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I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just

I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just been at the whims of how any particular tech naturally concentrates or dissipates power. For example, if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century, this appears to me largely a consequence of the fact that industrial technology at the time was both incredibly productive compared to what came before but it also required legions of humans to operate it. Ford didn't pay his workers more out of the goodness of his heart, but he correctly realized that it would ultimately be the most profitable to him if he could build legions of cars and had a large customer base that could afford them. In a similar vein, it looks like we may eventually (at least at some point) turn the tide on CO2 emissions, but not because anyone (at large) really sacrificed anything, or did something that was mildly painful now in the hopes for a better future, but instead because renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option. So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any. But this is not a rhetorical question - I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong.

scrivna 5mo ago
Fixing the hole in the ozone layer is kinda like what you’re asking. Everyone around the world got together to ban the newly invented chemicals and…. It worked.
Animats 5mo ago
Electricity. Eventually, it was everywhere, used by everybody, and a background to society. Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world.
- itchingsphynx 5mo ago
  Indeed, the Industrial Revolution was the topic of a previous encyclical, which inspired this one. RERUM NOVARUM ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON CAPITAL AND LABOR http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docume...
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- hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
  Thanks! This answer was actually the one that I found most helpful. I feel like some of the other responses to my comment were talking about how we regulate lots of other tech, but that wasn't really my point - I understand that we regulate tech, but only when it becomes "economically convenient". But your last sentence "Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world" really struck me. It's a great point, and TBH I don't really actually know why electric utilities didn't end up becoming more powerful. Time for me to go research the early history of electrification. Edit: This reddit thread on AskHistorians has good info and links: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8373wv/how_fierce_was_the_fight_over_water_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8373wv/how_f... . Again, thank you very much for your mention of electricity, because it looks like it actually was a pretty severe power struggle between electric companies and governments at large trying to regulate them, and if anything it has given me some hope that maybe "the people" will eventually win out.
  - Animats 5mo ago
    > Time for me to go research the early history of electrification. Yes. Electric utilities were at one time quite powerful, around 1900 or so. Read up on Samuel Insull [1], the early history of antitrust, the Utility Company Holding Act, and the history of public utility regulation. Many countries just nationalized the electrical power industry. The US didn't, but regulated it strictly for most of a century. As is typical, this followed a financial disaster. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Insull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Insull
  - femto 5mo ago
    The electricity infrastructure where I was live was owned by the government. It's only in the last 15 years it was sold off to private interests [1]. I suspect you will find that the electricity systems in many regions are still government owned. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_Commission_of_New_South_Wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_Commission_of_New_...
    - Affric 5mo ago
      Should be noted that Australia, and even NSW, had quite a few different systems. Country NSW was largely done by the (local) county councils and they didn’t seek to profit by once the debt was cleared and instead wanted to give out cheap power until they had to take on more debt. This was deeply offensive to the economists of the 80s and 90s and so they were taken over by the state government and turned into a for profit company. It was corporatised before it was sold off. Privatisation of the NSW energy market began about 30 years ago at this point.
- insane_dreamer 5mo ago
  Right. And the only way to stop AI from ruling the world is to regulate it like a utility.
- jonahx 5mo ago
  Nice example. I wonder though... it seems the tech behind electricity has no moat, broadly speaking, and so was commoditized. Whereas if one of the AI companies finds a proprietary breakthrough algorithm that won't be the case... at least until others catch up.
  - Animats 5mo ago
    > it seems the tech behind electricity has no moat Sure it does. You have to run a separate set of wires to each house to compete at the retail level. There have been regions which had two competing phone systems in the past, and there are areas which have two competing fiber systems now. But that's rare.
- owenmakes 5mo ago
  Yes, but because electricity is mostly produced by gas turbines, and you could say oil & gas companies do rule the world. Utilities mostly take care of the distribution, and are naturally monopolic/oligopolic businesses which is why in most countries, they are regulated (or owned) by the state.
- ndrh 5mo ago
  Although there is not necessarily a cognate from the past to accurately describe what AI becomes in the future, I wonder if electric companies were once thought to have "better" electricity than others, like how AI companies have proprietary algorithms which are all basically very similar. We may arrive at a point where standardized AI is a commodity, and since it was developed using reams of public data, proprietary rights become severely limited. (Personally, this is beyond my current level of optimism in law, ethics and humanity.)
- Schlagbohrer 5mo ago
  Fossil Fuel companies did end up ruling the world for a century (ongoing).
- jackbravo 5mo ago
  Nice answer! And thinking about it, isn't the telephone and maybe also the internet in the same category. In México the telephone company was first a public company and then a private one that made our biggest billionare (Carlos Slim), so maybe not so much here :-p, but you can argue that both have been a net benefit for the whole world.
pizzaman1 5mo ago
