> We need to remember that scientific research and technological innovations are not disembodied and “neutral”, but subject to cultural influences. As fully hum

> We need to remember that scientific research and technological innovations are not disembodied and “neutral”, but subject to cultural influences. As fully human activities, the directions they take reflect choices conditioned by personal, social and cultural values in any given age. The same must be said of the results they produce: precisely as the fruit of specifically human ways of approaching the world around us, the latter always have an ethical dimension, closely linked to decisions made by those who design their experimentation and direct their production towards particular objectives. I wish every AI hype guy yelling "luddite" at the top of their lungs whenever they encounter resistance could simply understand this utterly true point. People have become so confused by what is essentially just accumulated marketing, they don't even have a consistent or rational idea of what something like progress actually is, or perhaps at least, what it could be. SV ideology has created a culture existentially committed to what amounts to an empty signifier: "progress" becomes simply whatever the economic winners happened to do, something defined after the fact. Everyone wants to believe history is simply climbing this one big mountain, and we simply need to keep up and go forward. But perhaps we are just in the ocean, holding on to whatever planks and buoys we can, hoping we can weather the storms we might see on the horizon.