[blue]
If you could push a button that gives you a hundred thousand dollars but a random person dies, would you do it?
[yellow, cautious]
Interesting thought experiment… intuitively, I’d say no, but it’s worth thinking about… it’s a genuine moral dilemma in a capitalist world: there’s a dialectic between our desires and the common good…
MEANWHILE, BILLIONAIRES
[an orange guy in a suit is shown with a terrifying grin pushing as many buttons as possible at once on a table, slamming one of the buttons, and even using their foot to press an extra one]
https://thebad.website/comic/the_totally_hypothetical_button_thought_experiment
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Apologies to all the foot fetishists, I eventually gave up trying and thus have failed you.
Guess I have new anatomy lessons to grind. Shit’s hard yo.
You managed to create the most disturbing non-ai foot I’ve seen today, so that’s nice
Love the comics!
AIs have become decent at anatomy these days, haven’t they?
That’s one job they won’t take from us in the long term, finding new ways to mess up drawings. I’m always a step ahead.
AIs have become decent at anatomy these days, haven’t they?
Maybe so, I don’t really follow that progress
I like that it’s not a realistic human foot. Sometimes art should capture the idea of a thing rather than just the superficial image of the thing, you know? It has character.
I’ll keep that one in mind, next time someone criticizes my anatomy I’ll tell them “son, it has character”.
Actually I need to repeat that bit to myself until I am convinced. Feels like a healthy mantra.
next time someone criticizes my anatomy I’ll tell them “son, it has character”.
Honestly, a billionaire would probably hire people to push the button for them.
They’d minimize explaining what the button does, and then pay them like $100,000 a year to push the button 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
Why would they get payed that much? this is unskilled labor, they get minimum wage.
That, or they hire an undocumented immigrant for even less. Extra bonus because they can’t read the sign that explains the killing thing.
billionaire would hire multiple persons to press the button and give the money to them while paying basically nothing for it.
We know because they do this exact thing
The more I look at this, the more unhinged it becomes. None of the buttons are organized, the billionaire has a giant toe for a foot, and I keep thinking the billionaire has six fingers instead of five.
Prefect amount of unhingedness. 10/10.
You’d have to kill 10,000 people to become a billionaire this way. Obvious fact perhaps, but it’s easy to forget how unnecessarily much a billion dollars is.
Even 50million is an extreme amount of money.
You’d have to kill 10,000 people to become a billionaire
You could have just stopped there.
It’d probably still be true, recognizing that billionaires tend to indirectly kill at least that many just from the artificial scarcity required for their hoarding of resources and THEN you add the direct results of their specific actions…
MEAWHILE
(but yeah, good comic)
Ah fuck me those always slip by me thanks
Since I recently finished Zero Escape, my first idea is to press it a couple billion times
(If I get lucky it’ll kill all the stupid people)
You can’t kill all the stupid people without killing everyone. We’re all stupid in our own ways.
But any random button push has a 50% chance of killing someone that’s stupider than average.
Your terms are acceptable.
Billionaire would press the button for 100 bucks, then spend 100 times the amount in a pair of shoes he’ll never wear.
More interesting (and more realistic) if it isn’t a guarantee that someone dies if you push the button, but a probability.
Would you push the button if it was a 20% chance someone dies? A 5% chance? A 1% chance? 0.1%? Is there a number where it’s ok to push the button? If it was a 0.0001% chance, how many times would you push the button?
Also, does it change things if you know that your button push resulted in someone’s death? Is it different if it’s someone standing right there? Maybe on the other side of a one-way mirror? What if it’s just that you get a green light or a red light after you push the button and you don’t have to see someone die or know who died or how they died?
Also factor in when they die. Maybe your action results in a demise after a period of time. Lung Cancer won’t kill someone right after they puff a cigarette, so the cigarette baron may not consider it his fault in the sort term.
It isn’t the “cigarette baron’s” fault any more than the beer baron’s fault or the parachute maker’s fault. Some people are going to die if they choose to indulge in mildly risky behavior. If the scenario is something like this, everyone here will be pushing that button. Don’t say you won’t because you will.
You could still not press the button for selfish reasons.
“I’m not pressing it because there is a chance the random person who dies is me.”
i mean, give me a 90% chance of kills me and i’m still pressing the button.
Hell, give me a 100% chance. That’d solve more of my problems than any amount of money.
I would press it at least ten times. A hundred times would also be tempting. There are eight billion people in the world. Chances are I won’t know anyone who dies.
And even if you know them, once you reach a certain amount of money you won’t care anymore about the serfs.
