Webs’ Random Ideas

There is a discussion going on at ***Dave’s blog about morality and technology. Originally the topic was about a study asking respondents about their opinions on nanotechnology; the study was written in Science Daily. From the article:

In a sample of 1,015 adult Americans, only 29.5 percent of respondents agreed that nanotechnology was morally acceptable.

To me this seems like a completely silly response. But even more so, it seems like an udder nonsensical question. Now I don’t know what question was asked for sure, I can’t find the original study, but I am assuming the question was along the lines of, “Do you find nanotechnology to be morally acceptable?” Which to me, and ***Dave, seems akin to asking, “Do you find metallurgy morally acceptable?” How can you get a true result from such a question?

I also found this odd from the article:

The moral qualms people of faith express about nanotechnology is not a question of ignorance of the technology, says Scheufele, explaining that survey respondents are well-informed about nanotechnology and its potential benefits.

“They still oppose it,” he says. “They are rejecting it based on religious beliefs. The issue isn’t about informing these people. They are informed.”

I’m not sure I buy that conclusion at all. People in general do not seem to have a full grasp of technology, what it is, where it’s going, etc. If they did, stem cells wouldn’t be an issue of morality and neither would nanotechnology. Below is a clip of a comment I left on ***Dave’s blog about this very subject:

If we stick to dictionary definitions of morality we are dealing with ethical decisions of right or wrong essentially, goodness based on a code of conduct, and/or human ethical decisions. Basically to be moral or immoral you or something has to make a conscious decision based on some kind of code.

So in the extreme case of cannibalism, for example, most people in the industrialized world would come to the conclusion that eating another person is immoral. Our codes of conduct or (un)written rules condone such action. In more remote places of the world it is acceptable and likely considered moral by their code or (un)written rules.

In the case of technology that goes into building a PMFRD machine, each piece of technology is an inanimate object. It cannot make a decision based on (un)written rules. Now maybe the machine on a whole could make such decisions with the right amount of AI. But the machine on a whole is not considered technology, rather a machine or AI robot. And different pieces of technology went into creating this machine. And furthermore, the machine was still programmed to make such decisions based on some kind of code. It still had a creator that decided how to give the robot the ability to make decisions.

You may need to go to the link above for the discussion on ***Dave’s blog for context, but basically technology can’t really be good or evil, people are based on pre-defined standards.

So what do you think? Is technology moral or immoral? Are people good or evil? Do people kill people or do PMFRD machines kill people?