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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

You're describing so many things wrong with humans as a species, or at least modern humans. We shouldn't change things just because we can. We shouldn't assume that if we're able to extract natural resources its also our right to use them without question until they're completely depleted.

Why should we assume that every invention, every technology, everything we call "progress" is actually advancing in a good direction?

There's a balance to everything. We wouldn't be human without the ability to invent, to use tools, or to contemplate the future. We need to respect that power though, not lean into the shiny objects and power we can buy with a currency that itself is an entirely man-made system designed to feed a system of taxes and perpetual "growth".

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I disagree to some extent that we should not change things just because we can: we grow beautiful ornamental gardens and weave silk and make cheese because these things please us and not necessarily because we need them; nature would never produce such order. We are the masters of our world. Nature, too, has merit, but nature makes flood and famine and disease -- we can engineer against those things.

Money is an instrument of labor also; it's possible to be rich, carbon negative, and without using up any depletable resources.

In fact, more efficiency (less resources used to produce a good) means more profit, doesn't it?

Money is the only reason a lot of endangered species are still alive. Here, rats eat ground-nesting bird eggs. Only money to build fences and island sanctuaries and establish breeding programs saved them.

> it's possible to be rich, carbon negative, and without using up any depletable resources

Arguably it's currently only possible to do so if you're rich, but as more and more rich people do so the marginal cost of living such a lifestyle decreases.

This is a bad theory because it could apply to literally any time in the past or in the future. It’s infinitely variable and not falsifiable thus unscientific.

Meanwhile, progress (aka people trying to make the world better) will continue whether you like it or not, bringing benefits to practically everyone forever. Pessimists may temporarily stifle progress, but the genie has been out of the bottle for the last 400 years or so. Good luck trying to stop people from wanting better for themselves aka solving problems.

I specifically ended my comment saying we need to be responsible with this power, not abandon it completely.

I said nothing of pessimism or pessimists, or that progress shouldn't be made. I strongly question how you could possibly know that anything we do with the intent of making the world better could possibly bring benefits to practically everyone forever.

Everything has side effects and more often then not we can't predict them. What we do today with the best of intentions can be a huge mistake that we only realize years, decades, or centuries later. That doesn't mean we should hide in a cave and do nothing, but it does mean we need to be extremely careful with where we lean in and change things and where we don't.

"humans shouldn't change things" is group-think that has pervaded morals & values.

Nobody really believes that. You're not living in a mud-hut. You've decided the balance should be less than whatever that guy said, but it's all relative. You are ridiculously wealthy and having such an incredibly outsized impact compared to any non-human animal that the relative difference between you and the GP is effectively nil.

See my last paragraph, we agree on this

You know, I'm re-reading your comment again later, and you're right about some of the things we do because we can being detrimental.

We don't often weigh those decisions, we do first and figure out the consequences later. That happens less now with environmental issues than it used to, but we do things just because we can, we fill the night sky with satellites and we build AI without pausing for even a moment to consider if we should. We may regret some of this later. Maybe it will work out, maybe it won't, but we won't stop to figure that out in advance, we'll find out the hard way.

Still though, we eradicated smallpox, hedged famine in most countries, closed the ozone hole, build networks that allow instant global communication by wire instead of by ship.

It may all yet work out, we'll see.

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