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The Nobel prize was specifically invented so Nobel would be remembered for something other than blowing things up, after he read an obituary describing him as "

• InclinedPlane 13y ago
  The funny thing is that by far the bulk of commercial explosives have always been used in industry, not in war. To add another person into the equation, consider Fritz Haber. He invented a process to synthesize ammonia on commercial scales cost effectively. In doing so he made explosives and gun powder far more economical, but also fertilizer. His work is responsible for a significant escalation in the efficiency and lethality of warfare (he also pioneered chemical warfare, as an aside) but also for feeding roughly half of the entire population of Earth at this point. That's the nature of science, it's not easy it's not safe it's not without risk, it's not without moral quandaries. The way to attack these problems is not to try to neuter intellectual curiosity, to replace everything in a chemistry set with water, to replace tools with their nerf equivalents, to put people in jail when they venture too close to danger. The correct way is to ensure that people learn from their mistakes, and to make sure that people acquire a sense of what sorts of things tend to be dangerous and how to be properly prepared for handling those situations, or, when warranted, avoiding them. The same lessons apply to using computers. It's simply not possible to have a robust curiosity about programming, systems, or computing in general without acquiring dangerous knowledge. And it's extremely unlikely for folks to go through their formative years of learning these things without one or more excursions into dangerous behavior.