A summary of philosophy night yesterday, from my perspective:
Q: Should we end or outlaw the sale of personal data by tech companies (similar to how we outlaw organ harvesting or some other morally objectionable activities within capitalism)?
A: We didn't exactly get around to answering this question, but talked about the kinds of things companies / AI does with data and the challenges an individual has in protecting their data. As noted, pretty much all companies are involved in collecting and selling personal data because they want to make more customers happy, and this makes selling their data profitable, so there would certainly be a cost to ending its sale. There is perhaps a more general problem where companies use long legal "terms and conditions" documents that are time consuming for an individual to understand as a way to prey on individuals and coerce them into technically agreeing to something that they don't truly consent to. I'd argue that practice is itself unethical, although it would be hard to outlaw. I personally do think we should end the sale of personal data but we noted that outlawing it would be difficult because it would mean going against big tech companies, which are currently the most powerful entities on the planet. The EU did successfully pass laws to limit this behaviour though, so there is some hope. On an individual level we can raise awareness and become informed ourselves, and although we discussed some software tools that are available to help, we also noted that it's only people who take the initiative to search for these tools who are actually protected. The average computer user just tends to go with the flow and won't find those options, so will be at risk. It's possible that making people more aware of the reality could prompt them to action and eventually influence lawmakers, culture, or even the companies themselves.
If companies couldn't sell data, many would become less profitable and some would even go out of business. However, I don't consider that a valid reason to continue the sale of data; I don't mind organ harvesters going out of business either. As human activities shift, certain businesses emerge while others die, and I'm OK with that.
Q: Could we live without industrialization? (Referring to the world in the book "A Psalm for the Wild-Built" by Becky Chambers.) Should we try to preserve industrialization and/or civilization?
A: We all thought that there are certain important things that industrialization gives us and that a world without it wouldn't be desirable. E.g. glasses would be very difficult to make without factories, so many people's eyesight would become limited, and computer chips require factories, so we'd have to give up computers. However, industrialization, although increasing efficiency, also makes us lose some adaptations, such as a bushman's ability to gather nuts and store them over the winter. Although initially, industrialization seems to give us benefits so can e.g. have nuts year round even if we can't gather them, after a while we can lose that adaptation, and perhaps worse, we then tend to just increase our wants and needs as it's easier to manufacture things to meet them. In my opinion it therefore comes down to a balance - we can have some industrialization but shouldn't have too much dependence. If we as a species choose an ideal path, we may never completely remove our dependence on industrialization or on culture, but with a shift in how we think about what we want, we may reduce our dependence and increase our freedom.
Q: What is power, i.e. what does it mean for a ruler to have power?
A: The ability to decree that something will happen then have it happen seems to be a fairly accurate definition. However, it's questionable whether people, even kings or dictators, ever have that power, because the only reason they're able to decree that something happens and to then have it happen is because in the context that they exist, the thing they decree is in alignment with people's beliefs or the culture or the realm of possibilities. If they had been a person to decree something else, they wouldn't have been put in that position of power. This means they're also subjected to the tide of events in the world that all of us are swept along in, and dn't have much more or less freedom than any of us. (Marcus Aurelius, the founder of stoicism, said this too.)
Q: What makes a good person?
A: We didn't really find an answer, but 2 good points were made relating to what it means to be a good person. (1) You can't be a good person by *not* doing things, i.e. by asceticism. In the past people thought of abstaining from things such as premarital sex, alcohol, dancing, etc. was what constituted being good, but by defining goodness as avoidance you can end up being complacent when someone you know is suffering an injustice that you've kept yourself apart from. To use more modern examples relevant to me, not driving a car or not drinking milk doesn't make someone a good person either. (Note, of course, that this doesn't mean we should try to do bad things.) (2) Although helping others can be good, what often happens is that when someone shows themself to be helpful or useful, whether it be with volunteering or in their family, then people end up taking advantage of their usefulness. They may get asked to do many things and feel like they need to do those things in order to be useful and thereby good, but end up getting burnt out or overwhelmed, or never able to do the things that they want to do. I think we all agreed that this is not really the best way to be a good person, and that we should set boundaries to ensure that our own needs are met too. Whether helping others within the context of setting boundaries is sufficient to define a good person is something I'm still unsure about.
Q: Should we try to preserve history?
A: Yes, so we can learn from our mistakes. However, we have to realize that the history we've preserved is skewed; not only by being inaccurate but by having certain perspectives over-emphasized, such as the perspective of rich people who were able to hire historians, or by going into a lot of detail on wars while ignoring everyday life. Reading old novels is one way to get a more balanced perspective on how everyday people thought and lived, but that's still limited to recent history; writings that are several centuries old are mostly scarce and incomprehensible.
