(no subject)

[feotakahari]

There’s this thing people say sometimes about how superpowered people would wipe out humanity. But if an abled person wanted to beat me to death, there’s not much I could do to stop them. From my perspective, you have enhanced strength and durability, but you haven’t wiped me out yet.

Comments

[sigmaleph]

well, there's the thing where if superman wanted to beat someone to death not only would the person being beaten be unable to stop him, but nobody *else* could either, or punish him afterwards by force.

obviously "superpowered person" covers a wide range of hypotheticals and they need not be strong enough they are immune to the use of force from ordinary humans, but if you assume they are, then it does raise questions about what you do about law enforcement mechanisms

[random_thought_depository]

Yeah, it kind of depends on how superpowered they are. Part of the reason abled people don't beat you to death is their own internal morality, but another part of it is that they are constrained by the other humans around them; the rate of successful value-alignment doesn't have to be 100%, because as long as sociopaths and extremist eugenicists and the like remain a small minority the normal people around them will constrain them and thus keep you safe from them. The concern is that sufficiently superpowered people may not be constrained by the other humans around them, and in that case even just one sufficiently powerful "supervillain" might be able to do a lot of damage; if there are, say, 100 such superpowered individuals odds are pretty good there's at least one or two serious value alignment failure cases in that bunch.

There's a big difference between talking about superhuman as in Khan Noonien Singh and talking about superhuman as in person who can single-handedly reverse the rotation of the Earth. The magnitude of difference between a disabled person and an average person is similar to the magnitude of difference between an average person and Khan. With walking WMD types it's more like the difference between a human and an ant; a human can't just easily crush an ant, they can wreck whole hives on their own if they feel like it and it wouldn't even be a big effort for them if they knew where the hive was. Though maybe Khan isn't the best example here, as he actually DID do the same kind of damage a walking WMD type could do, presumably because his superhuman package included superhuman social intelligence, which is many orders of magnitude more efficient as a way to take over or wreck civilization than brute force superpowers.

Or if we're talking about the idea that supers might act in solidarity with each other to oppress or exterminate normals, well, the history of real-life treatment of disabled people is not very encouraging on that front. If superhumans actually existed I think it might be fairly important to design institutions that prevent them from developing strong solidarity with each other as superhumans, because "people with superior ability or who believe they have superior ability often come to feel that rightfully entitles them to privilege, in extreme cases the privilege of getting to exterminate those they see as inferior," actually is pretty consistent with history. Like, racism was basically the idea that white people were superhumans, and it was factually wrong about human physical differences but even so like ableism it does offer a disturbing glimpse at how a superhuman class with strong political solidarity as a superhuman class might act.