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Comment by j0hnyl | Hacker News Reader

I find the e/acc ethos highly relatable for the simple reason that accelerating innovation inevitably means access to new technology becomes democratized quicker. Progress and technology only moves forward and this can't be avoided, but when we try to slow it down under false pretenses of "safety" all that means is that the disproportionately wealthy or powerful will have access to it. Accelerating technological progress means these amazing tools can get into the hands of the average person much quicker, and imo that's a good thing.

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IMO this is a super ahistorical and overly-simplified reading of technological development. For one, you're painting with an absurdly wide brush. For example: has the rapid development of missile technology "democratized access" to surface-to-air missiles? Obviously not. Technological development comes in many different flavors, and sometimes has nothing to do with "technology" at all (look at the development of push-button elevators). It's not really possible to make realistic statements about "technological development"; you have to apply some qualifications and context.

Even when technology does get developed and shared among people quickly there's very, very good reasons we'd want to slow it down in the name of safety. Thalidomide anyone? What about chloroflurocarbons? I certainly agree that it's no good to keep technological power concentrated in the hands of the already-powerful, but to just claim that all efforts at promoting "safety" inevitability deepen inequality is facile.

The "e/acc" way of thinking is (IMO) Whig history coming from a freshman engineering major.

> has the rapid development of missile technology "democratized access" to surface-to-air missiles?

Yes? They are being used in the Ukraine conflict on both sides. While not SAMs, Hamas has missiles. Even North korea has a it’s own SAM system.

If the best examples you can come up with are Thalidomide and Chloroflurocarbons you aren’t really selling the danger. Both are chemistry technologies, something by which we have massively benefitted from on the whole, but can have uniquely hard to detect effects, most catagories of inventions don’t have the risks of novel toxiciy like chemistry inventions.

Interesting point, I guess by "democratized access" I was thinking along a "state <-> individual" axis, but you're not wrong that in terms of nationstates there's better access across citizen groups, rather than just being concentrated in a few wealthy nations. I'm curious about how these weapons proliferated so widely, do you feel like it comes from improvements in their level of technological development? It seems like it could be explained more by geopolitics than "development" per se, although I could see an argument that weapons-sharing agreements are their own flavor of technology.

> Both are chemistry technologies, something by which we have absolute massively benefitted from on the whole.

But this is kind of my point. There isn't any such "thing" as "chemistry technologies", in reality it's only the individual technologies themselves which are "real". To talk about "the development of chemical technologies" you have to talk about both thalidomide and CRISPR together. Moreover, the history of this group of technologies (and the positive outcomes you refer to) are products not just of development but of the culture of safety and caution that e/acc wants to see undone. I can't see how a true empiricist could say "it's better to develop any chemical technology and release it to the public ASAP"; you've never had a true experiment and the whole problem space is full of edge-cases.

Thanks for sanity. More broadly, concentration of power and unsafe technology are two different subjects -- we can and should tackle both.

Absolutely! And I do think that the relationship between technology and power is super interesting and worthy of consideration, but this approach to it is just....goofy.

I am quite sure people were able to come up with plenty of downsides when fire was discovered too (accidents, usage as weapon, burning whole fields, forests and even dwellings), but most of us can now agree it was a net positive for mankind.

Ergo all technological development anywhere ever is a net positive? Seems overly strong to me.

No, it's just stronger than the opposing point: that there exists such a potentially negative technology that it's worth freezing/delaying our technological development to avoid it.

The "opposing point" I am making is that technology is ethically neutral and needs to be examined as as it functions in the world, on a case-by-case basis (and implemented accordingly). I can't personally say I know many people who fear dangerous technology so much that they advocate for a complete halt to all technological development everywhere.

And how are you gonna do that? Not even the very inventors of technology can predict how it’s gonna be used (especially for bad) and by whom. Are you gonna have a committee of bureaucrats who never invented anything in their life come in and promise they will protect you from any possible downside? And are you gonna believe them?

What do you mean "how are you going to do that"? Are you seriously trying to assert that ex. the FDA has never successfully blocked a harmful drug from going to market? In another comment you yourself concluded that not adopting nuclear exacerbated the climate crisis, isn' this exactly what you're saying is impossible? Scientists and engineers make estimates about the large-scale impact of technological adoption all the time, and often they're very good at it (for example we're very clear about what the combustion engine is doing to our environment).

> Are you gonna have a committee of bureaucrats who never invented anything in their life come in and promise they will protect you from any possible downside?

This is such an absurd strawman that I almost didn't want to address it. Nobody is asking to live in the perfect nanny state, although if that's how you view everyone who disagrees with you no wonder you're into e/acc. It is both possible and extremely achievable for a government to collaborate with scientific experts to decide how and where to deploy different technologies. The fact that this process doesn't have a 100% hit-rate is emphatically not an argument for just abandoning the concept of industrial/technology regulation entirely. I personally enjoy not having industrial runoff in my groundwater or dangerous drugs available for sale in the pharmacy, and indeed believe that this type of prudence is a major contributor to the progress in human quality of life that you touted elsewhere.

edit: also how is this not it's own form of "doomerism"?? In one breath you make these wildly sweeping statements about human history and the unstoppable power of progress, and then here you state that it's basically impossible to ever make informed estimates about the consequences of our actions. It seems to me like you can only hold one of these two positions, consistently.

> What do you mean "how are you going to do that"?

I mean that in order to regulate a technology you normally would develop it first, to see how it's used. EU (where I am unfortunately residing) just reached an agreement to regulate AI without any AI products originally developed here at all!

Previously they made practically illegal to develop other charging standards than USB-C.

This is "the strawman" I am talking about: regulating emerging tech into oblivion out of fear something bad may come out of it.

