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Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

> Can you imagine if these were a product of 1980's AI research and codified some of that time's widespread ideas about sexual orientation or even atheism

Spot on. There are a lot of people in every era who assume that whatever the dominant moral set of values is must be the most logical, most conclusive set of morals ever developed, and are immediately willing to make those values mandatory and enforced by violence.

Hundreds of years later people become disgusted with behavior that wouldn't even remotely register as immoral at the time. Sometimes I wonder what will be unthinkable in future societies that we don't care about today.

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In 50 years people will think of many of our cultural norms, exclusions and rules were horrific.

50 years after that ...

For example, I think in 100 years acts like murder will be classed as a mental health issue and treated rather than "punished" (tho societal exclusion may remain).

> For example, I think in 100 years acts like murder will be classed as a mental health issue and treated rather than "punished" (tho societal exclusion may remain).

We're already kind of there. That's why a lot of murder cases end up with insanity pleas. When I studied criminal law I had a lot of trouble trying to convince myself there's really a difference between "sane" and "insane" murderers...

And when I extended this doubt to other serious crimes as well, there was a nihilistic feeling about the whole system in general (which is what people already know -- you can get away with a lot of things if you have money to hire a lawyer, and the legal system is generally harsher towards poor and unprivileged people).

I think that will be true if meaningful rewiring of someone's brain becomes possible. One of the reasons these types of aberrant behaviors aren't "treated" is that no such treatment exists. (I know interventions can be made that have predictably positive aggregate effects, but it is certainly not true at present that you can take any individual and therapy them into a moral, law-abiding person.)

There's plenty of things assumed untreatable 50 years ago which are common place to treat now. What's your point?

We also used to treat "female hysteria" with sexual abuse and orgasms, homosexuality with castration, and so on.

Also not everything is immediately structural. Someone who kills because they've been indoctrinated to hate women by the incel movement isn't the same as the person with a head injury who struggles to control anger and a lack of empathy.

I'd argue neither are punishable, but treated either with a view to rectify or to at least give the poor soul a dignified restriction from being able to act freely.

Granted there will be plenty of people you can't treat, that doesn't make them any less poorly.

In 100 years we will look back on the widespread criminalization of poverty and immigration along with many other crimes like sex crimes and even murder as something that needs to be treated, not simply punished.

We are all primitives of the future. Forbearance toward, and forgiveness of, the deeds and attitudes of our ancestors is a way of atoning for our own barbarism in the eyes of the future.

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