“I hope you don’t think I’d ever do anything like that, I mean, just step out of the drier, if anyone were seeing me. It was just viewing.”
“Same thing, isn’t it?” asked Baley.
“Not at all the same thing. You’re viewing me right now. You can’t touch me, can you, or smell me, or anything like that. You could if you were seeing me. Right now, I’m two hundred miles away from you at least. So how can it be the same thing?”
Baley grew interested. “But I see you with my eyes.”
“No, you don’t see me. You see my image. You’re viewing me.”
“And that makes a difference?”
“All the difference there is.”
For many of you the above passage would be familiar, it is from the novel “The Naked Sun” by Issac Asimov where the hero has just initiated a Sci-Fi equivalent of a web-cam messaging with a beautiful murder suspect.
Are these ethics still science fiction?