RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Hollow Man.

People are at once the greatest treasure and the greatest bane. Who hasn’t watched the movie where sadistic convicts take the guards hostage with makeshift knives and threaten to kill them one by one unless their demands are met? Or the scenario where a cab driver refuses to drive all the way into a high crime area and drops his passenger off in a dimly lit street, leaving him to walk the rest of the way past a group of youths hanging menacingly out in an alleyway? Or perhaps we’ve heard of the pizza delivery employee hesitating to take a food order to a neighborhood that even the police avoid, leaving some elderly person without food because he can’t walk to the nearest store because of the gangs?

Drama is about good versus evil. The dilemma in each case is that people can be either the source of sentient evil or all that morally matters in the world; the ultimate good and the ultimate bad, depending on their choice. That’s a common view in many modern ethical systems—especially in humanism and most versions of utilitarianism or rights-based theories. Man was at the center of things for all recorded history. But if we could send robots into the mix, then humanity’s position could change.

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