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Comment by bradleybuda | Hacker News Reader

The great thing about technology is that it's possible to have new things or ways of life that are strictly better than the ones they replace! We can move beyond the efficient frontier; progress is non-zero-sum.

  * Golden Rice
  * Unleaded gas
  * HCFCs (over CFCs)
  * etc

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Yes it's possible, but we really need to be cautious.

In general it's a bad idea to underestimate adaptive systems. It's especially foolish to underestimate the ultimate adaptive system: natural ecosystems. We should be extremely humble and careful when we're toying with the unfathomably complex system that we depend on. We understand very, very, very little about these things except that they're hard to predict and we really need them to continue working well enough to maintain the parameters we need for survival.

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