The Parable of the Teleporter

[elfs]

Greetings, Earthlings! We are the Interstellar Collective N1N33L3V3N and we have come to deliver a vast and powerful boon to you. We bring you teleportation. Yes, just like in your teeveeshow Star Trek. It is a marvelous technology, and will bring vast and powerful benefits to your civilization.

There is a catch. Every year, 40,000 people using it will not arrive at their destination. They will just... disappear. We are sorry. We hope you consider using this gift, as the benefits really do outweigh the risks.

There is a way to mitigate this risk, however. In order to calibrate the machinery correctly, we must analyze you down to the very last atom. Every time you use this machine, you will be probed-- remotely, painlessly, you won't feel a thing-- and every last intimate detail will be known to us. And to your fellows, as well, as we will need to publish all of this information on your Internet so that all transporters around the world can participate in your safety. A database of what you eat and drink, what medications you consume, what drugs you enjoy, and the cross-matched DNA of everyone you've had sex with in the past six weeks will be available world-wide to anyone who wants to look up such information.

---

Obviously, this is a parable. But there's some truth to it. 40,000 people a year die in automobile accidents in this country alone. We accept that risk, sad as it is, for several reasons. When we drive we feel as if we have some control over our fate. This control is illusory, but the feeling is real. It happens sporadically, here and there, night after night. We get the ones that happen in our neighborhood on the local news, but we don't see the mass aggregate of deaths every day, or every week, or every year. And it grew gradually, and we've learned the message that "cars are safer now than ever before," and so we blithely ignore the blood sacrifice that is modern transportation.

When someone says to me of 9/11, "I note that no evil even close to its treachory has befallen us since," I think of the parable of the transporter. I'm unimpressed with the "treachery of 9/11"; that same year, 20,000 more Americans died of murder as well, but we didn't care so much. The assertion that "they did it once they can do it again" demands evidence: can they? Can we take reasonable steps to prevent it? (We did; we armored up the cockpits of airplanes. Almost everything else we've done has been a tragic mistake.)

We didn't sacrifice our freedoms to catch the murderers of the 20,000, or to make the streets less prone to the murder of 20,000 more the year after. We didn't abandon our ethical compass, violate our principles, turn our backs on liberty and lose our moral high ground.

I want to live in a shining city on a hill, not cower in a goddamned bunker.

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

With an absolute number 40,000 I think I'll pass on being an early adopter just this once.

It *WOULD* be a little more honest to break it out as "Every trip (or for every mile you are teleported), there is a 1 in xxx change you will be hideous maimed or rematerialized as a puddle of goo."

(Why does Firefox's spell checker recognize "rematerialized" and not "teleported"?)

And in fairness to the 9/11 comparison - those people died IN ADDITION, not INSTEAD of, which far too many people skip over (you didn't - "Salute!") My point is "We fix what we can, live with or gripe about what we can't. Until we can." People will die no matter what we do for the foreseeable future. The best we can do is mitigate it to the level we are able. Mass murder really is one of those "If we can just stop them from..." things they think/hope/dream of being able to fix.

Oh, I also agree with the TSA that if you don't have a ticket you're not getting beyond the gate, and you should have I.D. to fly. The rest is a nightmare joke. Seriously, SHOES?

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

How does checking IDs help security? All airline terrorists in recent memory have presented genuine IDs in their actual names. If the terror watch list happens to have the right names for people on it, better hope terrorists have a harder time getting fake IDs than high school students do.

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Checking IDs help prevent the stupider people from succeeding in something stupid. It won't deter the smart one, but neither will NOT checking them.

There is no security measure that is 100% except denial - which is rather pointless. All you can do is what can be done.

Actually not ALL terrorists have IDs in their own names, just the more prominent ones in recent history. "D.B. Cooper" is an example.

[wendor.livejournal.com]

Actually "D.B. Cooper" isn't really an example of whether or not airline terrorists have ID's in their own names.

He never presented any ID to anyone in connection with his flight. In 1971 there was no ID requirement to either purchase a ticket or to board a plane. He simply stated his name as "Dan Cooper" when the ticket was issued.

Since there was never any requirement to show ID, there also would have been no reason to go to the trouble of obtaining a false ID with the "Dan Cooper" name on it...so the least unlikely hypothesis would be that if he was carrying any ID on him at all, it was probably in his real name.

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Fair enough.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

With an absolute number 40,000 I think I'll pass on being an early adopter just this once.

Oh, so you don't drive either?

[mouser.livejournal.com]

There will be fewer people using them them the first year then there are driving. If an absolute number of failures are calculated, and a variable number of successes are allowed, I'll wait until my odds improve beyond "This issue, everyone DIES!"

Straight math problem there.

[(Anonymous)]

Heh. Good point.

But when cars were first introduced, they too had very high statistical death rates (measured in "per thousand miles travelled" for example). For some bizarre reason it still took some 50 years before someone finally sat up and took notice and said "Hey, maybe putting plate glass windshields and not having restraining devices in them is a *bad* idea!"

I guess people were just having too much fun with their cars to care if the death rate was 40,000 per year, even with fewer people driving back then.

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Less "having fun" then "Wow! These are useful!" I suspect, but yea - teleportation would be so HUGE by the second or third year that it would be a no brainer to use it.

