What I find most intriguing about this is the how a law that was enforced only 50 years ago has so quickly become abhorrent to the majority of the population. It's an interesting thought experiment to consider which laws we routinely use today to punish people will become morally unacceptable in the next 50 years.
Copyright and patent laws, and laws used against Snowden's whistle blowing are some obvious ones that are due for changes, but what's more interesting is if history continues to repeat itself it seems likely that some things we consider wrong now will become acceptable in the near future and the reverse is also true. This is much harder to predict.
(Humans driving cars is a reverse example. I think in the next 50 years it will become illegal for humans to drive cars manually except on private racing circuits)
I think trans rights are something that in 50 years time will be like gay rights now. We'll look back 50 years to today and think the treatment by society of trans people was barbaric.
In 50 years time Chelsea Manning might get an apology because medication she needed wasn't given to her in prison.
I doubt that we would need to make human driving illegal. More likely automated cars become so popular and cheap that a generation grows up without learning how to drive manually and outside of a subset of enthusiasts human driven cars simply start to disappear from the market.
We already have driving assistance systems like ABS and computers which will automatically apply brakes which can reduce the risk of accidents but we don't mandate that all vehicles on the road use them.
> It's an interesting thought experiment to consider which laws we routinely use today to punish people will become morally unacceptable in the next 50 years.
It's also an interesting thought experiment to consider whether beliefs we deeply and routinely hold today will become as morally unacceptable as the belief that homosexuality is wrong, unnatural and ought to be punished.
For example, what if it becomes wrong to believe in meritocracy? If in fifty years, everyone from scientists to politicians to the media blasts the message that it's wrong and hurtful to heap prestige, financial rewards, etc. on brilliant hackers and successful entrepreneurs?
Presumably many HN'ers strongly believe in meritocracy and point out historical examples of stagnation in non-meritocratic societies, mathematical/economic arguments why meritocracy is good, etc.
What if anyone who sincerely believes in meritocracy, and makes these kinds of logical and data-backed arguments in favor of meritocracy, is met the same way that today anyone is met who argues against the liberalization of our treatment of homosexuality?
Please, treat people who honestly believe that homosexuality is wrong the way you would want believers in meritocracy to be treated in the hypothetical world I've laid out. First, because you want a civilized precedent for dealing with distasteful beliefs, to reduce the downside if your own beliefs will one day be regarded as distasteful. Second, it simply makes the pro-gay argument look weak if the best way you can deal with opponents is call them names like "bigot," or threaten to blacklist them and destroy their livelihood.
The cases you cite seem fundamentally different from the anti-gay laws under discussion. Copyright and patent laws, even if we look back and say they were stupid, we would still be able to point to the problems that they were designed to solve (of which they have solved somewhat), and view them as a reasonable attempt. Similarly, we would recognize that humans driving cars was okay not because of of a poor moral system, but rather because we had no better alternative.
I suspect that some of the areas we will look back on in a similar way are drug laws and sex laws (we still have prostitution, child porn, and statutory rape, all of which seem immoral only in a cultural sense).
The trend is that certain ideas are offensive and are therefore kept censored or ridiculed, until people can overlook those societal views of past generations and assess the ideas with a fresh perspective, at which point they become accepted.
There are things today which if you say you might lose friends over, but I am certain it's a case of nation-wide groupthink. Evidence? In other parts of the world these ideas are widely accepted already.
Copyright and patent laws, and laws used against Snowden's whistle blowing are some obvious ones that are due for changes, but what's more interesting is if history continues to repeat itself it seems likely that some things we consider wrong now will become acceptable in the near future and the reverse is also true. This is much harder to predict.
(Humans driving cars is a reverse example. I think in the next 50 years it will become illegal for humans to drive cars manually except on private racing circuits)