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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

This sort of rhetoric is borderline insane, though. Yes, bad things happen even with tech. But they are typically far less dramatic than what happened before the tech. Homicides/lynchings were common before modern tech, as an easy example.

Similarly, suicides are not only not a new phenomenon, but they are actually not as high as they have ever been historically. This is precisely what i meant by us having a higher bar. And we should continue to raise the bar. But don't talk about how tech could possibly make our lives better. Instead, lets continue the progress we have made.

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"Bad things happened before" isn't really a rebuttal. The point of the original article was that tech can improve the outcomes of those things, but it's not, because we're not demanding it.

Worse things happened before, is the rebuttal. We are getting better. To the point that we now hold ourselves to standards we didn't even imagine before.

yet our stories of their past don't include any history before colonial forces, slave capture, or the faintest possibility that anything other than improvement could have come with the civilizing forces.

What? Even without the conquests of societies in the past, most other societies were much less likely to survive nature. A simple walk through the forest before antibiotics was ridiculously risky.

Again, the claim is that the bar is rising. Not that it always rose fairly. Nor that it has equally reached everyone. Just that, by and large, technology has made our lives better.

I mistakenly thought your double-grand-parent was related... so my comment is without context.

yeah, "tech" is changing things and I couldn't imagine life without it... I imagine there are beings on the planet that can't imagine life with it, and they seem to live fine lives.

we're special animals... in that technology is part of "us". but I don't know that makes our lives better.

bill joy and some others disagreed, too

This sort of rhetoric is borderline insane, though. Yes, bad things happen even with tech. But they are typically far less dramatic than what happened before the tech.

Oh totally, war was much less dramatic before atomic bombs. /s

Edit for substance: Tech is a massively double-edged sword, and looking only at the benefits is dishonest. You have nuclear power, which is truly amazing, and nuclear weapons, which may yet end us all. You have vaccines, but also biological weapons, medicines and poisons, better plows, better swords. You can argue that tech is a net positive, but if it’s anything, it is dramatic.

Despite the incredible destructive weaponry we can deploy today, the last half-century has been the least bloody in history. Technology has drastically improved both our ability to create and destroy, but fortunately we're doing more of the former.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

Let me argue that the only reason for this is the atomic bomb and not 'technological progress' as a whole. Technology's 'ability to create' has virtually no bearing on any of this in my opinion.

To add to what Kitsune has said, the violence has simply changed into a series of proxy wars between nuclear powers, at the expense of non-nuclear powers. The other part is that for the first time in over a thousand years, Western Europe isn’t almost constantly killing itself in endless wars.

> the violence has simply changed into a series of proxy wars between nuclear powers, at the expense of non-nuclear powers

Still thanks to technology (e.g. radio, satellite, improved espionage capabilities).

> Western Europe isn’t almost constantly killing itself in endless wars

Once again, thanks to technology. We're now able to do more for less, and many of the motivations for war (resources, land) are no longer as much as a contributing factor.

For values or “us” which are nuclear powers and their close allies. Of course if “thanks to technology” we end up destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons, climate change, or something as yet unforeseen then really what has come of it? Fixing nitrogen for fertilizer also led to the democratization of high explosives. Nuclear power and weapons are linked.

Look away from your personal circumstances for a minute and consider the trajectory overall, for everyone, and not just you. This Panglossian “optimism” is downright destructive. It feels a lot like being in an airplane which has entered an unpowered, uncontrolled descent, and the guy next to tells you to be happy, it’s a miracle that we’re flying, humans never flew in all of history until recently.

Past performance does not guarantee future returns. One could say something similar about the 50 year period ending in 1910. WWI, WWII, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot really skew the average.

If you look at the death toll in proportion to the population at that time, even that 50 year period will be less bloody than some others in the past.

We need you to please up the insight/provocation ratio of your comments, no matter what you're replying to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Understood, I edited it to include more details about what I was trying to get across.

Thank you.

Not a problem, I was wrong and appreciate the feedback.

Some feedback: the way you present your arguments is not useful or productive to discussion.

This has nothing to do with whether I agree or disagree with your premise. It's the delivery of the message that you need to improve if you want it to come across in a way that is productive.

I appreciate the feedback and agree, I did a poor job. Hopefully my edit has added some much-needed substance.

That's funny because I was just thinking how much I appreciated your comments.

Edit: but of course I didn't see it before the edit ;)

And likewise - I appreciate your edit and I think your point is stronger for it (regardless of whether I agree or disagree with it)

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