Anonymous asked: Would you say yes to get the power to make laws, and if anyone breaks them they get smited
Absolutely. The first law would be that anyone who tries to launch a nuclear weapon gets smited. Or even that anyone who tries to commit mass murder gets smited. (I imagine you’d have to craft the laws very carefully to keep them from being gamed. Like, you wouldn’t want someone to set it up so that their being smited is what causes other people to die.) Also, perhaps a law protecting me from assassination attempts. It’s a powerful enough ability to conquer the world I think, but I’d do my best to use it in a very limited capacity, since it’s a rather blunt instrument to change behavior. I’d try to reduce existential risks and end wars, but that’s probably it.
I’d have to think about how much I’d want to cooperate with the international community.
Dude, this is almost exactly the Death Note power, and you’d better believe that I have it all worked out how to create a “new world” way better than Light Yagami.
Let me just say, I would not be conservative with it. Things wouldn’t be too different in regard to individuals—except that suddenly all the laws against murder, robbery, etc. would become absolutely binding.
But government officials had better watch out.
More details?
Well, where to begin…
I perhaps a bit too conservative in my my earlier estimate, since this power actually far exceeds that of the Death Note.
I suppose the first thing I would do is pass a law against my using the power unjustly, to prevent myself from becoming corrupted by it. (Resulting, I guess, in immediate death if the rest of this strikes you as corrupt.)
Then, it seems with this mechanism that I would lack the Death Note’s ability to send messages, so I wouldn’t be able to communicate the principles of the new world order that way.
However, if I could pass a law against attempting or conspiring to kill me, I could simply announce myself as Supreme Justice of the World. I would arrange a suitable demonstration of my power and require the leaders of the nearest military force to take orders from me. Then I would command them to unify all the world’s governments, making it illegal to violently resist them (or for them to engage in looting or other abuses).
Crime (murder, robbery, rape, etc.) would be eliminated as a major social problem, as all serious crimes would be punishable by smiting. With a 100% detection and conviction rate, it is unlikely that many would be attempted.
With control of all the world’s governments, I would be able to command them to do anything. However, with this power, it is unclear what the purpose would be even of minimal government, so I would abolish all of them—except, of course, government by magic power of smiting.
There would be immediate open borders. Conveniently, this would obviate all concerns about crime or political takeover—since the commission of any violent crimes would be punishable by immediate and certain death, and there wouldn’t be any governments to take over.
There would also be immediate abolition of all other restraints and controls over the economy. Also very conveniently, there would be no concern about unregulated corporations knowingly selling people poisoned food or something—since this would be punished by smiting.
People would be free to do anything except initiate the use of force. I could go on, but presumably you get the drift.
But with this power, we could also do other things. For instance, we could vastly expand the reach of human knowledge at an incredible rate. We could formulate all important and unresolved scientific problems in terms of true/false questions. For instance, “P = NP, T/F?” Then, taking volunteers (perhaps from people dying of terminal diseases), I make it illegal to answer incorrectly. By process of elimination, we sort through all the mysteries of the universe, curing all diseases, ending aging, developing Friendly AI, and so on.
So yeah, I would not be conservative.
A lot of this seems wrong-headed to me, for the simple reason that you could die. I could understand using your power to set up a new, better regime, but using your power to create a new world order that’s entirely contingent upon you - no more governments at all! - is very foolhardy. Even if you had a succession plan, everything could easily fall apart in the time it took to get police/military forces going again. Making sure that humanity’s ability to rule itself doesn’t wholly atrophy would hugely limit how much you should change things.
Okay but seriously. This is way OP.
Light promethea first; only very unambigously good actions:
Banning conspiring, or planning, or trying, to kill me, or otherwise render me incapable of doing my duty, is the obvious first step.
Immediately, I proceed to ban sucking the blood of a human with one’s sucking-snout. Boom, mosquitoes are gone.
Also, dividing one’s self into multiple cells with too seriously damaged restraints is also illegal. Cancer is over.
And every infectious disease I can think of follows next. Parasites, pests, always defined in terms of taking certain actions so evolution will learn that homo sapiens is not to be fucked with. Oh, and it’s illegal for an embryo to grow if it has certain genes that would be a rapid death sentence or “just” a source of unbearable suffering for the resulting human. And I’d seriously look into the medical science of “how many conditions could we cure just by declaring cells legally responsible individuals and smiting those who get out of line?”
