11 ms·

> The "Bad" Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the "Good" Parts. [1] I thought this was one of the most prophetic statement from his Technology Manif

> The "Bad" Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the "Good" Parts. [1] I thought this was one of the most prophetic statement from his Technology Manifesto. Written in 1995, still true today. Take any technology, and you'll see it has been used for doing "good" things as well as "evil" things, and it's impossible for anyone to separate the two and enforce usage of only the "good" parts. Example: Drones. Used in many countries now to send recon to remote areas for rescue missions [2], drop food or medicinal supplies in conflict zones. Same drones also used by the same countries to remotely kill "suspected terrorists" and by ISIS Jihadis (in Iraq) to drop bombs on Iraqi soldiers [3]. You cannot invent drones and tell people it should only be used for good things, not bad things. Same with Facebook. Used to organize events, connect with family, find missing people, start revolutions and protests. Same Facebook also used to spread fake news, lure unsuspecting victims for robbery and even murder, recruit Jihadis. Every time a new technology is invented, human find a way to use it in a bad, destructive way. Too bad blogging and Podcasting or youtube weren't around when Ted Kaczynski's wrote his technology manifesto, cos maybe then he may have resorted to online medium to spread his message, instead of killing people to get attention for his manifesto. [1] Source: The Unabomber Trial: The Manifesto => http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo... [2] Source: Drones Help Rescue Missing Hikers => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1VPZ5jt5Xw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1VPZ5jt5Xw [3] Source: Footage of ISIS drone dropping grenade bombs on Iraqi soldiers => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Uw0KWhYAoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Uw0KWhYAoY