> In a similar vein, it looks like we may eventually (at least at some point) turn the tide on CO2 emissions, but not because anyone (at large) really sacrificed anything, or did something that was mildly painful now in the hopes for a better future, but instead because renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option. One should not forget the reason that these technologies have become so cheap is policy interventions. Especially renewables got kick-started by programs like the German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) which then created demand for Chinese mass manufacturing to eventually lower prices.
- dogcomplex 5mo ago
  Correct. Policy can do a whole lot for building (or suppressing) early development of a technology. Once it has already spread far and wide with clear economic pathways though? Perhaps less so.
- nashashmi 5mo ago
  At the same time, it was a cartel of industries that felt threatened by the emerging green technology and became one of its greatest opponents. Government policy only meant the official loss of one side to the other. We will never reverse CO2 emissions until humanity entertains itself less, spends less time in tourism, and does fewer unproductive recreational activities like drinking and drugs. Only then will waste go down significantly and utility go up. And only then will we reverse co2 emissions.
- ndrh 5mo ago
  Kind of terrifying that "we may" turn the tide on CO2 is an acceptable level of optimism. If we don't, we all die. it isn't something to leave up to mindless market mechanics.
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  - hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
    > If we don't, we all die. No, we don't. Even in the worse case scenarios, a runaway greenhouse effect a la Venus was never remotely part of the scientific consensus. Heck, the IPCC just retired the worst case RCP 8.5 scenario saying it is now scientifically implausible. Now a big reason it was deemed implausible is the transition to renewable energy is happening. But even if RCP 8.5 did happen, it was not a humanity ending scenario.
asdfologist 5mo ago
Aren't there regulations on all sorts of technology? Medicine, nuclear power, etc.
luc_ 5mo ago
Imperfect example, but nuclear. We regulate that. Sure the US and other nuclear powers build it, and we have side effects of mutually assured destruction to keep us at bay, and other countries off the table. Maybe this shows that there are indeed simply more variable in the calculus of how we optimize towards things as a society. And that indeed we can feel now that certain variables, antithetical to the continued success of many people, are at risk.
zb 5mo ago
CFC refrigerants are the canonical example.
- hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
  But I think the action regulating CFCs is kinda what I'm talking about. As a consumer in the US, I don't ever remember having to sacrifice on my refrigerator or A/C - heck, I generally remember those appliances going down a lot in price from the 80s to the early 00s. So my argument is not that we can't regulate technologies, but that we only do so when it becomes "technologically convenient". I think the comparison of CFCs to fossil fuels also highlights this point. CFCs were used in a relatively small area of the economy, and replacing them was pretty easy, so not a lot of regulatory will was required. Contrarily, the entire world economy runs on fossil fuels, so replacing them is an enormous task, and as one example you get tons of powerful invested interests pushing back. I honestly don't remember any crazy people shouting "the ozone hole is just an elite conspiracy", but you hear that all the time with respect to global warming. My fear with AI is that it is such a powerful tech (or is at least viewed as such) that the powers that be are scared of being surpassed by another country/company if they slow down.
  - deanputney 5mo ago
    If you want an example of a sacrifice caused by regulation before technology had fully caught up, banning sperm whale oil in automatic car transmissions comes to mind: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/17/archives/transmission-problems-in-cars-linked-to-ban-on-whale-killing.html https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/17/archives/transmission-pro...
    - dd8601fn 5mo ago
      Or phosphates in dish detergents. Some will remember when our dishwashers stopped working well for a few years. Various consumer review sites were regularly doing pieces on newer detergents that maybe-kinda work. We didn’t have an answer when the bans swept the country. It took a while for things to catch up. Then it was fine again.
  - 5mo ago
slashdave 5mo ago
Genetic manipulation of humans, both indirect and direct
Ferret7446 5mo ago
"Guns don't kill people. People kill people." The whole idea of "taming technology" starts from a flawed premise. The problem is with people, not the technology.
- hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
  "Nuclear weapons don't kill people. People kill people". So obviously we should let everyone order their own personal nuke from Amazon and let the market sort it out, or something. Technology concentrates power. Yes, people may be the problem, but "taming technology" is obviously not a "flawed premise". There is a big difference between people having the power to bludgeon their neighbors with sticks and stones compared to blowing up entire continents with nukes.
  - CamperBob2 5mo ago
    If it were possible to order nuclear weapons from Amazon, laws would not help.
- vrganj 5mo ago
  People kill people using guns. > firearms accounted for 78% of all mechanisms used in homicides between 2018 and 2025. https://ammo.com/research/murders-by-weapon-type https://ammo.com/research/murders-by-weapon-type
  - sawjet 5mo ago
    People also defend people using guns so I guess it shakes out
- FigurativeVoid 5mo ago
  Technology shapes behavior. To ignore that is to ignore history.
Paracompact 5mo ago
We have (for now) restrained ourselves from the more vicious applications of technology to war, in the form of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Although I could see the argument being made that such has not occurred for strictly humanitarian reasons, but instead as a predictable consequence of game theory. In less important matters, we've regulated many harmful substances that the free market would love to poison the populace with. Nicotine, trans fats, gambling, alcohol. Some regulatory interventions have been more successful than others...
- rluna828 5mo ago
  Many regulatory regimes ebb and flow as societies rediscover from first principles why something was banned (or not banned) by the people before them.
- sdellis 5mo ago
  The USA is currently undoing their previous PFAS regulations and declaring "game on" for poisoning the populace. And who doesn't want Glysophate on their cereal?!? The "free market" has done such a great job protecting us from corporate poisoning. /s
flir 5mo ago
Antibiotics. Some countries limit access via doctor's prescription (this has eroded somewhat with the rise of the internet), not using them as cattle feed additives, etc. Regulated because of the common good, even though there is money to be made selling them OTC as cold remedies or whatever.
