Trolley problem and trust
Can we trust 33 random people to do the right thing?
The other day, I stumbled upon a post with a premise of the trolley problem that seems like it just another meme-infused hook that was made to bait comments from people having a laughter at the problem, but strangely, it got me thinking,
Can we trust 33 random people to do the right thing?
Why specifically 33 you ask, well it stems from the world population itself.
So here's the problem,
There's a train, you can pull a lever to send it hurtling towards a group of people, effectively ending all of them. But you can choose to not do so, you are released from this horrible situation, then the choice get pass onto someone random, but this time, the amount of people in the group DOUBLED. Starting with 1 person.
A genuinely smart mix of the modern day meme of "double it and give it to the next person" and our old-timer, the trolley problem. The problem however, lack proper GAME. I say we do this, if when everyone on earth is tied down to the track, no one dies. So to best preserve the human race on this planet, everyone just have to agree to not pull the lever, or is it?
Let say we have 8.3B people on this planet right now, it would take 2^33 to surpass that number by a small margin (8.6B), it means with the problem at hands, we would need 34 people not pulling the lever to reach that many people on the train track (It somehow holds that many).
If you are one of the people in this 34-people chain of fate, What will you do, Say, you are person number 21, accounting for 1,048,576 people's lives?
- Believe, in other people, though randomly selected, will perform the act to save humanity from the brink of doom. You didn't pull the lever!
- Pass on, the thought is too much, the responsibility is not yours, shouldn't be yours, so you didn't pull the lever.
- The hero in thought, there are 13 more person from you till the very end, will there be one bad actor? If so, will pulling the lever, in turn, giving them the chance to do the destruction on the scale that might be unimaginably large from what you are holding. You are scared the devil might exist within those 13 other people, you can stop him before he got the chance. The thoughts circle around you, should I stop him? The devil might not exist in this group? But he will never exist if I just end it all right here. You pull the lever, effectively become the devil himself.
- The devil, you know his drill.
I'm genuinely don't know who I will choose to be in the situation (not the last one though). It is scary to be at the end of the string, especially when it involves all of humanity's tomorrow. But a choice must be made.
Are you actually a believe-type or just a pass-on person in the act of trying to redeem himself? If you are person #1, will you trade one life, to secure the hope of this world? Or save him, and entrust the 8.3 billions human lives to the next 33 random people to do the right thing?
In actuality, the world's crime rate is surprisingly low, and those who wish for humanity's demise should only account for a tiny part of that even. But the thing is, you only need one bad actor at the end of the chain to doom us all, so, What is your choice?