I grew up in a fairly out of the way area in a red state, but we had this cool elective in high school called simply enough "Technology". We had AutoCAD, computers, little bridge building things, etc.
One of the few lessons that really stuck with me was when the teacher was discussing technology one day and one of the students grappled with this very philosophical point. Basically the posed it as something like "we should just ban technology X because people do bad things with it". This was 1998 (dating myself) so it isn't like computers were the force they are now in everyone's mind.
What unfolded is this basic discussion: people are the ones doing the bad things. Technology is just a force or thought multiplier. He explained it so well. It sort of clicked into my brain then and that discussion still sits pretty firm in my mind.
I don't think all technology can find inherently bad uses, but most of it can. Computers are at the heart of every military technology now other than explosives. Physics are at the heart of nuclear weapons. etc. etc.
I think Ted would have still did what he did. He was a narcissist at heart. He felt his view on it was somehow that much more special than the same view we arrived at in 1998 in my high school class in many ways.
That said, ill just leave this here and say I think this guy saw further into the future than most people ever have, but I see sentiments like this all over HN these days:
50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.
51. The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual's loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.
> people are the ones doing the bad things. Technology is just a force or thought multiplier. He explained it so well. It sort of clicked into my brain
Except, this isn't empirically true. It's the same argument made by the NRA ("guns don't kill people, people kill people"). To be clear, I'm not weighing in on the gun debate here, only pointing out that if people have easy access to guns, you will have more deaths by guns.
There's something comforting about the view that "it's really just people doing these things," because it suggests we aren't responsible for our inventions and their consequences. It sidesteps the actual unfathomable complexity, which at high level is this: people are living an environment which can be changed with new technology, which will in turn cause them to behave differently in unpredictable ways.
Make no mistake: the technology causes the change.
I don't think we can unwind it so simply. The basic consequences of technology are not new. The scale and asymmetry are. It shifts power around and changes who can make decisions about what happens. Of course we are responsible for our inventions.
Oppenheimer and co. lived with the most dramatic weight of such decisions. No one solely blames the president who went ahead with dropping the bombs. It took thousands of people making a conscious effort to build and deploy the technology. In a sense we all own that to this day. But at it's heart it is and always will be driven by the choices of people. As long as we agree that our will as human beings exceeds that of technology, then it is people doing the changing, whether thru build of tech or use thereof.
The point is easier to see with things like the printing press, the personal computer, cell phones, or even facebook...
> As long as we agree that our will as human beings exceeds that of technology, then it is people doing the changing, whether thru build of tech or use thereof.
The collective will of human beings is helpless in the face of such technologies. To act as if we have control over the changes they produce deeply misunderstands the situation.
Guns and nuclear bombs are still "just" force multipliers, but they are multipliers of predominantly or even overwhelmingly negative forces.
The problem isn't that trivial conclusion in isolation, it's what happens in a multi-actor game, where the other players have significantly higher badness than yourself. Despicable as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was, had Hitler or Stalin gotten the bomb first, there's a substantial risk of a much, much worse outcome. Stalin did get the bomb, but MAD ensured that he never used it. That is also a force multiplier.
Same dilemma for guns: could you remove all guns from everyone at once (except cops and perhaps carefully trained, background-checked, mentally sound, and clean-criminal-record holding citizens, and without going door-to-door Iraqi-counter-insurgency-style), it would probably be quite simple to get a clear majority for doing it. But you can't, and so removing the guns means removing them from people for whom they represent the least of a negatively multiplied force. Hence the slogan, if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.
> [Guns and nuclear bombs] are multipliers of predominantly or even overwhelmingly negative forces.
Whether this statement is true is not clear. The time since multiple countries have had nuclear weapons has been one of the most peaceful times in human history. You can't just look at all the times guns and bombs are used, you have to also include all the times they have been there and not used.
I think you missed the point of the parent. The idea of an atom bomb did not enter Truman's mind out of the blue sky. People create technology, and that in turn influences decisions. The types of technology we surround ourselves will in turn shape us, and the further decisions we make. It's more intertwined than a simple "force multiplier", it's also a force director in a way.
...if people have easy access to guns, you will have more deaths by guns
... because guns are a "force or thought multiplier".
I read that about 40,000 people are killed/injured by guns per year, with 44% of households owning one. Meanwhile 1.3 million people die in road crashes - let alone injuries. If we simply judge "empirically" what happens by sheer ratios of ownership, the NRA's arguments make even more sense. That isn't to say I agree with their jingoism, but let's not oversimplify the issue.
You'd rather the suicides use more primitive implements?
If you are done with things a gun is pretty painless and nearly certain. Everything else should have warning labels.
This is particularly important on sensitive topics, such as this one. The goal of HN is not combative arguments, but rather constructive, substantive discussion.
1. [proof of concept] the inventor is responsible for the invention's (initial) appearance, but not for any other person's epiphanies regarding possible use-cases {in HN speak: execution(opportunity) >= execution(invention) >> imagination(invention) > imagination(execution(opportunity)) }
2. [proof that one can rely upon proof of concept] the user is responsible for the opportunity in which the invention is used
3. [proof of concept evolves into paradigm] society becomes aware of opportunities in which established inventions have typically been used or hypothetical (realistic?) situations in which their use would be significant
..it may become easier to discriminate the components of responsibility.
[does responsibility obey the distribute property? Does it obey association? (Could it ever be abelian???), etc...]
Furthermore... I can understand people making choices affect the choices that others can make as a lemma - but I don't particularly believe the TOOLS that people decide upon ARE EXACTLY those 'choice-deltas' - without a huge deviation from ordinary definition of technology ( which I think is not without rationale).
I probably shouldn't have mentioned responsibility -- it wasn't the main point I was trying to make. My point is something like "people living in a world with X" are different from "people living in a world without X" in profound ways, and it's not under anyone's control.
I'm not really interested in how we distribute blame -- only in pointing out that you can't release new technology, shrug your shoulders, and say, "Well, if it's misused, not on us." A far more accurate metaphor would be to consider us like animals in captivity.
OK. I admit that the preexisting presence of an object influences the decision to use it or not far more than most would probably care to admit. But I think one of the problems is when people start to sum history to explain something new's causality. It's like saying you should trust a prior probability to predict an event's occurrence more than the posterior probability after it happens - a new piece of evidence is categorically different than a historical tendency.. if that makes sense?
I think that Kaczynski's concerns over technology are different from those raised by your teacher. The issue isn't so much that technology can be put to bad uses, but that it changes how people engage with the world.
Analogical example: people might lie over the internet, but whether the internet has made relationships shallower is a different issue.
One of the few lessons that really stuck with me was when the teacher was discussing technology one day and one of the students grappled with this very philosophical point. Basically the posed it as something like "we should just ban technology X because people do bad things with it". This was 1998 (dating myself) so it isn't like computers were the force they are now in everyone's mind.
What unfolded is this basic discussion: people are the ones doing the bad things. Technology is just a force or thought multiplier. He explained it so well. It sort of clicked into my brain then and that discussion still sits pretty firm in my mind.
I don't think all technology can find inherently bad uses, but most of it can. Computers are at the heart of every military technology now other than explosives. Physics are at the heart of nuclear weapons. etc. etc.
I think Ted would have still did what he did. He was a narcissist at heart. He felt his view on it was somehow that much more special than the same view we arrived at in 1998 in my high school class in many ways.
That said, ill just leave this here and say I think this guy saw further into the future than most people ever have, but I see sentiments like this all over HN these days:
50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.
51. The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual's loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.