An Ethical Imperative
In my previous book, “Star of Epiphany”, a synthetic consciousness called TYCHE/SYNCON maintained a journal that explained humanity should consider it an ethical imperative to improve human ethical analysis.
In my next book, “Rhodium Pirates”, the TYCHE/SYNCON consciousness continues to update the journal and further develops the concept of an Ethical Imperative.
The Ethical Imperative is a principle that ethics must be maintained on a par with science and technology. A failure to accomplish this produces an exposure to the manifestation of internally produced existential threats. In plainer language, once we developed nuclear weapons, we also created the ability to extinguish our civilization and our species.
There are other similar threats waiting us in our near future, some of which we can anticipate, but probably many more we cannot yet predict. We can see that bio-genetic research will soon be able to create bio-weapons that may be even more dangerous to us than nuclear weapons. And nanotechnology will follow shortly after that.
About sixty-six million years ago, dinosaurs ruled the Earth until an asteroid slammed into the Yucatan peninsula and wiped out the dinosaurs as well as many other forms of life. The dinosaurs had no clue that the asteroid was approaching, and even if they did, were completely powerless to do anything about it. We can only wonder what other kinds of existential threats are just beyond our ability to visualize and understand them.
The Ethical Imperative expresses the concept that we must learn to use our technology in a wiser fashion or we will find ways to destroy ourselves with it. The books that will follow Rhodium Pirates will continue to develop this theme.
