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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

Stopping scientific discovery because you (or anyone) believes the result will be abused is a bad idea IMHO. Also while you're imagining snooping police, I'm imagining rescue workers locating survivors of a building collapse.

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The tech will probably have some peaceful uses, but I don't think they will outweigh the uses for military, law enforcement, espionage etc.

More generally, I think it's a mistake to believe that tech advances are always good overall. An extreme hypothetical example: advances in torture technology. A real-life example: television.

Pragmatically though, you'll never be able to stop new advancements from seeing the light of day. Blocking MIT from researching this won't stop the NSA or defense contractors, and even with a fair government, it wouldn't stop criminals. So far, the best path for dealing with potentially dangerous tech has been to keep it open and studied.

I'm skeptical. If it were very simple in terms of materials to create, say, biological weapons of mass destruction, I'd be in favor of keeping the knowledge under wraps.

Where is that friend button when you need it? ;)

You do have a good point there, but "For the most part, though, at least according to Charvat, the radar array is all about more efficient killing: “This is meant for the urban war fighter … those situations where it’s very stressful and it’d be great to know what’s behind that wall.”", direct from the horse's mouth.

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