Hacker News Reader

>A trolley is heading towards 5 people who tied themselves to the track.

My reading of this was that they were suicidal. If people want to kill themselves, that's not for me to decide if that's right, or wrong. But if i can save one person from misfortune, atleast i was ablee to do that.

>70% would rather send a trolley into the future to kill 5 people 100 years from now, instead of 5 people now.

Would you rather have $5 now, or $5 in the future? Humans are compounding, i'd rather pay you in the future when there is more abundance.

> Humans are compounding

I had the same thought, but this isn't necessarily true.

With money, it's true by design. Interest rates, inflation and money expansion are core components of the economy.

However, with humans it all depends on the fertility rate, and it's currently dropping. So in this scenario, there's a lot we don't know about the future.

I sent the trolley into the future because, all else being equal, at least it gives us 100 years to plan for the event.

Eh, I don't really buy the whole fertility rate, depopulation stuff that Elon and the like have been disputing. I truly believe that was him signaling support for abortion ban without him signalling support for it.

One thing has been constant through history, population growth. I have seen no evidence that this is slowing, only that 'Developed nations' are having less kids. People seem to forget that develop nations don't really represent 'the world' as a whole. Southeast asia, India, rural parts of China, South America do not seem to have this problem and they represent that majority of the world as much as the west would like to hide that fact.

Also, we've already proved that artificial womb technology is theoretically possible... it's only a matter of a few generations until thats going to be abused.

Regardless of what Elon is saying, it makes no sense to assume that exponential growth will continue forever. At some point (rather quickly), you run out of resources. Population growth at the global scale has begun to slow down. I don't know when it dips below 2.0 or gets to a stable state of 2.0, but it will eventually happen.

Why not? Exponential growth is all that i see around me. Exponential growth is the universe & all signs point to infinite.

We have an unbelievable amount of resources in our galaxy alone. I don't see anything slowing down in the near future.

> In that framing, I'm really surprised that, on Level 27, 70% would rather send a trolley into the future to kill 5 people 100 years from now, instead of 5 people now. In almost 11K votes, this seems significant.

RIGHT?!?

I mean, who know's the potential reprecussions that portal might hold for us if we send that trolley through. Sure, 5 people might be saved today; but millions could be saved instead in 100 years when that portal isn't reopening to whoop our ass for killing 5.

I voted to send the trolley into the future, because everything else being equal (5 lives and 5 lives), it gives us 100 years to try and plan for the event.

100 years is a long time for humanity to look into ways to counteract time travelling trolleys! Sure it _says_ the future trolley will kill 5 people, but if I were in that situation I'm fairly sure I wouldn't be so certain. In your "political" example: Do you want a guaranteed bad outcome now, or what we expect to be the same bad outcome later?

Maybe we have medical resurrection in 100 years, so killing people might not be so bad. Plus future humans get a perfectly preserved example of a 100 year old trolley out of the deal, which is presumably a valuable antique.

>I save the 5 over the 1. Only 15% agree with me. Why?

I saved the one because the 5 presumably want to die anyway.