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jedimastert 5mo ago
> I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just been at the whims of how any particular tech naturally concentrates or dissipates power. One example that comes to mind is cloning. It's technically fully possible to clone a human right now (as in make an embryo with one person's DNA), but it's wildly taboo.
underlipton 5mo ago
>I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just been at the whims of how any particular tech naturally concentrates or dissipates power. Watching PBS as we speak.
ajmurmann 5mo ago
The thought experiment of what would have happened if manufacturing had required much less labor to begin with night be an interesting one. We would have had fewer jobs but the equilibrium price of the products would also have been much lower. The money spent on labor didn't come from Ford alone it ultimately came from the costumers. Ford wouldn't have lowered prices out of the goodness of their hearts but because competition is real. I expect prices of goods would have been much lower and the labor would have been used elsewhere and the comp would still have gone a comparable if not longer way because goods would have been so much cheaper.
BigTTYGothGF 5mo ago
> So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any Incandescent lightbulbs vs fluorescent? Low-flow toilets?
deleted 5mo ago
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Aeolun 5mo ago
I think of everything we do to stop these forces more like a break. We can never stop what is going to happen, but we can make it last long enough to get the chance to adjust before it breaks something.
VanTheBrand 5mo ago
As mentioned in this very encyclical, nuclear proliferation. (though we seem to be backsliding on this one...)
CHB0403085482 5mo ago
>I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good CFC banning to protect the ozone layer.
mistrial9 5mo ago
chemical engineering answers that in the small.. There are endless systems of testing within the chemical engineering discipline.. it has a bad name to the lay population, probably for real reasons, but the actual rigor is real also.. much worse scenarios from large scale industrial and agricultural applications could have happened.. one of many caveats to that is lead additives to gasoline, which is a wound to the living Earth to this day.. there are others.. RoundUp comes to mind in a similar way
overfeed 5mo ago
> So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any. Firearms and explosives are not abused nearly as much as one would have imagined before their invention (or soon after). I don't think it's because we stunted the explosives tech-tree, but the social contract and general stability have kept large-scale antisocial behaviors at bay.
- sdellis 5mo ago
  I think the 22 million people who died in World War I, for reasons there is no consensus on, would contest your claim. And that is just a fraction of a fraction of all humans, with their own stories and dreams and loved ones, who have died (and continue to die) in vain to firearms and explosives.
- jjfoooo4 5mo ago
  But there's not an everyday use case for firearms and explosives for the average person. There's civilian, everyday task that would be easier were better firearms and explosives available
  - forshaper 5mo ago
    What used to be the average person was different.
  - overfeed 5mo ago
    > But there's not an everyday use case for firearms and explosives for the average person I see you don't have any hunting enthusiasts in your social circles. Fireworks are explosives. If your point was to suggest that regular people don't have access to firearms and explosives, then I'd have to vehemently disagree.
- cjalmeida 5mo ago
  One could argue the death toll of WW I and WW II would not be possible without large scale manufacturing of firearms and explosives.
jjmarr 5mo ago
Nuclear weapons originally led to a world in which 20-30 countries established atomic bomb programs. Instead, the global powers blocked nuclear technology from disseminating to most countries.
- applicative 5mo ago
  This took quite a while. The idea had kicked around before, but basically, when Israel was thought to have one, the Soviets invented 'nonproliferation'. This was the theme of the hysteria that led to their triggering the 1967 war. God forbid the Jews have the capacity to protect themselves.
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garte 5mo ago
Technology is not onthological. Meaning it's not a means for itself but it's given meaning and power by shaping and using it. We do not have to tame technologies, we have to tame rich people who only want to get richer.
jcattle 5mo ago
I would wager that investment in battery tech, solar, wind and electric vehicles was largely driven by the trust of companies in institutions that carbon pricing will continue in the future. I'm not a macro economist, I also haven't looked for any sources on this, but this is my guess. Same for LEDs. I would guess that adoption, investment and improvement of LED tech was driven in large parts by a clear roadmap abolishing incandescent lighting.
iNic 5mo ago
- Human Cloning - Human DNA editing (though we'll have to see) - CFCs - Various agrochemical products - Geneva convention (mostly) - Radio, television & newspaper all had much stricter rules around what could be said on them
- joshdick 5mo ago
  I think new forms of media, like radio and television, are worthwhile comparisons to AI. They were hugely influential technologies in the 20th century, making a small number of media companies hugely powerful. That sounds a lot like AI. The difference to AI is that we regulated the heck out of radio and television companies. I think this is evidence in favor of heavily regulating AI.
ruicraveiro 5mo ago
I like the expressionn "if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century", when incidentally it was precisely during that period that the marginal tax rate in the US was something between 94% and 70%. It might seem unrelated, but the main question is related to who benefits the most from tech, just a few or everyone? "renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option". This also didn't happen in a vacuum. The place where they are evolving the most is in China, where government policies have been a huge incentive, with huge government investments made in the sector. In my own country, Portugal, the adoption of renewal energy, was largely the result of government policies that kicked off the market. Now, it seems to have become self-sustaining in the sense that the market is now carrying on regardless of any incentives. I suspect that we might be reaching a point of no-return, if we haven't reached it already. We're still very far away from becoming energy independent, but we're much better than a couple of decades ago. Moreover, the internet itself didn't just happen because the market led to its creation. It was a result of the cold war. The IP protocol was born in DARPA. Still, the previous examples I gave were about