Sfdebris.net

Here's an interesting thought exercise that occurred to me earlier. Imagine you are a scientist and have just invented a matter transporter a la Star Trek. Would it be ethical to release it to the public?

Setting aside the obvious military and terrorist applications for a moment, I think that it's a tricky situation. On the one hand I can think of some good for it - just imagine if instead of waiting for an ambulance, the paramedics could be teleported straight to you and could teleport you straight to hospital and if it was fine tuned enough the surgeon could use it to remove foreign objects from your body without having to open you up; similarly instead of having to wait for a fire engine to drive across town to you, the engine could be teleported straight to the scene of the fire, saving time, and if it had an inbuilt transporter then firemen could teleport straight to where trapped people are without having to trudge through the inferno to look for them and once located they could be teleported straight out. And similar cases could be made for the other emergency services. Other beneficial applications could be that it'd allow shops to transport perishable goods directly from where they're grown/made, allowing for longer shelf life and fresher goods. And depending on operating costs it could also allow companies to cut shipping costs as they won't have to bring items by ship, plane, etc and thus wouldn't need to pay the associated costs. Depending on how 'green' or energy intensive the transporter is it could also have an environmental boon as by replacing planes, ships, trains, lorries, etc it'd reduce pollution and other environmental impacts (e.g. Oil could be teleported directly from the rigs to the refinery and then to storage silos without the risk of oil spills and similar accident that are associated with tanker ships).

But on the flip side, it could result in an increase in unemployment; for example why would people take taxis, buses and other forms of public transport when they can use a transporter (assuming it was affordable to own and operate one). And the benefit of not needing transport ships, planes, etc would put most of the people who work on them out of a job (some might be able to get jobs operating the transporters, but that's likely to be a small portion of them). It might even put many postal workers out of a job - why pay postmen to hand deliver letters and packages when the sorting office can just load them into a transporter and teleport them directly to your house? Ditto for delivery companies - why would UPS, FedEx or the like pay drivers to deliver packages when a worker at the depot could deliver the same load as say ten drivers in the same space of time? Although affordable transporters might replace cars for families, those who work in car manufacturing plants might actually be relatively unaffected, as it plausible they could be transferred over to manufacturing transporters (although on the other hand people probably won't replace their transporter as quickly as they replace their car, so who knows...).


So would it be ethical to release a transporter to the public? Does the benefits outweigh the cons?

There are many ethics considering transporters. Minute Physics did an episode on the reality that you are destroying one thing and creating another or essentially cloning the person.
As far as economic concerns, isn't that what progress is? No one laments about the horse buggy's being replace by cars. Or that a pipeline is being built and worrying about the loss transportation jobs. The manufacturing and maintaining of these would require a lot of manpower. I am also certain that it would require much more energy to use a transport, so that would require us to boost our electrical grid or even create a demand for cheaper traditional transport.

I don't think you can address transporters without also bringing up replicators because I sorta see them as logical extensions of each other. In fact, I actually think if we were to develop such technology it would be replicators first then transporters. The two developments together would be beyond revolutionary. Being able to instantly create goods and instantly transport them to wherever they're needed (especially as shown in Star Trek where a receiving station isn't necessary) would be amazing.

The difference between cars replacing horse and cart and transporters coming into being is that the former didn't result in the same loss of jobs as the latter would - the drivers just need to be retrained to drive the new vehicle and the cart builders could get employment working in the manufacturing plants (especially as it'd be pre-automated assembly line and thus would require more workers). I suppose it'd result in a loss in jobs for horse breeders and stable boys, but that'd be offset by the increased demand in factory workers.

I think the economic impact is really the lesser ethical consideration - yes, it'll screw over a huge chunk of the existing economy, but that's what progress does, happened before will happen again frakking toasters etc. - compared to the potential for misuse. I know you said setting aside military/terrorist applications, but... granted there's a lot of guesswork since nobody knows how a transporter would really function, but I feel like it's a safe bet it'd have absolutely terrifying weapons potential. Certainly game-changing for international relations, possibly civilisation-destabilising, maybe an outside chance that someone'd come up with a way to make a planet-killer out of it. So I feel the appropriate analogy isn't so much the Industrial Revolution as it is the Manhattan Project.

