Anna Tomy
Caille University Art Faculty
Haven.
8
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Posted - 2016.01.26 15:20:06 -
[1] - Quote
Ergentii Juhar wrote:
In summary, there are certain ethical considerations that make this project completely wrong:
1. Replacing real workers, paid ones, with virtual ones that are not paid for their time (or worse - are paying themselves for it). That's doubly unethical, on both ends of the bargain.
2. This is not for the good of humanity or the progress of science. it is all for a shared profit between medical companies, that MMOScience company, and ccp. Saying the former, is misinformation. And as such, it's unethical, too.
3. Let's not forget, the actual ethics of the medical companies themselves. I think oil companies only can compete with them on this matter. Consider their pricing, their testing procedures (both on animals and humans), their research quality (and what they hide), and all the other stuff. I don't want to help them, in any way. It's only fair because they don't care about helping anyone, either.
4. What's next? Sweeping the streets for plexes? So that municipalities can fire the sweepers and save? I don't think any of this will come to any good.
Don't think I'm an extremist enviromental freak or lobbyist or whatever. I just think that all this 'volunteer' projects are just cost-reducing plans, increasing profits for some companies but reducing the actual gains (and jobs) for the community. If CCP doesn't want to be involved in the politics of the matter, let it abstain from these projects altogether.
While I do share your sentiment towards big pharma corporations (or big corporations in general), I don't see big moral issues in this case:
1.)
Human Protein Atlas: "The publication and/or presentation are solely for informational and non-commercial purposes."
I'd rather help an open, public project than see a private owned, commercial company withholding their research.
2.)
We don't actually "kill jobs" by doing this. As far as I understand, scientists are only recently working with this massive amount of data. We are talking about 13 Mil images. It's not a "trend to reduce real workers" because in the past nobody was doing this kind of work in this massive dimensions. It's also stated that categorizing those images is nothing a Computer farm can do easily, so we not even "help to cut the costs" on this side.
I, obviously, assume that MMOS and Protein Atlas don't lie about their intentions.
I'm looking forward to this! Having such projects as (optional) minigames instead of the hacking minigame would be cool! |