Hacker News Reader

The whole point is that it's not the technology that causes the problem, it's the user. In the case of antibiotics, an evil dictator could restrict their use in his nation to people of one ethnicity, so that members of other groups quickly died from easily curable diseases.

View on HN

It's not the antibiotics being used for evil in your scenario, it's the lack of them. It's like saying water can be used for evil by depriving people of it. That's not at all the same thing as a technology which really can be used for both good and evil, like nuclear power.

Exactly. Technology is like water. It's neutral. You could supply water to thirsty people or destroy the environment through hydraulic strip mining. You could build a dam and flood a village of people you don't like. I'm sure diabolic minds could come up with a way to do evil with antibiotics if that was all they had to work with.

Water is that way, sure, but the specific example I gave isn't an evil use of water. What about antibiotics? Your only example of how to cause harm using them is by not giving them to people, which just shows that when they are used, they cause good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com