[blue]
If you could push a button that gives you a hundred thousand dollars but a random person dies, would you do it?β€―

[yellow, cautious]
Interesting thought experiment… intuitively, I'd say no, but it's worth thinking about… it's a genuine moral dilemma in a capitalist world: there's a dialectic between our desires and the common good…

MEANWHILE, BILLIONAIRES

[an orange guy in a suit is shown with a terrifying grin pushing as many buttons as possible at once on a table, slamming one of the buttons, and even using their foot to press an extra one]

https://thebad.website/comic/the_totally_hypothetical_button_thought_experiment

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[–] [S] 106 points 5 months ago (12 children)

Apologies to all the foot fetishists, I eventually gave up trying and thus have failed you.

Guess I have new anatomy lessons to grind. Shit's hard yo.

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  • [–] 68 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    You managed to create the most disturbing non-ai foot I've seen today, so that's nice

    Love the comics!

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  • [–] [S] 27 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    AIs have become decent at anatomy these days, haven't they?

    That's one job they won't take from us in the long term, finding new ways to mess up drawings. I'm always a step ahead.

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  • [–] 12 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I like that it's not a realistic human foot. Sometimes art should capture the idea of a thing rather than just the superficial image of the thing, you know? It has character.

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    I'll keep that one in mind, next time someone criticizes my anatomy I'll tell them "son, it has character".

    Actually I need to repeat that bit to myself until I am convinced. Feels like a healthy mantra.

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    [–] 81 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (10 children)

    Honestly, a billionaire would probably hire people to push the button for them.

    They'd minimize explaining what the button does, and then pay them like $100,000 a year to push the button 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.

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  • [–] 32 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Why would they get payed that much? this is unskilled labor, they get minimum wage.

    That, or they hire an undocumented immigrant for even less. Extra bonus because they can't read the sign that explains the killing thing.

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    [–] 33 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    You'd have to kill 10,000 people to become a billionaire this way. Obvious fact perhaps, but it's easy to forget how unnecessarily much a billion dollars is.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    You'd have to kill 10,000 people to become a billionaire

    You could have just stopped there.

    It'd probably still be true, recognizing that billionaires tend to indirectly kill at least that many just from the artificial scarcity required for their hoarding of resources and THEN you add the direct results of their specific actions..

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    [–] 29 points 5 months ago* (15 children)

    More interesting (and more realistic) if it isn't a guarantee that someone dies if you push the button, but a probability.

    Would you push the button if it was a 20% chance someone dies? A 5% chance? A 1% chance? 0.1%? Is there a number where it's ok to push the button? If it was a 0.0001% chance, how many times would you push the button?

    Also, does it change things if you know that your button push resulted in someone's death? Is it different if it's someone standing right there? Maybe on the other side of a one-way mirror? What if it's just that you get a green light or a red light after you push the button and you don't have to see someone die or know who died or how they died?

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  • [–] 24 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Well, driving to work is basically that. Non zero chance someone dies.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Also factor in when they die. Maybe your action results in a demise after a period of time. Lung Cancer won't kill someone right after they puff a cigarette, so the cigarette baron may not consider it his fault in the sort term.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    Yeah, that would be an interesting twist. 100% chance that pushing the button kills someone, but it might happen in 2 years or it might happen in 30 years. But, even if someone lives a perfectly normal life for 30 years, their cause of death will be this button.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    billionaire would hire multiple persons to press the button and give the money to them while paying basically nothing for it.

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    [–] 11 points 5 months ago

    He can afford foreshortening and detailed hands, in a stickman worldβ€½ His greed sickens me.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I'd hope it would take a lot more than $100,000 for most people. That won't even get you a house.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    It'd get me a sizable down payment on a house with a bit left for expenses. Which is basically the only hurdle to me owning a house at this point. Not that I would kill someone for it... At least not a random person. There's people I'd kill for money.

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    [–] 8 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I actually just thought about this same analogy a bit ago. Most normal people it would be a hard no, but there are some out there that would do it for $1k and their first question would be "can i hook it up to an auto-clicker?"

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    [–] 8 points 5 months ago

    The more I look at this, the more unhinged it becomes. None of the buttons are organized, the billionaire has a giant toe for a foot, and I keep thinking the billionaire has six fingers instead of five.

    Prefect amount of unhingedness. 10/10.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    You could still not press the button for selfish reasons.

    "I'm not pressing it because there is a chance the random person who dies is me."

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    [–] 6 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    I have an alternative idea fom a meme.

    Blue says: "if you could push a button that gives you a hundred million dollars but a random billionaire dies, would you do it?"

    Then simply switch yellow and the billionaire.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

    "If you could push a button that made you lose $10 but a random billionaire dies, would you do it?"

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)
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    [–] 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    hundred thousand? naw.

    hundred million. sure. I could actually do some good for the world with that.

    I would troll the fuckin shit out of billionaires and shitty corpofascist with every penny.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    Think about how much more you could troll them if you turned that into a billion! Besides, you've got bills to pay. And these taxes are obscene, that money has already been taxed a thousand times! You've taken on quite the burden and deserve to live a little.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    Billionaire would press the button for 100 bucks, then spend 100 times the amount in a pair of shoes he'll never wear.

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