Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

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> Which is why it bugs me so much when people talk about the flaws of both in one breath as if they were even remotely comparable.

I agree. But it was not my intent to portray them as even remotely similar, hence the misunderstanding.

Reading about things like the balloon escape and what surrounded it gives a very real sense of just how bad things were. So when you see just how much better we have it, the sheer amount of opportunity available to our society in a general sense, it's more than a bit depressing to think that this is how we (collectively) chose to use it so far.

A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus. Like yeah I think the advanced bioengineering is a fantastic accomplishment. I don't think we should get rid of it. Things were definitely worse before we got that figured out. I don't miss amputations and lobotomies. But is it really necessary to so badly misappropriate the opportunity that it affords us?

Given how different your perspective is from my own I can appreciate that my original short and rather flippant comment failed to convey that particular message.

There is no doubt in my mind that your intent was good.

> A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus

What connection between bioengineering and Torment Nexus do you have in mind? The advances of bioengineering that pop up in my mind are mRNA vaccines and new cancer treatments, which I consider awesome and not at all Torment Nexus-y. When you say Torment Nexus, that makes me think of Thiel’s Palantir, but this is not something we do collectively as a society - is it? To me, that is exactly the anti-democratic stuff pushed by a few specific people that we as a society need to rein in.

Nothing more than a fictional hypothetical for use as an analogy. Suppose advanced technology T requires broad societal effort to develop, for which societal mastery of advanced scientific topic S is a prerequisite. The analogy is nothing more than "first society achieves X, then it can achieve Y" where X is desirable but Y is not and both are fairly difficult.

I chose bioengineering because I was imagining something like the neural lace from the culture series except without having any "good" usecase.

The panopticon we've constructed may have individual components driven by a single personality and fabricated by a single company but a great number of such pieces is required. Even something like Flock that more or less stands on its own requires individual adoption by countless local municipalities. An awful lot of independent groups have to approve of it.

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