Whenever you build a highway or a bridge or a power plant, your engineers have to put a money value on human life, or at least the worth of a statistical human life. Just to make ordinary engineering decisions.

And refusing to do this exercise just means that you behave as-if you put a really silly number on the value of human life, and probably not consistent between different parts of the project.

So I don't quite agree with these taboos in the absolute.

(I'm still against capital punishment on practical grounds.)

For books it's similar: if you taboo book destruction for the AI training folks, that doesn't rescue books from their ordinary pre-AI life cycle of getting destroyed all the time in the course of running a publisher or a library or a second-hand book store.

In fact, the AI craze is what's giving rare books _value_ and incentivises people to dig them up and preserve them. Or at least preserve them long enough to be scanned.

The scanning might destroy the physical copy of that book, but they save the contents. That's the whole point of scanning after all.

I am well aware of the Statistical Value of Life and how it impacts projects. But that is generally used for allocating preventative measures. No road is going to get approved if it is going to result in random deaths by design.