Intellectual people predominantly populate academia, natural sciences, and computer science. This makes sense and serves society as a whole; you need to do abstract thinking detached from emotions to find objective truth, flaws in your or others’ thinking, logic errors in your computer code. If you do study computer science, the goal of your computer science institute and professors is usually primarily to teach and train this intellectual mind, this abstract and logical thinking. That’s what makes you a computer scientist after all. I came to realize after a couple of years of studying computer sciences that all the lectures, exercises, research I was spending most of my waking time on were training a very narrow part of my human mind. My human experience relies on a much broader repertoire of modes of thinking and parts of my mind in everyday life. You have emotions, empathy, fear, wants, and needs expressed in the non-intellectual and non-abstract subconscious parts of the mind. These things make up the majority of experiencing being alive. But studying computer science focused me on a tiny part of my human mind, the abstract, intellectual, logical thinking. I was trained by spending and understanding this mode of thinking during my studies. It’s interesting to think about what effect this has on my mind if I spend so much time on a part of my mind that has so little to do with everyday human experience and satisfaction.

I subscribe to the notion that ethics is entirely rational and maps to game theory. Ethics is about the principled resolution of conflicts of interest between autonomous agents under conditions of shared purpose when playing long games. [1] With this in mind, it is crucial to model incentives and their consequences for systems to evaluate ethics. On the most general level, we can take the goal of avoiding suffering as the shared purpose of all humans on earth. Additionally, maintaining the global civilization might be another high-level goal. Technologists with the ability to create and change technological systems should do so ethically by considering these goals and projecting the impact of the system they create into the distant future. Making this difficult, the complexity of networks of human and non-human entities interacting through technology on a global scale has become overwhelming. Additionally, technology changes at such a fast pace that national and global elites cannot anticipate its full impact anymore, leading to increasing randomness in societies trajectories without anyone being able to formulate and implement a coherent plan projecting them into the future. Therefore it is even more critical that technologists evaluate the ethics and impacts of their actions, especially given the enormous leverage that computer technology offers.

Ein Touristen-VISA für einen Kubaaufenthalt zu bekommen ist nicht schwer, der Tourismus ist eine feste Devisenquelle für die kleine Karibische Insel mit seiner so wilden Vergangenheit. Spanische Kolonie, Revolution und Kubakrise lautet die Kurzzusammenfassung. Und nun ist Kuba eines der wenigen Länder, welches sich noch der Coca-Cola-Marktwirtschaft verweigert. Es sei der Vollständigkeit halber angemerkt, dass es dennoch ein leichtes ist, auf Kuba käuflich eine Cola zu erwerben.

Die Republik Kuba wartet mit tropisch-feuchtheißem Meeresklima auf und die Hauptinsel ist 1200 Kilometer lang und zwischen 30 und 190 Kilometer breit. Insgesamt leben dort 11,2 Millionen Kubaner. Zusammen erwirtschaften sie ein BIP von 85 Milliarden USD (2015), wobei das Durchschnittseinkommen bei 29 USD liegt. Auf Kuba waren einige Werbetafeln zu sehen, welche für Demokratie und die anstehenden Wahlen warben. Das auswärtige Amt bemerkt hierzu jedoch lakonisch in den Länderinformationen:

Regierungspartei:

ausschließlich zugelassen: Kommunistische Partei Kubas

Opposition:

neben der Kommunistischen Partei sind keine anderen Parteien zugelassen