ethics

Chris Knight's avatar

You might have noticed a slight addition to this blog.  It’s on the header, toward the right of the screen.  There now appears the following label:

 

 

I have heard all kinds of insane stories about people using ChatGPT and other “artificial intelligences” as something more than a curiosity.  Students have begun having AI write papers for classes.  Some ministers have admitted that they have used ChatGPT to compose sermons for Sunday morning.  In at least one situation a lawyer had AI create his legal paperwork for a court case: the judge was not impressed.

To be truthful, I’m not impressed by any so-called “artificial intelligence” thus far.  Their enthusiasts are claiming that AI is now able to pass the Turing Test (in which a living person can or cannot differentiate verbal responses from a human being or a computer).  It’s not something I’m particularly jazzed about, not yet ...

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Krista Kapralos writes a most fascinating piece in The Washington Post this week: about how evangelical Christians are coming to the forefront of adopting frozen embryos that have been fertilized in-vitro. The article cites that there could be approximately 600,000 embryos being stored in liquid nitrogen around the United States. And that in keeping with their pro-life values, many who identify themselves as conservative Christians are choosing to legally adopt children… and then carrying them to term on their own.

From the article…

The embryo was frozen in liquid nitrogen when Gabriel and Callie Fluhrer found it. They didn’t know whether that embryo would grow to be a boy or a girl, or whether it would even grow at all.

But to the Fluhrers, it was worth the risk. That tiny collection of cells was a baby, they believed. And if they didn’t pluck it from the warehouse where

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In the past month or so WGSR general manager Charles Roark has broadcast footage of no less than three murder victims (before knowing if the next of kin had been notified), and at this moment is defending his “right” to trespass on property and film video of a person’s house burning down without regard of what the guy’s family was going through. In addition to every other amount of callous disrespect toward others that WGSR under his management has done with no editorial oversight.

So I’m compelled to ask aloud…

If the naked, beaten and dead body of Azile Roark was lying in the street, would Charles Roark be equally insistent on footage of that – the corpse of his own mother and the proprietor of Star News Corporation – be broadcast on television?

Or is there a double standard at work at WGSR?

We already know that Roark ...

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A Japanese firm is offering weddings in space beginning next year, and now officials with both state-sponsored space agencies and private corporations are beginning to openly concede that sexual intercourse beyond the confines of the Earth is going to happen… if it hasn’t already (NASA is tight-lipped about whether it’s taken place on the International Space Station or a shuttle flight).

Of especially great concern is what will happen on a long-term mission, like the ones now in the planning stages for a manned flight to Mars, or even an extended stay on something as relatively close by as the Moon. Space experts agree that humans are, by nature, beings who require sexual activity and expression in order to remain both emotionally and physically healthy. In more than forty years of forays into space, we’ve learned how to deal with just about every other human physiological need… and ...

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How does this sound for a new show (I’m thinking Fox would be the best venue for it) in the style of American Idol and On The Lot: I call it Pardon Me!

Pardon Me! will feature twelve contestants, all of them convicted felons on Death Row. Each week the inmates have to “file an appeal” which is critiqued by a panel of three judges, including one “celebrity judge” (I’m thinking O.J. Simpson and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme via satellite from prison in Texas). At the end of each show the phone lines open and the audience gets to vote on who they like most. Each week the “contestant” with the fewest votes is sent “home” and escorted off the stage on what the producers call “The Long Walk”. The very last person left after weeks of competition gets a full pardon.

We’re headed straight toward that, folks. That’s ...

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Read the story at the Houston Chronicle site here.

The first things that flashed in my mind when I read this story were Nazi “doctors” like Josef Mengele, and the Tuskegee Experiment (which was conducted by the American government, by the way).

Someday “they” will go too far – if they haven’t already – and the Man in Room Five is going to break free and come looking for them.

(Props to anyone who will recognize that literary reference.)...

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Ever heard of the Book of Enoch? It’s not widely accepted as Christian “canon” (although some Coptic Christians consider it to be inspired scripture) but it was mentioned in the Book of Jude (that’s the next-to-last one in the Bible just before Revelation). I’ve read it a couple of times since first hearing about it several years ago. And it’s quite an interesting read. Among other things according to the Book of Enoch, the Flood was sent by God to cleanse the Earth because fallen angels – who had originally been charged with taking care of creation – started having sex with human females. The result was a monstrous race of human/angel half-breeds and it got so bad, that the only people left who it could only be said were pure genetically human were Noah and his family: whole new meaning to Noah being “perfect in his generation”. ...

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