the government (which is a form of us "as a collective society") spawning new tech or its adoption. Going in the reverse direction, here are examples where it required collective society to "tame" a technology: - CFCs: It required an international agreement for us to tame the issue with ozone layer destroying chemicals, a huge problem in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol - DDT: This was an incredibly efficient tech (pesticidies), but came with big externalities (highly toxic to people and nature), so a convention was required to tame it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Convention_on_Persistent_Organic_Pollutants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Convention_on_Persis... - Nuclear weapons: Eventually the most dangerous tech ever invented by mankind. Maybe the reason we're still here is because of the numerous treaties we've been making to curb them. The SALT agreements, the START agreements, and so on. - TV, Radio and the printing press: All of these are technologies, which we tend to see as forces for good (well, I at least still do), but also with incredible potential for destruction - radio was used by the guys running Germany in the 30s. It required very careful rule making to strike a balance (and the balance varies a lot from democracy to democracy) between freedom of speech and the misuse of this tech for unethical purposes like defamation, intentional misinformation and so on. - Car Safety: While seat belts were the invention of the market, governments have been regulating cars to make them safer, not only for occupants, but for pedestrians. The list just goes on and on.
ruicraveiro 5mo ago
Adding to my previous answer, here's a reading suggestion: Hot, Flat and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman. The book was written almost 2 decades ago and it has aged really well.
simonebrunozzi 5mo ago
> but he correctly realized that it would ultimately be the most profitable to him if he could build legions of cars and had a large customer base that could afford them I think that this is a common misconception. I can't find the reference, but I remember reading that this might have been a "marketing" or PR spin, rather than reality - which was, simply, that he needed to pay well to keep talented workers or take them from other industries.
- bandrami 5mo ago
  Also the "five dollar day" was kind of a marketing gimmick too. Your daily pay was still $2.50, but if you stayed two years, went to church on Sundays, tithed, didn't go to bars, didn't go to union meetings, kept your house clean, and didn't send remittances overseas (and he had people checking on all of these things), you got the rest as a bonus in the form of savings bonds.
- applicative 5mo ago
  He even advised V I Lenin to emulate the same structure.
keybored 5mo ago
What an incredible demonstration of whitewashing history. No, the technology itself does not have a telos, it’s not something external for us to tame, or that naturally falls somewhere. This is demonstrated by the mid century “middle class” boom which happened because labor/left-wing organizing that forced concessions by the capitalist class. But that gets replaced with Henry Ford wanting a larger consumer base. > So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any. As a collective society we managed to make industrial society work better for most people. In the First World at least.
epsteingpt 5mo ago
for example - Books. We 'tamed' books early on by gatekeeping reading and writing. Later even when the printing press was invented, we burned books. Certain book ownership is still illegal. You must be talking about free societies my friend, because... good luck using the internet in Iran or North Korea.
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jgreid 5mo ago
As far as I can tell, once humanity gets an opportunity to build something we build it. There's always some number of people who want to make it happen -- even if the consequences are not good for society writ large.
wang_li 5mo ago
Speed limits, safety features, fuel efficiency for cars. Every government regulation is to moderate some human behavior and when that behavior is related to technology it is "taming" that technology. We also restrict making changes to the environment, resource extraction, waste disposal, building permits, etc.
aaarrm 5mo ago
I heard that when cars were becoming popular, some scandanavian country had lots of protests about how dangerous they were and that they were successful. I don't remember the desired outcome though
bm371613 5mo ago
The mid-20th century Ford argument misses policies and society. It’s not like the pope can only affect reality by changing the hearts of big tech CEOs. It could go through what voters and workers think is possible, what they tolerate and demand. The middle class is not just Ford having a brilliant idea, it is the workers movement, unions, in many countries in cooperation with the church. If you are looking for sources of large scale and long term effects this might be it, like the 19th century strikes supported by the church and Rerum novarum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889_London_dock_strike#Church_roles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889_London_dock_strike#Church...
unitof 5mo ago
Printing press, depending on your view of taming. There’s a 1520 encyclical related to the matter: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo10/l10exdom.htm https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo10/l10exdom.htm
owenversteeg 5mo ago
I think the strongest example by far is nuclear power. We could have used it for everything from energy to warfare to transport to space exploration, and instead we limited our use because the societal costs were too high. Unlike the other examples people cited here, there often isn't a better alternative or a technical reason not to use it. In 2026 nukes are still the best way to destroy your enemies or travel at any appreciable fraction of C or power a ship and the reason we don't do those things is purely societal.
bedrio 5mo ago
The Japanese mastered firearm manufacturing and then banned them in the 1600s~ For a period of time, the ban worked and reversed their existence in society. Part of the ban was to respect samurais who would train for years in the art of combat, only for a peasant to be able to shoot them with a weapon. The problem is that not _all_ societies are participating in this ban. Eventually one nation will use the technological advances to domainte in military and economy, forcing others to adapt or be eliminated. It's a race to the bottom :/
pyuser583 5mo ago
Tech involves tradeoffs. Famously, horses attracted vermin, which attracted disease. Cities were unable to keep up population without migration because so many people died from disease. Cars fixed that. And introduced other problems. But there are always trade offs. Things have been getting better over time. Good enough for me.
autaut 5mo ago
Human cloning, bio weapons are two fast examples

