Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeWilde | Hacker News Reader

Has there ever been a case when such movements successfully halted some technological progress?

MLB umpires calling balls/strikes instead of machines. Probably the most absurd situation as viewers at home can see clearly when they are wrong/right immediately.

I'm sure there's lot of other (better) examples where unions are strong and/or experimental technology carries risk and the market is heavily regulated (e.g. healthcare).

> MLB umpires calling balls/strikes instead of machines.

Hah true but this is more of a "spirit of the game" rule than anything. Same idea with football/soccer, there's certainly no technological barrier preventing the use of an accurate game clock to get an exact amount of stoppage time, or even pausing the clock during play, but they keep on out of tradition I guess.

A predetermined game time is much easier for TV broadcasts: they don't have to schedule filler content for when the game ends earlier or later than anticipated. I've already been hearing complaints around the last World Cup that all the VAR-induced injury time was eating into the ad blocks.

Why not have a pitching machine? And a hitting robot?

Or a robot crowd? Or a robot watching the game at a robot bar? Or a robot talking about the good old days of human umpires in the comment section of a tech blog for robots?

This sounds like a scene from Futurama.

Do you watch baseball for the umps? To see them show their 99percentile talent at calling balls/strikes?

Joe West thinks you do!

Human error just makes the game more interesting and less predictable.

Human error in judgment doesn't.

Yeah, it does.

F1 also has their disputes with rulings by their committee. All part of the game.

Ridiculous. You're conflating human error as part of the skills in the game itself (failing to catch a pop fly) versus human error that results in inconsistencies of rules (marking a pitch as a strike when it is quantifiably outside the strike zone). One of these makes the game more interesting, the other one makes it more frustrating.

Can you guess which one is which, or should I call for a ref?

The solution is to win by a wider margin. Or schmooze the refs!

Right. The same goes for other sports. I'm sure one could build a machine that would bowl strikes all day long, and if bowling were part of an industrial manufacturing process, that would be awesome. But it isn't... bowling is a sport. The whole point of sports is the challenge. No challenge, no sport.

Except nobody plays or watches sports for the refs. They are a necessity because that’s been the only possible way to enforce rules.

I play a sport at a pretty competitive level and would love it if we didn’t have a human ref. Refs can be assholes and they make bad calls all the time. It can really ruin a game. Having a machine make the calls removes a lot of the bias (and genuine mistakes) in those calls.

Formula 1 racing has lots and lots of wild, random things happening that totally change who wins vs who "deserves" to win. For example, a rookie driver might pop a tire and take out the race leader. These things happen all the time, and make the game more interesting rather than a completely predictable sure thing.

That has nothing to do with what is being talked about or is there, in F1, some commit which decides whose tire will pop today?

Antinuclear activism was incredibly successful. We may get there soon with infectious disease research. Also, we have (mostly) successfully enforced a convention against using CRISPR to create transhuman monster embryos.

"Geneticists shouldn't make any superhuman embryos."

"Geneticists should get to create one CRISPR monster, as a treat."

I spend 10 months locked up, because of infectious disease research. Is someone going to pay me $300 000 in damages?

You do not need activists, just users!

What's the story with this?

Also the anti GMO movement is normalized, which is scary because we need gmos to feed our species among countless other important things, especially as we are changing the climate faster than many populations are able to respond. So many products proudly wear that gmo free project label.

The movement inspired by the book Silent Spring [1] is certainly one.

[1] http://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx

Okay, any examples where said 'technological progress' wasn't literally spraying everything with deadly poison and giving everyone cancer?

What about the anti-nuclear movement?

Maybe? There are apparently ~430 active reactors worldwide today but the number has been practically constant since the 90s. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263945/number-of-nuclear...

Likely more to do with the massive expense of building them than any movement though.

If I recall Germany's anti nuclear movement is very successful and got a few shut down after Fukushima and in recent history.

The clipper chip comes to mind. Of course "progress" is a relative term, but NSA surely saw it as progress. Companies like Uber are now leaving some European cities[0] after facing a more adversarial political environment than they do in the states.

I've also heard stories about places like Uruguay, which have laws that apparently protect some workers from automation and self-service (i.e. attended gas stations, etc.)

0: https://thenextweb.com/news/uber-forced-leave-brussels-what-...

> The clipper chip comes to mind.

But...technological progress on cryptographic hardware didn’t stop just because that particular attempt to foist a precompromised system onto the market failed. (Neither did the social technology of the NSA manipulating the market to adopt their precompromised systems.)

So how is that a movement stopping technological progress?

It’s not just Uruguay. I think both New Jersey and Oregon forbid drivers to pump their own gas. [0]

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/states-wher...

Car dealers certainly. Initially automakers did not have the ability to perform sales and service across the country and needed dealers to take on the risk of running these dealerships. That quickly changed as you can imagine, so car dealers were able to lobby for legislation that banned direct sales from automakers thus preserving their little fiefdoms long past their need.

Train / metro conductor unions have successfully blocked automation, multiple times in multiple cities

It gets even worse when you consider nyc in particular. Not only do they have an operator, there is also the conductor. One actually drives the train, the other exists to point out a window for seemingly historical purposes and control the doors. In most other systems a train is operated by 1 person who is able to control the doors just fine, because that never needs to happen at the same time as driving and there are these things called mirrors.

Yes, but essentially always relating to safety or environmental damage.

It's unsurprisingly much easier to make your case when there are hundreds of poisoned children, or when mining companies cause flooding that destroy people's homes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com