This thread is at least based on a sci-fi book, but it’s more about a particular concept within it and the consequences and morality thereof, so I didn’t really feel it was appropriate for cafe society. If a mod disagrees with me, then I apologise - please move it.
In Vernor Vinge’s novel “A Deepness in the Sky” there is a technology called focus. This effectively induces a form of controlled monomania - it focuses a person on a particular subject to such a degree that they care about nothing else. A focused physicist will produce amazing work because they will devote all their time to it without tiring, and will have no distractions. Through sheer persistence and attention to details they will see things that others won’t, as well as having more general knowledge of their subject because they have the dedication to focus on it to the exclusion of all else. A focused security team can watch all the cameras and information indefinitely, catching things that other people wouldn’t. Focused programmers are capable of debugging and rewriting code to an extent unmanagable by normal humans (in the book this is particularily valuable as the software environment they used is based on thousands of years of addition to older systems). Another use for focused individuals was that they provided a level between automation and the user - you would give instructions to the Focused and they then performed the task. A good example of something where this would be useful would be data retrieval. e.g. For a current example, if you wanted to research something obscure on the internet, Focused could work with the existing search engines and provide another level between you and the computer with much more flexibility and discrimination, but with an attention to detail and a persistence no normal person could manage.
The point is that Focussed individuals combine the level of dedication that a computer has, with the level of flexibility of a human. It allows a level of achievement that is simply impossible to reach without something like this. Hypothetically I suppose you could create an AI which performed a similar function, but it would effectively amount to the same thing.
The process itself is of course disgusting - it amounts to little more than a form of high tech slavery. The part where it becomes different from slavery is that it achieves effects that could not be possible without it. So in some sense it is better than slavery, which is in the end achieves little more than saving money by not paying labourers to work for the task. On the other hand it is also worse than slavery, as it denies the victims even their freedom of thought.
Say we had focus now… Could you justify using it? Focusing a team of economists, etc. and you could make plans which could rejuvenate the problems on an entire nation. Focusing teams of engineers and physicists could give new advanced technologies - clean, cheap power sources, cheap methods of desalinisation, and countless other things. You would be sacrificing a few hundred, but benefiting the entire planet.
I imagine you could probably even get (a limited number of) volunteers for it, but that is somewhat incidental to the issue I’m trying to discuss. Is it justifiable to sacrifice a relatively small number of - unwilling - people to benefit the entire race? If, by exploiting a few, you can achieve for everyone else (not just yourself) things unimaginably greater than what you could otherwise achieve?
With the specific example of focus, perhaps you could have a system of specialised universities - training people for free, giving great benefits to those who graduate, but at the end of the program taking a small (randomly selected) percentage of the people and focusing them, say 1%; If all the students who went into these programs were fully aware of the risks, would it be justifiable? Would many take it? (Incidentally this solution is somewhat similar to how it was handled in the book, except that all university graduates were subjected to such a lottery).
Myself, I don’t know what I would choose for the use of focus. On the one hand, the idea apalls me. On the other, the promise of the technology seems too high to dare pass up. It’s a difficult decision to make.
It seems to me it’s not only a difficult decision to make, but one that will have to be made. Perhaps not soon, but also not too far away. If nothing else, if we manage to create artificial intelligences will the situation not closely parallel this one - if we are able to create AI, would the temptation to create AI like the focused be too great to pass up? If you can dedicate all that thinking power to one task, imagine what you can achieve. If not AI, then given a reasonable advance in neurosurgery and cybernetics you could probably achieve something approaching focus, maybe even by simple stimulation of pain/pleasure centers - if you can make a person develop the right associations you can make them desire to do nothing else but work. Once you’ve done that you can used your new ‘focused’ to refine the technique further and further.
For now, I’m glad the decision only exists as a hypothetical. Even beyond the technology itself, the possibilities of it’s uses are frightening, and even if it could be used responsably, I very much doubt it would be…