Statistically speaking, it would probably be safer then using your bathroom.

It's all about fear

[rand0m1.livejournal.com]

It has been quite obvious to me over the last 7 years that fear is the most effective means of manipulating people.

"If you don't embrace Jesus you'll burn in hell for all eternity"
"A woman as President will make us weak and open us to terrorist attacks"
"Democrats are weak and will open us to terrorist attacks. We're only safe with Republicans"
(Direct quote from my in-laws *sigh* Like a Republican President and Republican Congress scared away the terrorists on 9/11.)

Convince people they should be afraid and you can pretty much do anything you want.

I tend to find inspiration in that famous quote by FDR.

"So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

Re: It's all about fear

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The problem with the Franklin quote is that I've come to understand its context. He was actually telling the "little people" to stop worrying and go back to work because the bank crisis of his era wasn't really anything to worry about.

Trouble was, it was a big worry, almost as big as the current meltdown of our markets. It led to a national crisis and the New Deal, which ballooned the national debt (although again, not as badly as the nationalization of FM/FM has been). It's a great quote, but unfortunately it seems to have been in service to oligarchical ideals.

Or maybe I'm just too cynical these days.

Re: It's all about fear

[rand0m1.livejournal.com]

Very true about the quote.
Out of context however, it does ring well for me in these days where everyone seems to want to manipulate out of fear alone.

I do wish that someday that sound logic and reasoning are the primary factors people use to make decisions and dictate their own behaviors.

Re: It's all about fear

[mouser.livejournal.com]

From one of your "favorite" authors:

Giving up freedom for security is beginning to look naive. (Note: this originally read "F × S = k", signifying that the product of freedom and security is a constant.) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niven%27s_laws) The problem is that it's the wrong formula. Eventually as one of the two variable approach zero, the other dips significantly as well...

[gromm.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is, that 9/11 did indeed make air travel safer from terrorism.

Should someone be stupid enough to hijack a plane ever again, I don't think there's a government in the world that would hesitate in shooting down the plane anymore. At the very least, you'd get an escort of fighter planes. There's no need for big brother there.

But hey, if you're looking for an excuse to turn your country into a prison, Stalin has already written that playbook, and guess what step one is? :)

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

Should someone be stupid enough to hijack a plane ever again, I don't think there's a government in the world that would hesitate in shooting down the plane anymore. At the very least, you'd get an escort of fighter planes.

And that's if you weren't jumped on by half the people on the plane the moment you tried it. Travelers don't assume they might survive a hijacking any more.
What drives me mad about the ongoing obsession over airplane security is the apparent assumption that terrorists can't figure this out. Being the bad guys doesn't mean being stupid in the non-cinematic world.

[(Anonymous)]

Airplane security is fascist for the same reason that terrorists are drawn to airplanes in the first place, instead of cruise ships.

People are deathly afraid of flying *without* the threat of terrorism. Attack people where they feel most afraid, is the bully's creed. The "security measures" are just there to try to make people feel better.

I don't get it

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

What's the connection between 9/11 and driving or traffic deaths?

I'll also note, as a side point-- not disagreeing with what you're trying to say because I don't know what that is-- that the odds of being killed in a traffic accident are far, far lower than that 40,000-person figure indicate. These deaths aren't taken at random from the overall driving public, which you state is a condition of your transporter system.

If they were, then each of the 200,000,000 licensed drivers in the US would have a 1-in-5,000 risk of dying each year, right? Or a 1-in-100 lifetime risk. That sounds pretty bad.

But a person is far more likely to be killed in a car if he or she is young, drunk, speeding, tired, angry, on the cellphone, talking with a passenger, driving a small, cheap, badly designed or badly maintained car, driving at night, driving on rural roads, driving on unfamiliar roads, driving on mountain roads, driving a lot, etc. etc., and all of these things can be controlled.

It's even pretty easy to tell who's at the greatest risk out there-- look for the people whose cars are banged up, who get honked at, and who are just plain bad drivers. If you drive carefully, your odds fall back to the odds of randomly getting smashed by a bad driver, and even those odds can be substantially influenced by getting a more robust car and not driving at times or in places where there are young, drunk, speeding, tired people on the road.

The chances of a careful mature adult dying in a traffic accident in common, ordinary conditions such as a daily commute while sober, alert, and in a good car are very low. Maybe only a thousand people die this way each year, vs. a total number of careful mature adult drivers in this country that must be up somewhere around 100 million. (My estimates-- aiming high and low respectively to produce a more defensible argument.)

So that means the lifetime odds for such an individual are somewhere around two thousand to one against this fate, twenty times better than implied by the naive analysis.

That makes a huge difference when we compare this cost to the benefits to our quality of life that are generated by our automobiles: a vastly more efficient economy because a company in a given location can choose its employees from a larger population, the option of living in areas with lower population densities, the opportunity to spend our free time in less populated areas as well, the freedom to make individual decisions about all these things rather than submit to centralized decision-making about rail lines and city centers, etc.

I think those benefits are very large compared to the baseline, whereas the cost of driving is almost trivial.

But anyway, I still don't see where you were going with this. The comments are all over the map so maybe I'm not the only one confused. :-)

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