elefanten 9y ago
How is this prophetic rather than a long-tread subject? Super obvious example are the well-publicized doubts of many scientists involved in inventing nuclear weapons.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bitexploder 9y ago
I grew up in a fairly out of the way area in a red state, but we had this cool elective in high school called simply enough "Technology". We had AutoCAD, computers, little bridge building things, etc. One of the few lessons that really stuck with me was when the teacher was discussing technology one day and one of the students grappled with this very philosophical point. Basically the posed it as something like "we should just ban technology X because people do bad things with it". This was 1998 (dating myself) so it isn't like computers were the force they are now in everyone's mind. What unfolded is this basic discussion: people are the ones doing the bad things. Technology is just a force or thought multiplier. He explained it so well. It sort of clicked into my brain then and that discussion still sits pretty firm in my mind. I don't think all technology can find inherently bad uses, but most of it can. Computers are at the heart of every military technology now other than explosives. Physics are at the heart of nuclear weapons. etc. etc. I think Ted would have still did what he did. He was a narcissist at heart. He felt his view on it was somehow that much more special than the same view we arrived at in 1998 in my high school class in many ways. That said, ill just leave this here and say I think this guy saw further into the future than most people ever have, but I see sentiments like this all over HN these days: 50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values. 51. The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual's loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.
- tpeo 9y ago
  I think that Kaczynski's concerns over technology are different from those raised by your teacher. The issue isn't so much that technology can be put to bad uses, but that it changes how people engage with the world. Analogical example: people might lie over the internet, but whether the internet has made relationships shallower is a different issue.
Iv 9y ago
> You cannot invent drones and tell people it should only be used for good things, not bad things. Sure you can. This is the purpose of laws and law enforcement. Try to fly a drone with a knife to stab people and people will destroy it and arrest you. Internationally we have a lack of laws and a lack of enforcement, therefore we had only limited success at preventing nuclear proliferation or chemical/bio weapons uses but the will is there and successes do exist. Both Antarctica and outer space are military-weapons-free (they do have a valid excuse for that handgun on the ISS)
- scarmig 9y ago
  > Try to fly a drone with a knife to stab people and people will destroy it and arrest you Unless it's the people doing the destroying and arresting who are flying the knife drone. In that case, they'll be celebrated as patriotic heroes and you as a terrorist deserving of death.
- gizmo686 9y ago
  The ISS never had a gun; it stayed in the Soyuz. Supposedly, the gun has not been included in recent missions. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/how-i-stop-cosmonauts-carrying-guns https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/h...
  - Iv 9y ago
    For the intent of drama, it can be considered accessible from the ISS :-) Thanks for the link, that's good to know, no more weapons in space!
- pizza 9y ago
  Laws are like coupons: you can redeem them, but no coupon redeems itself without a redeemer.
- rjsw 9y ago
  There was a gun on the Almaz [0] space station. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz
asveikau 9y ago
> Take any technology, and you'll see it has been used for doing "good" things as well as "evil" things, Isn't this true of every human endeavor? It's not really that remarkable that any given action has positive outcomes X, negative outcomes Y -- this in itself is not a reason to do something nor a deterrent. Seems like you can argue for or against anything on this basis. Hard to see it as anything other than a bunch of tautological nonsense over which real people died.
- pizza 9y ago
  Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment (written in 1947 - when Nazism, Stalinism, Fat Boy & Little Man, and the advent of popular culture were still in short-term memory) devotes a good amount of analysis to how - in spite of society's tendency to espouse 'progress eliminates regression' - society is not monotonically increasing. > "The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape.”
  - asveikau 9y ago
    As I re-read the article and comments, I have an overwhelming feeling of "so what? what's the alternative?" People and societies are imperfect, film at 11, no sense isolating yourself or mailing bombs about it. In other news we try our best.
  - matthewmacleod 9y ago
    I think it would be hard to find an argument anywhere that social or cultural progress was monotonic. It almost feels like sawtooth progression is a natural law of some kind…
  - dgut 9y ago
    I've read some Adorno and his work appears to me as meaningless chewing around. After all, he was inspired by Marx and Hegel. E.g: > What philosophy once called life, has turned into the sphere of the private and then merely of consumption, which is dragged along as an addendum of the material production-process, without autonomy and without its own substance. To quote Hume: > If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
jamesrcole 9y ago
It runs the other way, too. Technology that is seen as for "bad" purposes can be used for "good". Like if some IT technology was developed for a perceived bad, like military uses or for pure profit, it may also be used for perceived good. Or more subtly, technology developed for perceived "useless" ends can be used for good. Eg tech advances made for gaming that help push forwards the state of the art.
qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago
You can use a T Bone from a steak and use it as a shiv. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9FDbgCzkVFE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9FDbgCzkVFE
plorg 9y ago
My undergraduate engineering education was at a fairly religious school, and the last semester of the program involved a course called "technology and society". The material was largely from the typical secular sources, including Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. The particular perspective shared by the engineering department, and which I find helpful in thinking about this, comes from the Dutch religious philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd. He broke down human experience and society into a hierarchy of maybe 15 so-called "spheres", each less abstract than the one nested below, and each influencing the one above. In this conceptualization the physical realities of the universe affect, for example, what we can invent. But we make choices in making inventions, and those choices affect how our inventions are used, and those uses affect society and culture. This thought structure doesn't perfectly capture the interactions of law and society on how objects are used, but it does seem good job of explaining the role of a technologist in shaping society. Sure, we can't prevent people from using our inventions for ill. But we can build them in ways that promote positive uses.
wu-ikkyu 9y ago
>> The "Bad" Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the "Good" Parts. This is the concept of Yin and Yang. Interestingly enough, this concept is what inspired Leibniz to invent binary arithmetic, which so much of the world's technology runs on.
alexanderstears 9y ago
> The "Bad" Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the "Good" Parts. However, there might be some value to price discrimination. Consumer tech reaches new heights of capabilities and new lows of cost. That's great of ISIS but bad for States that fight ISIS. It seems like we either have to make consumer tech less accessible or military technology better, but we already have fearsome military technology but we've promised not to use it (bio-, nuclear, and chemical weapons). Asymmetric warfare, huh?
ethn 9y ago
Kaczynski specifically writes about exploring written and communicative mediums in his works, including the Internet. He concludes that approach is fruitless, below is the quote. Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.

elefanten 9y ago

How is this prophetic rather than a long-tread subject? Super obvious example are the well-publicized doubts of many scientists involved in inventing nuclear weapons.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

bitexploder 9y ago

I grew up in a fairly out of the way area in a red state, but we had this cool elective in high school called simply enough "Technology". We had AutoCAD, computers, little bridge building things, etc. One of the few lessons that really stuck with me was when the teacher was discussing technology one day and one of the students grappled with this very philosophical point. Basically the posed it as something like "we should just ban technology X because people do bad things with it". This was 1998 (dating myself) so it isn't like computers were the force they are now in everyone's mind. What unfolded is this basic discussion: people are the ones doing the bad things. Technology is just a force or thought multiplier. He explained it so well. It sort of clicked into my brain then and that discussion still sits pretty firm in my mind. I don't think all technology can find inherently bad uses, but most of it can. Computers are at the heart of every military technology now other than explosives. Physics are at the heart of nuclear weapons. etc. etc. I think Ted would have still did what he did. He was a narcissist at heart. He felt his view on it was somehow that much more special than the same view we arrived at in 1998 in my high school class in many ways. That said, ill just leave this here and say I think this guy saw further into the future than most people ever have, but I see sentiments like this all over HN these days: 50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values. 51. The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual's loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.

tpeo 9y ago
I think that Kaczynski's concerns over technology are different from those raised by your teacher. The issue isn't so much that technology can be put to bad uses, but that it changes how people engage with the world. Analogical example: people might lie over the internet, but whether the internet has made relationships shallower is a different issue.