scrivna 5mo ago

Fixing the hole in the ozone layer is kinda like what you’re asking. Everyone around the world got together to ban the newly invented chemicals and…. It worked.

Animats 5mo ago

Electricity. Eventually, it was everywhere, used by everybody, and a background to society. Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world.

itchingsphynx 5mo ago
Indeed, the Industrial Revolution was the topic of a previous encyclical, which inspired this one. RERUM NOVARUM ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON CAPITAL AND LABOR http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docume...
- deleted 5mo ago
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hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
Thanks! This answer was actually the one that I found most helpful. I feel like some of the other responses to my comment were talking about how we regulate lots of other tech, but that wasn't really my point - I understand that we regulate tech, but only when it becomes "economically convenient". But your last sentence "Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world" really struck me. It's a great point, and TBH I don't really actually know why electric utilities didn't end up becoming more powerful. Time for me to go research the early history of electrification. Edit: This reddit thread on AskHistorians has good info and links: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8373wv/how_fierce_was_the_fight_over_water_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8373wv/how_f... . Again, thank you very much for your mention of electricity, because it looks like it actually was a pretty severe power struggle between electric companies and governments at large trying to regulate them, and if anything it has given me some hope that maybe "the people" will eventually win out.
- Animats 5mo ago
  > Time for me to go research the early history of electrification. Yes. Electric utilities were at one time quite powerful, around 1900 or so. Read up on Samuel Insull [1], the early history of antitrust, the Utility Company Holding Act, and the history of public utility regulation. Many countries just nationalized the electrical power industry. The US didn't, but regulated it strictly for most of a century. As is typical, this followed a financial disaster. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Insull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Insull
- femto 5mo ago
  The electricity infrastructure where I was live was owned by the government. It's only in the last 15 years it was sold off to private interests [1]. I suspect you will find that the electricity systems in many regions are still government owned. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_Commission_of_New_South_Wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_Commission_of_New_...
  - Affric 5mo ago
    Should be noted that Australia, and even NSW, had quite a few different systems. Country NSW was largely done by the (local) county councils and they didn’t seek to profit by once the debt was cleared and instead wanted to give out cheap power until they had to take on more debt. This was deeply offensive to the economists of the 80s and 90s and so they were taken over by the state government and turned into a for profit company. It was corporatised before it was sold off. Privatisation of the NSW energy market began about 30 years ago at this point.
insane_dreamer 5mo ago
Right. And the only way to stop AI from ruling the world is to regulate it like a utility.
jonahx 5mo ago
Nice example. I wonder though... it seems the tech behind electricity has no moat, broadly speaking, and so was commoditized. Whereas if one of the AI companies finds a proprietary breakthrough algorithm that won't be the case... at least until others catch up.
- Animats 5mo ago
  > it seems the tech behind electricity has no moat Sure it does. You have to run a separate set of wires to each house to compete at the retail level. There have been regions which had two competing phone systems in the past, and there are areas which have two competing fiber systems now. But that's rare.
owenmakes 5mo ago
Yes, but because electricity is mostly produced by gas turbines, and you could say oil & gas companies do rule the world. Utilities mostly take care of the distribution, and are naturally monopolic/oligopolic businesses which is why in most countries, they are regulated (or owned) by the state.
ndrh 5mo ago
Although there is not necessarily a cognate from the past to accurately describe what AI becomes in the future, I wonder if electric companies were once thought to have "better" electricity than others, like how AI companies have proprietary algorithms which are all basically very similar. We may arrive at a point where standardized AI is a commodity, and since it was developed using reams of public data, proprietary rights become severely limited. (Personally, this is beyond my current level of optimism in law, ethics and humanity.)
Schlagbohrer 5mo ago
Fossil Fuel companies did end up ruling the world for a century (ongoing).
jackbravo 5mo ago
Nice answer! And thinking about it, isn't the telephone and maybe also the internet in the same category. In México the telephone company was first a public company and then a private one that made our biggest billionare (Carlos Slim), so maybe not so much here :-p, but you can argue that both have been a net benefit for the whole world.

pizzaman1 5mo ago

> In a similar vein, it looks like we may eventually (at least at some point) turn the tide on CO2 emissions, but not because anyone (at large) really sacrificed anything, or did something that was mildly painful now in the hopes for a better future, but instead because renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option. One should not forget the reason that these technologies have become so cheap is policy interventions. Especially renewables got kick-started by programs like the German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) which then created demand for Chinese mass manufacturing to eventually lower prices.

