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I was reflecting on this a week ago when discussing how ubiquitous plastic is now. There are rightfully many health and environmental concerns about plastic, bu

I was reflecting on this a week ago when discussing how ubiquitous plastic is now. There are rightfully many health and environmental concerns about plastic, but it's nice to remember many of the positive impacts it has had. If celluloid had not been invented when it was, humans would have absolutely hunted elephants to extinction for something as trivial as pool balls. I like the promotional quote at the end. It ties in petroleum too. Again, our dependence on petroleum is coming back to haunt us, but at the time, it averted extinction for whales. Mass adoption of technologies always comes with tradeoffs.

dylan604 1y ago
at this point though, we have seen enough of these tradeoffs that as a society we should be able to start seeing the downsides in advance before the new becomes ubiquitous. then again, it didn't stop us from glomming onto GPTs after seeing what we did with socials.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- conductr 1y ago
  > then again, it didn't stop us from glomming onto GPTs after seeing what we did with socials. I usually phrase similar in context of energy usage and how any improvement we can make in our personal lives (renewables, EV>ICE, efficient appliances, etc) is basically dwarfed by crypto and now AI. Seems we will continue inventing & promoting rather unnecessary technology that do exactly the opposite of what We, as a species, need to do from an energy use perspective
- MichaelZuo 1y ago
  It doesn’t matter if there are millions downsides, if there are also millions of upsides, then it clearly could still be net positive. Just saving elephants from extinction alone is probably worth an enormous amount.