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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

Yes, you are delusional. How do you define new technology that is "good natured"?

The reason DARPA is studying this it seems is to reduce its casualty rate to research new ways to treat mental illness. If you can do that you will spend less and also keep people alive. A bunch of medical research has been created for this motivation.

ARPA created the prototype to the internet. (ARPANet). The catch of the internet is that it allowed for people to disseminate information faster than anything before. You get the good (advancement of science) and the bad (misleading people).

DARPA is in the business of moonshots. They are all about high risk / high reward.

Its more likely the stuff you don't hear about didn't work in the first place.

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>The catch of the internet is that it allowed for people to disseminate information faster than anything before.

The specific idea was to create a resilient network to allow for decentralized command and control communications in the event of a direct nuclear strike on well-defined targets like the White House or Pentagon or the Capitol building IIRC. From what I can find via searching right now, the currently only claimed intent was to provide communications links between research installations but I remember reading about the purpose I described in some sort of histories of the ARPANET/Internet decades ago on the net.

I have exactly ARPAnet in mind when I said "Or it's just the nature of tools?" :D

I should've worded it better, good natured here means good-intention, in which there will be bad intention that we will probably NEVER see (C&D, military secret, etc...)

In this case, what's stopping the scientists and/or funder from misusing/weaponizing this implant?

p/s: guess I'm biased when it's DARPA, since it's US military complex... but hey, I'm enjoying the Internet :D

For one thing how would you weaponize this? Do you think that scientists are robots and don't have their own morality?

You still haven't told me how to design a technology to be "good intentioned". Technology has no intension it's the people who use it.

It's really disturbing that you automatically assume that technology is evil because who created it and you have a prejudice because it is DARPA.

> You still haven't told me how to design a technology to be "good intentioned".

Design.

Design simply encodes the values of the designer in the physical technology. A virtuous designer will design something which makes good things easy. A nihilistic designer will design something which makes their life easy. It’s unavoidable.

That’s why so much software these days is harmful, the tech world is largely populated with supremacists and nihilists.

(I don’t mean that in any particularly judgemental way. Supremacism is the norm in the wealthier slices of American culture, so it’s unremarkable that Silicon Valley would end up reflecting that. And the competitive nature of funding and hiring self selects for supremacists as well. And for those who don’t tend towards supremacism, nihilism one of the few ways to stay sane amongst supremacists.)

I automatically assume any new technology will be used for evil because we are all humans. Individual morality breaks down over large groups with separation of knowledge.

> The catch of the internet is that it allowed for people to disseminate information faster than anything before.

That's an unintended consequence, years and tech generations apart from the DARPA work.

The ARPANET goal was always explicit: to permit troops coordination even on the event of large scale bombings.

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