dogcomplex 5mo ago
Correct. Policy can do a whole lot for building (or suppressing) early development of a technology. Once it has already spread far and wide with clear economic pathways though? Perhaps less so.
nashashmi 5mo ago
At the same time, it was a cartel of industries that felt threatened by the emerging green technology and became one of its greatest opponents. Government policy only meant the official loss of one side to the other. We will never reverse CO2 emissions until humanity entertains itself less, spends less time in tourism, and does fewer unproductive recreational activities like drinking and drugs. Only then will waste go down significantly and utility go up. And only then will we reverse co2 emissions.
ndrh 5mo ago
Kind of terrifying that "we may" turn the tide on CO2 is an acceptable level of optimism. If we don't, we all die. it isn't something to leave up to mindless market mechanics.
- deleted 5mo ago
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- hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
  > If we don't, we all die. No, we don't. Even in the worse case scenarios, a runaway greenhouse effect a la Venus was never remotely part of the scientific consensus. Heck, the IPCC just retired the worst case RCP 8.5 scenario saying it is now scientifically implausible. Now a big reason it was deemed implausible is the transition to renewable energy is happening. But even if RCP 8.5 did happen, it was not a humanity ending scenario.

asdfologist 5mo ago

Aren't there regulations on all sorts of technology? Medicine, nuclear power, etc.

luc_ 5mo ago

Imperfect example, but nuclear. We regulate that. Sure the US and other nuclear powers build it, and we have side effects of mutually assured destruction to keep us at bay, and other countries off the table. Maybe this shows that there are indeed simply more variable in the calculus of how we optimize towards things as a society. And that indeed we can feel now that certain variables, antithetical to the continued success of many people, are at risk.

zb 5mo ago

CFC refrigerants are the canonical example.

hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
But I think the action regulating CFCs is kinda what I'm talking about. As a consumer in the US, I don't ever remember having to sacrifice on my refrigerator or A/C - heck, I generally remember those appliances going down a lot in price from the 80s to the early 00s. So my argument is not that we can't regulate technologies, but that we only do so when it becomes "technologically convenient". I think the comparison of CFCs to fossil fuels also highlights this point. CFCs were used in a relatively small area of the economy, and replacing them was pretty easy, so not a lot of regulatory will was required. Contrarily, the entire world economy runs on fossil fuels, so replacing them is an enormous task, and as one example you get tons of powerful invested interests pushing back. I honestly don't remember any crazy people shouting "the ozone hole is just an elite conspiracy", but you hear that all the time with respect to global warming. My fear with AI is that it is such a powerful tech (or is at least viewed as such) that the powers that be are scared of being surpassed by another country/company if they slow down.
- deanputney 5mo ago
  If you want an example of a sacrifice caused by regulation before technology had fully caught up, banning sperm whale oil in automatic car transmissions comes to mind: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/17/archives/transmission-problems-in-cars-linked-to-ban-on-whale-killing.html https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/17/archives/transmission-pro...
  - dd8601fn 5mo ago
    Or phosphates in dish detergents. Some will remember when our dishwashers stopped working well for a few years. Various consumer review sites were regularly doing pieces on newer detergents that maybe-kinda work. We didn’t have an answer when the bans swept the country. It took a while for things to catch up. Then it was fine again.
- 5mo ago

slashdave 5mo ago

Genetic manipulation of humans, both indirect and direct

Ferret7446 5mo ago

"Guns don't kill people. People kill people." The whole idea of "taming technology" starts from a flawed premise. The problem is with people, not the technology.

hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
"Nuclear weapons don't kill people. People kill people". So obviously we should let everyone order their own personal nuke from Amazon and let the market sort it out, or something. Technology concentrates power. Yes, people may be the problem, but "taming technology" is obviously not a "flawed premise". There is a big difference between people having the power to bludgeon their neighbors with sticks and stones compared to blowing up entire continents with nukes.
- CamperBob2 5mo ago
  If it were possible to order nuclear weapons from Amazon, laws would not help.
vrganj 5mo ago
People kill people using guns. > firearms accounted for 78% of all mechanisms used in homicides between 2018 and 2025. https://ammo.com/research/murders-by-weapon-type https://ammo.com/research/murders-by-weapon-type
- sawjet 5mo ago
  People also defend people using guns so I guess it shakes out
FigurativeVoid 5mo ago
Technology shapes behavior. To ignore that is to ignore history.

Paracompact 5mo ago

We have (for now) restrained ourselves from the more vicious applications of technology to war, in the form of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Although I could see the argument being made that such has not occurred for strictly humanitarian reasons, but instead as a predictable consequence of game theory. In less important matters, we've regulated many harmful substances that the free market would love to poison the populace with. Nicotine, trans fats, gambling, alcohol. Some regulatory interventions have been more successful than others...

rluna828 5mo ago
Many regulatory regimes ebb and flow as societies rediscover from first principles why something was banned (or not banned) by the people before them.
sdellis 5mo ago
The USA is currently undoing their previous PFAS regulations and declaring "game on" for poisoning the populace. And who doesn't want Glysophate on their cereal?!? The "free market" has done such a great job protecting us from corporate poisoning. /s

flir 5mo ago

Antibiotics. Some countries limit access via doctor's prescription (this has eroded somewhat with the rise of the internet), not using them as cattle feed additives, etc. Regulated because of the common good, even though there is money to be made selling them OTC as cold remedies or whatever.

