> Recent years have shown me how difficult it is to make any meaningful public decision. Every debate is endlessly contentious, every subject has meaningful nua

> Recent years have shown me how difficult it is to make any meaningful public decision. Every debate is endlessly contentious, every subject has meaningful nuance, and every decision has exceedingly hard-to-predict second-order-effects. The world is much more complex than it was even twenty years ago, and the effects are paralyzing. This is clearly felt among policymakers, but I feel it even as a technologist: I understand that virtually all tools can be used – and more often than not, will be used – for both good and evil, and how hard the results are to predict over years in our dynamic world. I learned that technology can rarely solve fundamental social problems, and I’ve seen the public perception rollercoaster of “this technology/person/policy is good” to “this is evil” more times than I can count. This is a really important point that every technologist should be thinking about in their work. It's what caused me to quit tech. See also Neil Postman's "Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change": https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs492/papers/neil-postman--five-things.html https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs492/papers/neil-postman--... > Ask anyone who knows something about computers to talk about them, and you will find that they will, unabashedly and relentlessly, extol the wonders of computers. You will also find that in most cases they will completely neglect to mention any of the liabilities of computers. This is a dangerous imbalance, since the greater the wonders of a technology, the greater will be its negative consequences.