Hacker News Reader

Comment by jp_sc | Hacker News Reader

“We really have a tendency (...) to let our technology go ahead of our common sense about how we want to live together"

Bravo!

Sounds a little Amish. I ended up in Amish country when traveling last century, and it was a little weird. But I went to a house museum, and it was interesting.

One of the things that stuck with me as different: They take a little time to look at a new technology a decide if they want to use it. I wonder if our embrace of tech as being "neutral" is correct sometimes.

"They're more cautious — more suspicious — wondering is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental? Is it going to bolster our life together, as a community, or is it going to somehow tear it down?""

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/09/02/21...

Of course predicting where things end up when new tech disrupts is difficult.

==I wonder if our embrace of tech as being "neutral" is correct sometimes.==

It feels more and more like the “neutral” part is a shield we’ve created to exempt ourselves from responsibility.

Tangent here, but after visiting the Pennsylvania Dutch area a few years ago, I had this mini-epiphany of a vision of an alternate universe where most of society lived in small communities like the Amish do, that were mostly self-reliant and farm-based with cottage industries, BUT in which the communities embraced technology.

Basically, with 3D printers and solar power and local grids and machine shops to fabricate for local needs, and a loose mesh network to connect these decentralized nodes/communities together (like Mastodon, instead of the paper-and-print Amish newspapers that exist). A kind of techno-libertarian-Amish blend, to form a society that was more resilient and modular, rather than hyper-centralized, dense, and easily swayed by viral influence/behavior/trends or literal biological viruses.

EDIT: Of course it would never "scale" since such a system probably could not support higher population levels at all, but maybe that's okay in the ultra-long-run or some post-apocalyptic rebuilding future (also dangerously veering into population control and genocide-ish topics).

> Basically, with 3D printers and solar power and local grids and machine shops to fabricate for local needs

None of those could exist without the significant science and R&D which is only possible as a product of people leaving their personal areas to congregate in cities and colleges where information is shared and built upon. Along with a lot of money coming from the government and big companies. And the issue with that is when people leave for that purpose, many of them tend to leave forever to stay there.

There's an activation threshold absolutely, which requires large-scale central investment to get there for the very first time. But like, if you had one Star Trek style replicator, and it was able to make more replicators, then once you've crossed that threshold, you don't necessarily need all that massive R&D infrastructure as much.

It's also kind of a difference in strategic approach, to pool resources and create cutting edge institutions, or to adopt a more decentralized approach where yes, you might not get as quick of a pace of innovation, but each community is more self-sufficient. So, you might not ever get a fancy cure for cancer or CRISPR technology in this alternate universe, but most communities might have their own local clinics and more local nurses and maybe better overall health outcomes by focusing on common treatable problems, rather than pushing for cutting edge innovation. Similarly, you might have fewer PhD's, but more high school graduates or bachelor's level of education.

Anyways, nothing about this is all that realistic or anything, just some idle world-building in my head.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com