In which case... y'know, much as it galls my Trekkie heart not to leap into the 24th Century as quick as I can, no, I don't think it'd be ethical to release it to the public - not in any sense that means private individuals can get their hands on one, because at some point that is going to go wrong, and we'll find out how in real-time on the news. Which doesn't answer the question of what you do do with the blasted thing, because option B is probably "Call the government" and I don't see that going swimmingly either, but I'm not quite cynical enough to think that the ethical thing to do is just junk it because there's no way we can be trusted with it.

(Y'know, I never considered until now that Lex Luthor may actually have been doing humanity a favour - at least by throwing all his inventions at Superman instead of putting them on shelves at Wal-mart, he was making sure there was only one madman with a Lextech Warsuit rampaging around, not thousands.)

I think there's another thread around here, somewhere, that discusses the very implications you bring up. I haven't read the thread, yet, but I think the title is something to the effect of "beaming vs shooting" or something like that. Anyway, yeah, technology like this will most certainly not make it into the hands of John Q Public right away. Eventually, though, it might.

For radio and television to work, we hafta have a transmitter and receiver so, for me anyway, it would make sense for a transporter to have a similar restriction. If you can just two-way teleport someone or something to another location independent of a receiving station that opens up a lot of unpleasant possibilities for misuse.

Actually HUGE numbers of people Lamented Horse drawn Buggies being replaced by cars
I've even seen an article translated from Latin from 500 years ago lamenting the Printing Press!

It is important to realize that technological progress always comes with MUCH upheaval but also a net GAIN in jobs

take for instance the Tractor
Before the tractor, HUNDREDS of people were needed to work farms that would collectively add up to a modern farm
Now it appears that only 1 man and a tractor does the same work
but this is not true
1 man DRIVES the tractor, but Hundreds of people BUILT the tractor and Hundreds more made the parts, and shipped the parts, and made the fuel, and built the pipelines, and drilled the oil, and mined the iron, and launched the GPS Satellites, and maintain the trucks (that shipped the parts) and built the trucks and maintain the tractor and
and
and
and
and...
so in the end, while 1 man appears to have replaced hundreds it takes the toil of THOUSANDS to allow him to do so

Transporters would do the same

Yeah. I'd imagine transporters on a practical scale would require a shitton of people operating/calibrating/maintaining the things to make sure it all runs smoothly. Something akin to air traffic control coordinating millions of transports a day, making sure that people and/or cargo don't wind up in the wrong place or have their patterns scrambled together. Going to need legions of technicians just to keep ahead of potential breakdowns in the system and avoid those pesky transporter accidents.

Hopefully this thread isn't too old to comment.

I just want to say that I've never bought the argument that transporters kill the person being beamed and then assemble a clone.

First of all, its pretty clearly not the intent of the depiction in the franchise, and I don't think the canon Federation would readily sanction such a technology on that scale.

Secondly, as I recall, its been established that consciousness is maintained (as far as the person can tell, anyway) while in transport.

Thirdly, even if you disassemble the person and put them back together, they're still made of the same matter, the same mind. It seems to me just a more extreme version of, not fundamentally different from, say, a person losing an arm and then having it reattached. We wouldn't say that that person was dead because their body was taken apart and put back together. Its still the same matter, and the same mind.

The only way that it would constitute death in any meaningful sense is if their were a soul, distinct from the physical body, which was lost during transport, with the person that materializes on the transporter pad having a different soul. Which is a metaphysical question of the kind that Star Trek usually doesn't go into very much, and would likely be unquantifiable.

I could see a religious objection from some faiths to transporters, easily. But I'm having a hard time seeing a strong scientific one.

Let's be fair here, why would Tuvix have happened if they're just making duplicates? Why would the mirror universe episodes happened if they're making duplicates (all except for the first don't have synchronous transports)? If they're making duplicates, they can apparently do this at range, so why are replicator necessary?