Like everything else, it's only good up to a point!
- I believe in basic medical care, but medical technology that permits immortality is bad.
- Likewise, is reducing mortality always good? Now we have extreme overpopulation. In short, reducing OUR mortality has also INCREASED the mortality of non-human animals, which I believe have just as much right to live as us.
- Fertilizer and agriculture? Most industrial fertilizer poisons the land and agriculture has eliminated millions of acres of wild forest and destroyed a lot of ecosystem. Agriculture is also responsible for the huge population growth that is causing global warming.
- Cure for cancer? Maybe good, maybe bad IF that cure results in significantly extended lifetimes due to how it works.
I do have MANY more nuanced answers. That is why I believe in looking at each of your points AND others individually. My answer was specifically directed at AI, which I believe to be universally bad.
Most of the technologies you listed have significant negative consequences, and it's not clear to me that those are outweighed by the positives, especially if our modern society results in the destruction of the phytoplankton of the ocean producing half our oxygen.
I suspect in the long term, it would be better to have more mortality, smaller populations, and less technology than our current world. It's not a popular view because people are emotional about such things, but it's hard to imagine how a world with 8+billion and mass eco-destruction to be better IN THE LONG TERM.
Yes, I am making an ethical judgment about the means of AI, because after some analysis I do believe that the negative effects will be far worse than the positive. True, there are good applications of it. I never denied that.
Of course, my line of reasoning is far more vast than what I wrote here. I'm just arguing a specific point here, not presenting a thesis. I do think there is more to saving animals than arguing against human growth. Of course, people need incentives.
Take your stand on AI, which is more diverse than the LLMs and diffusion models that are currently making the news. Would it be bad to replace peoples by computer vision and robotics in a waste sorting center, enabling more recycling and less microplastics in the environment due to a better sorting of the waste stream ?
I see that as a good thing enabled by AI.
Antibiotics have saved billions of peoples lives from an early death. But use of antibiotics in farm animals is putting us at risk again via resistant superbugs that are sending us scrambling for new drugs to combat them.
Or, to take the analogy to 11, should each individual on the planet have access to a button that if pushed would cause the planet to explode? I seems reasonable the answer would be no, but now how do you set up a system of rules limiting who has access to the technology to make that button?
2. The laws of physics have so far prevented us from making technology like a tiny portable button that blows up a planet. Id assume a universe with weak energy constraints like that would have yielded much larger scale organisms, or perhaps none at all.
1 is you get a scratch then die because your body rots and you can do nothing about it. May want to spend some time learning about antibiotics resistance.