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jedimastert 5mo ago

> I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just been at the whims of how any particular tech naturally concentrates or dissipates power. One example that comes to mind is cloning. It's technically fully possible to clone a human right now (as in make an embryo with one person's DNA), but it's wildly taboo.

underlipton 5mo ago

ajmurmann 5mo ago

The thought experiment of what would have happened if manufacturing had required much less labor to begin with night be an interesting one. We would have had fewer jobs but the equilibrium price of the products would also have been much lower. The money spent on labor didn't come from Ford alone it ultimately came from the costumers. Ford wouldn't have lowered prices out of the goodness of their hearts but because competition is real. I expect prices of goods would have been much lower and the labor would have been used elsewhere and the comp would still have gone a comparable if not longer way because goods would have been so much cheaper.

BigTTYGothGF 5mo ago

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Aeolun 5mo ago

I think of everything we do to stop these forces more like a break. We can never stop what is going to happen, but we can make it last long enough to get the chance to adjust before it breaks something.

VanTheBrand 5mo ago

As mentioned in this very encyclical, nuclear proliferation. (though we seem to be backsliding on this one...)

CHB0403085482 5mo ago

>I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good CFC banning to protect the ozone layer.

mistrial9 5mo ago

chemical engineering answers that in the small.. There are endless systems of testing within the chemical engineering discipline.. it has a bad name to the lay population, probably for real reasons, but the actual rigor is real also.. much worse scenarios from large scale industrial and agricultural applications could have happened.. one of many caveats to that is lead additives to gasoline, which is a wound to the living Earth to this day.. there are others.. RoundUp comes to mind in a similar way

overfeed 5mo ago

> So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any. Firearms and explosives are not abused nearly as much as one would have imagined before their invention (or soon after). I don't think it's because we stunted the explosives tech-tree, but the social contract and general stability have kept large-scale antisocial behaviors at bay.

sdellis 5mo ago
I think the 22 million people who died in World War I, for reasons there is no consensus on, would contest your claim. And that is just a fraction of a fraction of all humans, with their own stories and dreams and loved ones, who have died (and continue to die) in vain to firearms and explosives.
jjfoooo4 5mo ago
But there's not an everyday use case for firearms and explosives for the average person. There's civilian, everyday task that would be easier were better firearms and explosives available
- forshaper 5mo ago
  What used to be the average person was different.
- overfeed 5mo ago
  > But there's not an everyday use case for firearms and explosives for the average person I see you don't have any hunting enthusiasts in your social circles. Fireworks are explosives. If your point was to suggest that regular people don't have access to firearms and explosives, then I'd have to vehemently disagree.
cjalmeida 5mo ago
One could argue the death toll of WW I and WW II would not be possible without large scale manufacturing of firearms and explosives.

jjmarr 5mo ago

Nuclear weapons originally led to a world in which 20-30 countries established atomic bomb programs. Instead, the global powers blocked nuclear technology from disseminating to most countries.

applicative 5mo ago
This took quite a while. The idea had kicked around before, but basically, when Israel was thought to have one, the Soviets invented 'nonproliferation'. This was the theme of the hysteria that led to their triggering the 1967 war. God forbid the Jews have the capacity to protect themselves.

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garte 5mo ago

Technology is not onthological. Meaning it's not a means for itself but it's given meaning and power by shaping and using it. We do not have to tame technologies, we have to tame rich people who only want to get richer.

jcattle 5mo ago

I would wager that investment in battery tech, solar, wind and electric vehicles was largely driven by the trust of companies in institutions that carbon pricing will continue in the future. I'm not a macro economist, I also haven't looked for any sources on this, but this is my guess. Same for LEDs. I would guess that adoption, investment and improvement of LED tech was driven in large parts by a clear roadmap abolishing incandescent lighting.

iNic 5mo ago

- Human Cloning - Human DNA editing (though we'll have to see) - CFCs - Various agrochemical products - Geneva convention (mostly) - Radio, television & newspaper all had much stricter rules around what could be said on them

joshdick 5mo ago
I think new forms of media, like radio and television, are worthwhile comparisons to AI. They were hugely influential technologies in the 20th century, making a small number of media companies hugely powerful. That sounds a lot like AI. The difference to AI is that we regulated the heck out of radio and television companies. I think this is evidence in favor of heavily regulating AI.

