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Comic #3791: the-ethical-singularity

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Description

Here is the transcription of the comic:

Panel 1: Character A (lying on the grass, looking up at the stars): "We're approaching an ethical singularity."

Character B (sitting up, looking surprised): "Each new generation is horrified by the ethics of the last, but we also consider the next generation's ethics 'a bit much.'"

Panel 2: Character A: "And the pace is accelerating. What now takes a generation once took 5000 years. By the Renaissance, it was down to 100 years. After the Industrial Revolution, it fell to 50 years. Now, it's about 20."

Panel 3: Character B: "By the year 2050, we'll find ourselves from yesterday to be unenlightened savages, and ourselves from tomorrow to be ideological radicals."

Character C (in the background, listening): "By the year 2100, we'll be in a state of continuous judgment and enlightenment, unable to speak because the first halves of our sentences are socially repulsive."

Panel 4: Character A (frustrated): "Pffft. That's easy to fix. We just need computationally difficult forms of judgment."

Panel 5: Character B: "Unto others as you would be done by, but only after you’ve found all the prime factors of the sum of the two largest known primes."

Panel 6: Character C (concerned): "I don’t think ethics should be tied to CPU performance."

Character A: "How backwards."