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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

> morality/future ramifications of any of their actions regarding science's unexplored territories

Have you considered the possibility that it's a good thing that China's isn't letting subjective feeling about morality stand in the way of progress?

It's easy to get stuck in a rut where we fear new technology, pre-emptively declare it unethical, and never experience the benefits. IMHO, the west has gone way too far over the past few decades in the direction of risk aversion and the "precautionary principle", and China's boldness is a much-needed corrective.

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Progress for progress's sake is meaningless. If you're going to forsake any notions of morality in the name of progress, then you're losing sight of what the goal of the progress is: using technology to better people's lives.

Even if you're going to argue that the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term detriments: surprise, you're still applying morality.

Forcing stupidly and mediocrity on our children is the opposite of morality. They could be so much more than us.

What are the risks of getting it wrong? You can't wave your hands, close your eyes, and say "look how great it will be" without considering the catastrophic consequences.

We don't come close to having an understanding of genetics, and without that understanding, we risk unleashing horrible new genetic defects and illnesses for literally generations.

Have you considered that such a rut could at one point even now be progress. Where we are happy with the level of tech we have and for 1,000 or 10,000 years things stabilize on this planet?

blink Are you really trying to define stagnation as progress? Is war peace too?

If technology is war, then "stagnation" is peace. And technology, at least the way that Capitalist society does technology, is war more or less on the status quo. You could do technology other ways where this would not be the case, but then that would force you to think differently then the way you are thinking now where war is good.

I am not arguing here that Capitalism does not work, it works very well... I am not arguing banning technology either. All that I am arguing is that there are other paradigms outside of those where technology is progress and progress is good. This paradigm is a very convincing paradigm because of how well it works in Capitalist society and how it generates wealth and helps accumulate power.

You appear to be arguing from within an esoteric anti-capitalism framework that's redefined a number of common words as terms of art within that framework. You're not going to have a lot of luck convincing people to ban technology by using this framework and those terms.

Ok you let me know how the world is in 50 years when near-perfect Chinese citizens by the millions will be demolishing the rest of the developed world in nearly every academic/intellectual measure.

So we should delay life-saving and world-changing technology as long as possible until we can get some sort unrealistic international consensus (good luck with that, look at climate change) on the technology to make sure that the hand-wringing leftist collectivists and moralizing rightist collectivists are happy and nobody gets left behind?

I think it's hilarious that all the anti-CRISPR/anti-gene-editing people bring up dystopias when it's pretty obvious they want to live in a very Harrison Bergeron world.

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