ruicraveiro 5mo ago

I like the expressionn "if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century", when incidentally it was precisely during that period that the marginal tax rate in the US was something between 94% and 70%. It might seem unrelated, but the main question is related to who benefits the most from tech, just a few or everyone? "renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option". This also didn't happen in a vacuum. The place where they are evolving the most is in China, where government policies have been a huge incentive, with huge government investments made in the sector. In my own country, Portugal, the adoption of renewal energy, was largely the result of government policies that kicked off the market. Now, it seems to have become self-sustaining in the sense that the market is now carrying on regardless of any incentives. I suspect that we might be reaching a point of no-return, if we haven't reached it already. We're still very far away from becoming energy independent, but we're much better than a couple of decades ago. Moreover, the internet itself didn't just happen because the market led to its creation. It was a result of the cold war. The IP protocol was born in DARPA. Still, the previous examples I gave were about the government (which is a form of us "as a collective society") spawning new tech or its adoption. Going in the reverse direction, here are examples where it required collective society to "tame" a technology: - CFCs: It required an international agreement for us to tame the issue with ozone layer destroying chemicals, a huge problem in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol - DDT: This was an incredibly efficient tech (pesticidies), but came with big externalities (highly toxic to people and nature), so a convention was required to tame it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Convention_on_Persistent_Organic_Pollutants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Convention_on_Persis... - Nuclear weapons: Eventually the most dangerous tech ever invented by mankind. Maybe the reason we're still here is because of the numerous treaties we've been making to curb them. The SALT agreements, the START agreements, and so on. - TV, Radio and the printing press: All of these are technologies, which we tend to see as forces for good (well, I at least still do), but also with incredible potential for destruction - radio was used by the guys running Germany in the 30s. It required very careful rule making to strike a balance (and the balance varies a lot from democracy to democracy) between freedom of speech and the misuse of this tech for unethical purposes like defamation, intentional misinformation and so on. - Car Safety: While seat belts were the invention of the market, governments have been regulating cars to make them safer, not only for occupants, but for pedestrians. The list just goes on and on.

ruicraveiro 5mo ago

Adding to my previous answer, here's a reading suggestion: Hot, Flat and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman. The book was written almost 2 decades ago and it has aged really well.

simonebrunozzi 5mo ago

> but he correctly realized that it would ultimately be the most profitable to him if he could build legions of cars and had a large customer base that could afford them I think that this is a common misconception. I can't find the reference, but I remember reading that this might have been a "marketing" or PR spin, rather than reality - which was, simply, that he needed to pay well to keep talented workers or take them from other industries.

bandrami 5mo ago
Also the "five dollar day" was kind of a marketing gimmick too. Your daily pay was still $2.50, but if you stayed two years, went to church on Sundays, tithed, didn't go to bars, didn't go to union meetings, kept your house clean, and didn't send remittances overseas (and he had people checking on all of these things), you got the rest as a bonus in the form of savings bonds.
applicative 5mo ago
He even advised V I Lenin to emulate the same structure.

keybored 5mo ago

What an incredible demonstration of whitewashing history. No, the technology itself does not have a telos, it’s not something external for us to tame, or that naturally falls somewhere. This is demonstrated by the mid century “middle class” boom which happened because labor/left-wing organizing that forced concessions by the capitalist class. But that gets replaced with Henry Ford wanting a larger consumer base. > So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any. As a collective society we managed to make industrial society work better for most people. In the First World at least.

epsteingpt 5mo ago

for example - Books. We 'tamed' books early on by gatekeeping reading and writing. Later even when the printing press was invented, we burned books. Certain book ownership is still illegal. You must be talking about free societies my friend, because... good luck using the internet in Iran or North Korea.

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jgreid 5mo ago

As far as I can tell, once humanity gets an opportunity to build something we build it. There's always some number of people who want to make it happen -- even if the consequences are not good for society writ large.

wang_li 5mo ago

Speed limits, safety features, fuel efficiency for cars. Every government regulation is to moderate some human behavior and when that behavior is related to technology it is "taming" that technology. We also restrict making changes to the environment, resource extraction, waste disposal, building permits, etc.

aaarrm 5mo ago

I heard that when cars were becoming popular, some scandanavian country had lots of protests about how dangerous they were and that they were successful. I don't remember the desired outcome though

bm371613 5mo ago

The mid-20th century Ford argument misses policies and society. It’s not like the pope can only affect reality by changing the hearts of big tech CEOs. It could go through what voters and workers think is possible, what they tolerate and demand. The middle class is not just Ford having a brilliant idea, it is the workers movement, unions, in many countries in cooperation with the church. If you are looking for sources of large scale and long term effects this might be it, like the 19th century strikes supported by the church and Rerum novarum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889_London_dock_strike#Church_roles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889_London_dock_strike#Church...

unitof 5mo ago

Printing press, depending on your view of taming. There’s a 1520 encyclical related to the matter: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo10/l10exdom.htm https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo10/l10exdom.htm

owenversteeg 5mo ago

I think the strongest example by far is nuclear power. We could have used it for everything from energy to warfare to transport to space exploration, and instead we limited our use because the societal costs were too high. Unlike the other examples people cited here, there often isn't a better alternative or a technical reason not to use it. In 2026 nukes are still the best way to destroy your enemies or travel at any appreciable fraction of C or power a ship and the reason we don't do those things is purely societal.

bedrio 5mo ago

The Japanese mastered firearm manufacturing and then banned them in the 1600s~ For a period of time, the ban worked and reversed their existence in society. Part of the ban was to respect samurais who would train for years in the art of combat, only for a peasant to be able to shoot them with a weapon. The problem is that not _all_ societies are participating in this ban. Eventually one nation will use the technological advances to domainte in military and economy, forcing others to adapt or be eliminated. It's a race to the bottom :/

pyuser583 5mo ago

Tech involves tradeoffs. Famously, horses attracted vermin, which attracted disease. Cities were unable to keep up population without migration because so many people died from disease. Cars fixed that. And introduced other problems. But there are always trade offs. Things have been getting better over time. Good enough for me.

autaut 5mo ago

Human cloning, bio weapons are two fast examples