish than individuals. Because there is nobody there. Just machinery. Nobody there to tell right from wrong.

Hard to escape short−sightedness in ethics when short−sighted in awareness. Hard to feel, hard to be reached, hard to be touched, when there is nobody there.

We’re unbalanced:

We can’t rank things. It has been said that evaluating is comparing: features, values, importance can only be relative, can only be assessed against terms for comparison. If you try to figure out the absence of any other item to compare something to, you’re probably going to find it quite difficult; and this probably demonstrates how comparing is intrinsic to – if not synonym of – evaluating. Evaluating assigns values, and values are but degrees of fitness to a purpose. Indeed, things are compared to other things and against purposes, and both other things and purposes can be considered terms of comparison. This results in values being relative: a thing is more or less important when compared to another thing, and when considered with regards to a purpose. And a purpose as well is more or less important than another purpose when considered against a more basic purpose. Just as an order of magnitude is wider or smaller than another order of magnitude.
All this eventually traces back to the basic of ethics: survival of everything and everyone in the best possible condition for the longest time possible. Then ethics is a matter of degrees, where “doing one’s best” in actual fact means ascertaining and doing what is relatively better amongst all the possible courses of action.
Our fault here is violating the relative importance: we either can’t or won’t see the actual ethics hierarchy between purposes and between things, so we favour the trivial over the vital, and we have the guts to polish up a couple of portholes while we let the rust eat the whole hull away. It certainly is a wholesome exercise that of detecting the endless forms and cases of us indulging in it and of our manipulators indulging in creating and exploiting such forms and cases.