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Comment by yipbub | Hacker News Reader

I'm convinced that this idea that technology is completely neutral is wrong. It is not neutral in the face of human psychology. The human species is a different animal that the human individual, and it is powerful, but does not make truly conscious decisions.

Once you let the genie out of the bottle, a wish will be made. A technology might not be inherently bad, but neither are knives, and we don't leave those lying around.

That said, it is the human species that develops technology, rarely is one human individual capable of holding back a technology.

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'Technology is neutral' is simply a banal observation that technology is only ever used by humans who can decide what to do with it. It's not saying that a new technology doesn't enable new and terrible human choices, simply that those choices rest with the people, not the technology itself.

Knives seem like the perfect example, really. We do leave them lying around in our drawers, usually under zero real security against any malicious guest, but we recognise it is about the choices of the people we invite into our houses, not the existence of the knives themselves, that is the real danger.

You can certainly argue though as you have that humans simply shouldn't have the choice to do certain things - what comes to mind immediately is nuclear weapons.

Yeah, my argument with the knives was pretty weak and I was trying to make the point you make in your last paragraph. I think I meant to type "lying around children". I should've said bombs.

Knives always seem like a perfect example because they really do have so many good uses, along with some bad ones. But just because two pieces of technology both have good uses and bad uses doesn't mean they're morally equivalent. As to your example, even if I trust people who enter my house I wouldn't want to store a nuke in my kitchen drawers :) And there are many ways to discuss the ethics of tech beyond "good and bad uses", such as to what extent a user of the technology controls it or is controlled by it, what are the negative externalities, does it increase power asymmetry, etc.

> Knives seem like the perfect example, really. We do leave them lying around in our drawers, usually under zero real security against any malicious guest, but we recognise it is about the choices of the people we invite into our houses, not the existence of the knives themselves, that is the real danger.

The problem comes from the scale, it is a knife vs nuke question, but you seem to stop a bit too short in your reasoning. Yes both can kill, they just don't operate on the same scale.

You could forge documents 400 years ago, it doesn't mean it would be ethical to release a software that let you forge any document at scale instantly and for free in a single click

One steam engine is a marvel, 1.4B ICE cars on earth is a nightmare

It's always about scale, almost never about the original purpose/intent of the tech. Modern tech develops and spread infinitely faster than anything from even 20 years ago

The idea technology is completely neutral is obviously stupid and obviously wrong.

Neil Postman has two amazing books on this subject.

It is not even that technology is good or bad, any technology will have good and bad aspects but the main issue is that we have surrendered culture and agency to technology as a society.

There is no going back or fix now. The fix for all was a culture that devalues bad uses of technology so that there is no money in creating something shitty. We basically have the opposite of that. Even completely useless technology is worth a ton of money because of our culture.

The solution is not Luddism either. Especially a ridiculous techno-Luddism.

For me, the Faustian bargain with technology has already been signed in blood and there is nothing to do other than enjoy the roller coaster ride.

The purported neutrality of technology is an old saw that people who are practitioners of technology ought to discard. The fact they haven't shows how terrible a job we're doing educating them.

Technology is not neutral and never will be because the nature of technology is to be a means to an end, and as such, to be inseparable from its end.

Technologies enable certain future outcomes.

That some of those outcomes are deemed "good" or "bad" just depends on whether they're compatible with the ends that were pursued initially and the worldview that supports them.

Some technologies have unexpected outcomes, but that doesn't make those outcomes independent of those technologies, either.

>The fix for all was a culture that devalues bad uses of technology

>The solution is not Luddism either. Especially a ridiculous techno-Luddism.

Cough.

> It is not neutral in the face of human psychology.

It's worth noting that nuclear weapons seem to have prevented more deaths than they caused. The MAD doctrine has prevented direct confrontation between the superpowers and limited their military conflicts to proxy wars.

And this is a technology that has almost no application beyond vaporizing cities almost instantaneously.

This is a fair point, but we have no way of knowing how close we came or will come to a nuclear apocalypse, so the risk posed by nuclear technology is difficult to evaluate.

The same as what would have happened have we not invented them.

We don't have reliable ways to project predict the future, or to predict the present based on past conditions.

We are a single human lifetime into a world that has that technology. If we are to live we will live with it for thousands more. Let's give it a bit more time before we decide how well it's turned out?

On the other hand, history is full of technological developments that caused far more harm than necessary before society figured out a way to deal with it simply because nobody thought these things through at the start.

What examples stick out to you? And what do you think of the solutions that arose?

If it happens even once those “lives saved” gains will be wiped away. If the stock market is rising for a hundred years then literally goes to zero, you’ve still lost the long game, buying short term gains at the expense of the long term.

If our children all die in a nuclear holocaust, it doesn’t really matter how many lives we saved, does it?

The acronym MAD is not a coincidence.

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