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Comment by reificator | Hacker News Reader

Bruce Schneier has been singing that tune for awhile now. Glad people are finally listening.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_t...

What's sad to me about this is, data has in a sense been weaponized. Much like nuclear power, it has potential for both good and bad.

I'm so saddened to see that so many organizations have collected and overstepped their boundaries without justification.

There continues to be so much good, totally legitimate work to be done with data.

my assumption is that anything new is weaponised _first_ and then slowly over time diffuses out into the world and is nett positive (it's like society figures out how to take the spikey edges off) but you definitely don't want to be in the leading edge of the transition...

It’s still possible to completely blow up the world with nuclear weapons.

And you think it's not with information?

Information has been a weapon since the dawn of man.

Right, but much in the same way that muskets and nuclear warheads are weapons... technology has changed the calculus on how powerful the weapons we have are.

The Springfield musket has probably been responsible for roughly about as many deaths as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but I suppose the nuclear weapons have more shock and awe to them.

Still, suffice to say, we've been slaughtering each other quite capably despite the level of technology we've been at.

What?

This was obvious. The only people who didnt see this in tech were the tech optimists.

Anyone else who has had to deal with humanity at large has warned that whatever was created would be used to help the powerful retain power.

The time for revolution was back in the 1990s. But that got lost in the baggage and dreams of being a unicorn.

This is just reversion to the mean, if anyone missed this, they havent developed the right balance of cynicism and optimism which helps identify the koolaid from the water

I'm an optimistic pessimist in a realist's body.

That is to say, I agree, it was obvious for a long time and information asymmetry has always been a tool of survival, advantage, control, etc. and not just in humans.

However, having lived through and been a tiny part of the "data revolution", and having seen some of the bad parts personally, as well as what we could do with data if everything was done in the open with good, clear intent and permission... that part of it still makes me sad.

I mean, the way the human race is going in general makes me sad, so yeah, perhaps I should not be surprised to see reality affect this area.

But, I'm still optimistic that some of us really are doing good and honest work with data and that there is still much more to be done.

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