Iv 9y ago

> You cannot invent drones and tell people it should only be used for good things, not bad things. Sure you can. This is the purpose of laws and law enforcement. Try to fly a drone with a knife to stab people and people will destroy it and arrest you. Internationally we have a lack of laws and a lack of enforcement, therefore we had only limited success at preventing nuclear proliferation or chemical/bio weapons uses but the will is there and successes do exist. Both Antarctica and outer space are military-weapons-free (they do have a valid excuse for that handgun on the ISS)

scarmig 9y ago
> Try to fly a drone with a knife to stab people and people will destroy it and arrest you Unless it's the people doing the destroying and arresting who are flying the knife drone. In that case, they'll be celebrated as patriotic heroes and you as a terrorist deserving of death.
gizmo686 9y ago
The ISS never had a gun; it stayed in the Soyuz. Supposedly, the gun has not been included in recent missions. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/how-i-stop-cosmonauts-carrying-guns https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/h...
- Iv 9y ago
  For the intent of drama, it can be considered accessible from the ISS :-) Thanks for the link, that's good to know, no more weapons in space!
pizza 9y ago
Laws are like coupons: you can redeem them, but no coupon redeems itself without a redeemer.
rjsw 9y ago
There was a gun on the Almaz [0] space station. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz

asveikau 9y ago

> Take any technology, and you'll see it has been used for doing "good" things as well as "evil" things, Isn't this true of every human endeavor? It's not really that remarkable that any given action has positive outcomes X, negative outcomes Y -- this in itself is not a reason to do something nor a deterrent. Seems like you can argue for or against anything on this basis. Hard to see it as anything other than a bunch of tautological nonsense over which real people died.

pizza 9y ago
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment (written in 1947 - when Nazism, Stalinism, Fat Boy & Little Man, and the advent of popular culture were still in short-term memory) devotes a good amount of analysis to how - in spite of society's tendency to espouse 'progress eliminates regression' - society is not monotonically increasing. > "The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape.”
- asveikau 9y ago
  As I re-read the article and comments, I have an overwhelming feeling of "so what? what's the alternative?" People and societies are imperfect, film at 11, no sense isolating yourself or mailing bombs about it. In other news we try our best.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  I think it would be hard to find an argument anywhere that social or cultural progress was monotonic. It almost feels like sawtooth progression is a natural law of some kind…
- dgut 9y ago
  I've read some Adorno and his work appears to me as meaningless chewing around. After all, he was inspired by Marx and Hegel. E.g: > What philosophy once called life, has turned into the sphere of the private and then merely of consumption, which is dragged along as an addendum of the material production-process, without autonomy and without its own substance. To quote Hume: > If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

jamesrcole 9y ago

It runs the other way, too. Technology that is seen as for "bad" purposes can be used for "good". Like if some IT technology was developed for a perceived bad, like military uses or for pure profit, it may also be used for perceived good. Or more subtly, technology developed for perceived "useless" ends can be used for good. Eg tech advances made for gaming that help push forwards the state of the art.

qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago

You can use a T Bone from a steak and use it as a shiv. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9FDbgCzkVFE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9FDbgCzkVFE

plorg 9y ago

My undergraduate engineering education was at a fairly religious school, and the last semester of the program involved a course called "technology and society". The material was largely from the typical secular sources, including Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. The particular perspective shared by the engineering department, and which I find helpful in thinking about this, comes from the Dutch religious philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd. He broke down human experience and society into a hierarchy of maybe 15 so-called "spheres", each less abstract than the one nested below, and each influencing the one above. In this conceptualization the physical realities of the universe affect, for example, what we can invent. But we make choices in making inventions, and those choices affect how our inventions are used, and those uses affect society and culture. This thought structure doesn't perfectly capture the interactions of law and society on how objects are used, but it does seem good job of explaining the role of a technologist in shaping society. Sure, we can't prevent people from using our inventions for ill. But we can build them in ways that promote positive uses.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago

>> The "Bad" Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the "Good" Parts. This is the concept of Yin and Yang. Interestingly enough, this concept is what inspired Leibniz to invent binary arithmetic, which so much of the world's technology runs on.

alexanderstears 9y ago

> The "Bad" Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the "Good" Parts. However, there might be some value to price discrimination. Consumer tech reaches new heights of capabilities and new lows of cost. That's great of ISIS but bad for States that fight ISIS. It seems like we either have to make consumer tech less accessible or military technology better, but we already have fearsome military technology but we've promised not to use it (bio-, nuclear, and chemical weapons). Asymmetric warfare, huh?

ethn 9y ago

Kaczynski specifically writes about exploring written and communicative mediums in his works, including the Internet. He concludes that approach is fruitless, below is the quote. Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.