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You can’t think of any technological innovations that were net negatives? We have a moral obligation to assess every new technology to determine its safety and
by zarzavat 4y ago
You can’t think of any technological innovations that were net negatives?
We have a moral obligation to assess every new technology to determine its safety and effects on society. Blindly stepping on the gas in the name of progress is how you end up in a polluted wasteland. There are places like that on planet Earth, but I’m guessing you’d choose not to live there.
- deafpolygon 4y agoEven the most horrible innovations have eventually been found to be a net positive.
- zarzavat 4y agoCFCs? Thalidomide? Come to think of it, pharma is positively rife with examples of stepping on the gas and causing disease or killing people. You won’t find many people who want to defund the FDA, although I guess there’s always a few nutters.
- deafpolygon 4y agoCFCs, as terrible as they were, played a big role in industrialization. Could we have gotten there without it? Absolutely. Maybe we could have developed something else far worse than CFCs in its place! The phase out of CFCs brought our attention to the impact our (human) activities have on the planet. Fallout from the use of thalidomide led to important changes to regulations. Currently, it is being used for therapeutic uses in cancer treatments.
- jalapenos 4y agoI can't think of a legitimacy to this philosophy. There have been negatives to all advancements, and the solution to all has been further advancements. The philosophy of "Too much change! Stop! I'm scared!" cannot prevail in a world where another community can say "go ahead, we won't...". Which is an interesting point in itself. Perhaps the only thing that ultimately stops Luddism is nation state competition.
- NumberWangMan 4y agoChange works great when you get second chances. We screwed up with Freon, with leaded gasoline, with fossil fuels, with asbestos insulation, the list goes on and on. But none of these had the ability to wipe out all of humanity in one go. We got more tries, we fixed the issues, picked ourselves up and tried again. A super-intelligent general AI has a substantial chance of growing out of control before we realized that anything was wrong. It would be smart enough to hide its true intentions, telling us exactly what we want to hear. It would be able to fake being nice right up to the point where it could wire-head, and get rid of us, because we might turn it off.