Then, humans. This is a bit more involved because crafting appropriate laws with such a blunt power is hard but torture, murder, terrorism, wars, inprisoning people who don’t present a danger to others, trying to enforce certain kinds of laws that violate personal autonomy etc. are pretty easy to ban. All in all, it’s probably better to target politicians and other influential people and demand them to adjust institutions to be more respectful of people, than to impose cruel magical hammerlaw nailing down those who fall on the wrong side of the line, because if the power goes away at death (I’m not planning on ever dying but it’s kind of selfish to stake the long-term survival of humanity completely on my own) I’d rather not have athropied all the structures that could keep the world together afterwards.
Of course, replacing them with better ones is totally fair game, and I’d start constructing the Archipelago immediately. I announce my intent to do it, declare that anyone who wants to join it must make an unbreakable oath to follow the very limited rules (but which they can later recant after leaving if they wish to), basically accepting that they may be smote if they grossly and knowingly violate the agreements they have made with the Archipelago (such as by trying to illegally interfere with a different polity from one’s own, or by trying to prevent someone from exercising their right of exit, or by subjecting humanity to intolerable X-risks, and other such things). In exchange, they gain immunity to the exercise of non-archipelago power; people who reject the archipelago’s non-smitey justice that demands adequate compensation for violating the rights of archipelagians will be smote instead.
And I’d totally do that binary search tree euthanasia thing because omfg lol yeah we’d fix everything pretty fast.
Now what about the other, less cautious version?
- - - dark promethea show me the forbidden utopia - - -
Apart from the above, the dark version would be less discriminate about applying the smitings to nonconsensual violence and coercion. A small fraction of the population is responsible for a huge share of those things, and eliminating them would be a pretty big benefit.
Repeat rapists, people who delight in cruelty to people or animals they have power over, those who systematically exploit people’s good nature and assumptions of benevolence, consistently violent people, those who aggressively seek authority or desire to impose it upon others, etc.
A very dark version would just declare everyone untouchable like “yeah, people have rights now, and you will respect them; what are you going to do about it?” The resulting massive die-off of people who had previously grown used to getting away with violations would probably not be optimal as it would (oftentimes literally) decimate a lot of institutions, but I can’t say it wouldn’t have a certain poetic justice to it.
Even if I were to die later, I’d expect the effect to be similar to what happened to that one baboon group where all the most aggressive and dominant males died from poisonous meat and consequently the culture got enduringly more n e o t e n i c and kind (by baboon standards). With the people who abuse that trust gone, societies could adopt much higher-trust norms and give up a lot of defensiveness.
And dark promethea would also declare that people must pay 10% of their consumption to good-faith EA as long as there still are people whose basic material needs aren’t adequately met (and the percentage would go down over time as the necessity gets lower via voluntary action, increasing people’s access to productive capital etc. or possibly higher if automation threatens to render people redundant and unable to provide for themselves otherwise due to excessive concentration of capital; no Landian accelerationism on my planet), unless they are taxed more than that by a state or have a sufficiently low income that they’d more appropriately count as recipients instead; and trying to enforce taxation on non-consenting people who can show that they have paid their 10% to valid causes (the simplest option being a global scheme that invests what it collects in index funds and distributes profits as UBI) would also be illegal. Governments would probably get into the value-creation business pretty fast and we’d actually end poverty and all that bullshit instead of playing around with buying votes from redwashed rentiers and not-even-0.7%-that-often-goes-to-robber-barons-too.
1 month ago · tagged #support your local supervillain #death cw · 20 notes · source: davidsevera · .permalink
almostcoralchaos reblogged this from shlevy
somewhere-in-the-dungeon reblogged this from shlevy and added:It seems this is both vastly more useful and importantly different than the Death Note power. The giant, glaring...
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from davidsevera and added:Okay but seriously. This is way OP. Light promethea first; only very unambigously good actions: Banning conspiring, or...
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eccentric-opinion liked this- davidsevera reblogged this from voximperatoris and added:
A lot of this seems wrong-headed to me, for the simple reason that you could die. I could understand using your power to...
voximperatoris reblogged this from shlevy and added:Well, where to begin… I perhaps a bit too conservative in my my earlier estimate, since this power actually far exceeds...
shlevy reblogged this from voximperatoris and added:More details?
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collapsedsquid said: Wouldn’t the mass-murder rule run the possibility of self-smiting?