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Comment by DisgracePlacard | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there's a real need to justify technological progress as a default. That has been the default for at least a century or so, and I think it's done us quite well. The unorthodox thing is the idea that we should avoid technological progress, and if there isn't good evidence for that, then we should ignore it.

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>[Technological progress] has been the default for at least a century or so, and I think it's done us quite well.

Such progress has presented an existential threat only once previously in the past century, and that was the development of nuclear weapons. The jury is still out on whether that was the right decision. I don't think the argument that, "Well, nothing bad has happened yet!" is very persuasive in the face of possible extermination of the human race.

It's escalated humanity's incapability to look toward the future or do long-term planning in any reliable kind of way very problematic. It's also made the tendency for humans to go to war significantly more problematic for everyone that isn't already a murdering loon.

While there's plenty of positive effects of the march of technological progress, let's not pretend it's done us an unequivocally good turn. The state of the environment is enough to explain that.

It's our default because for most technology, we have high confidence of a high p(survival).

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