> the FDA

Same FDA that regulated insulin so hard they gave a practical monopoly to a producer who promptly then decided to jack up the prices? The drug prices in US are so high, buying trips to Mexico and Canada come out cheaper. This is what happens when you decimate competition.

You see a few dangers narrowly avoided by the FDA, like thalidomide, but you never see the millions dead because life-saving drugs stay tens of years in approval limbo or never get developed in the first place.

> Nobody is asking to live in the perfect nanny state

Are you sure? Because that is where the EU is clearly headed. Have you forgotten the pandemic and its unspeakable abuses? Can't you see the ever accumulating regulations? Can't you hear people asking more and more from the state to intervene while politicians are more than happy to promise anything for votes? That is why I am into e/acc.

You’re lightly changing the topic here, I think. I brought up regulation as one type of situation where someone makes estimates about the future societal impact about technology. Setting aside the big libertarian rant for a sec, I’d like to go back to original question. Be it an individual, researcher, lab, corporation, or regulatory agency: do you believe that when developing a new technology it is both possible and prudent to assess its future social impacts, and continue or discontinue development accordingly? Or do you believe that it is always the best idea to continue development regardless of estimated impacts?

> do you believe that it is always the best idea to continue development regardless of estimated impacts?

Emphatically yes. The possible downsides are much smaller than the expected upside (as history shows) and we are really bad at predicting either in advance anyway (also as history shows). Finally, we really really really need those upsides to change our fate as a species currently one cosmic accident (meteorite, virus, nuclear escalation, etc) away from extinction.

Also even if the good guys stop, the bad guys will certainly accelerate - so in a competitive world there is really no advantage in voluntarily giving up technological development.

Got it, so when say a private individual or lab decides that the cost of continuing a line of research or development exceeds the predicted benefit/profit and cancels it, you think that's a missed opportunity regardless of the context? Every invention everywhere should be shipped and never rolled back, no matter if it is profitable (on any time horizon) because eventually there's a chance it could return social benefits?

I think you're missing the forest for the trees (perhaps deliberately) if your immediate criticism of e/acc is that we don't have democratized access to surface-to-air missiles.

Most people are able to understand what is broadly meant by "technological development". It normally means stuff like camera phones and internet access and hearing aids, you're the first I've read whose mind immediately jumps to weapons of destruction. If someone noted that they'd been impressed with the technological progress of the 2000s, I wouldn't personally feel the need to smugly clarify that they don't have access to missiles, so their point is misguided. Perhaps their comment would have been clearer to folks like you with the addition of more qualifications and context to describe _exactly what_ kinds of progress is being talked about, but personally I found it very clear.

You're letting the political mask slip a bit with the inclusion of the Whig comment, by the way :)

> Most people are able to understand what is broadly meant by "technological development".

I personally don't find someone saying "oh you know what was meant" to be a convincing argument, others may feel differently. The post made a massively overreaching claim about the universal positivity of technological development. If they meant "consumer goods should be adopted as fast as possible" then say that instead, especially if you're trying to build a life-philosophy on it. My core point is that "technological development" is an enormous concept, entailing all sorts of things. To say "more technology means more access to technology" paints over all sorts of dynamics which run counter or orthogonal to that. I'm merely pointing out one such example, there are many more if you think about it for a minute. Feel free to stay focused on the forest, but don't be surprised if you wind up unable to differentiate between a deciduous and an evergreen.

> You're letting the political mask slip a bit with the inclusion of the Whig comment, by the way :)

There's no mask, I wear my political convictions quite openly :)

While I can't speak for the other commenter, no I don't think they are missing anything. They're pointing out that when people speak about the positivity of technological development and its democratization, they are embedding certain assumptions about which technologies are included in that.

If you're going to talk accurately and honestly about how technology changes the world, you need to be specific about which technologies you're referencing. We have a sort of informally agreed upon shorthand that when we discuss technology we are only talking about "the good ones."

They're saying (I think) that we need to be more rigorous than that. You can't say GPS has made the world better while ignoring cruise missiles. You can't say wikipedia makes the world better while ignoring the role of the internet in the rohingya genocides etc.

If you're using past technologies to predict the role of future ones, your thesis has to justify or at least account for the negative consequences as well.

> If you're using past technologies to predict the role of future ones, your thesis has to justify or at least account for the negative consequences as well.

Perfect, I literally could not have said this better myself.

Cruise missiles were already in widespread use prior to GNSS guidance becoming practical. Inertial navigation and terrain contour matching worked pretty well, although GPS has certainly made strike planning easier.

There were more frequent genocides before the Internet than after. It was standard practice for conflicts in the ancient world: burn the cities, execute all the men, and take the women and children as slaves.

You might have a valid point about technology in general, but I don't think your specific examples support that point.

What evidence do you have of 'new technology becomes democratized quicker'? People mostly just use technology, but doesn't necessarily correspond to democratization (although the thought leaders would have you think otherwise).

Democratization as in "the action of making something accessible to everyone", not the political system.

They were not asking about a political system. They were asking about what democratization means in actuality - Does the "common man" get source code? Do they get to use the tech w/o interference by 3rd parties? Do they get to own the things they make with this tech?

IMO e/acc is just the SV version of Manifest Destiny and it's a self-serving philosophy for people who stand to gain billions and insulate themselves from the downsides the common-man cannot. Democratization means all citizens experience that equally - the good and the bad - but is that what's happening here?

The democratization of technology can only happen if people broadly can afford the technology. Distributing the gains from technological progress isn't necessarily happening as a default/without effort. At the very least there is a question mark there (see, for example, Acemoglu's work).

"new technology is disseminated quicker" as in "microbial dissemination"

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