| HN Mirror

There were, in the distant past, more inventions with immediate uses than today, but most of them also had some pretty horrendous effects that took generations to refine.

I wouldn't be surprised if the transition to farming and the use of fire and all the rest had lots of things we would prefer to avoid if we had present day values and information.

Some things had some immediate use but nowhere near what they have now. The internet was an amazing innovation. But it would just be some military research lab experiments without users, and most webmasters just followed a "How to set up apache" tutorial. Some created something new via their content. Others told stories grounded in heavy academic research.

Drugs and medical products have killed amazing numbers of people, and require massive amounts of tests and calculations to show safety. We even STILL get it wrong sometimes, which means we probably need even more boring tedious data analysis, and probably eventually AI support for doctors.

My favorite example is the industrial revolution. It hurt a lot of people, made a lot of pollution, and there's not much from that era I'd want to use. But over time, the things they invented were refined and recombined, along with some new stuff too, into things that are hundreds of times cheaper, lighter, and smaller.

Light bulbs had a lot of uses. They also were used to mess with work schedules and add more hours. They used a ton of energy. We fixed that with automation and a better understanding of benefits of shorter hours, along with tech like LEDs.

So many inventions seem to initially be used to create new needs that didn't exist before, and add new demands on people, and to make use of new resources that were originally idle for things that we were mostly fine without. Eventually they get refined into something that doesn't really impose any extra burden, and then finally they can be refined to something that minimizes pollution. Eventually we can even replace them entirely with newer tech that has the same benefits.

I can't argue with the problem of people not really reading the article though. Sometimes it seema like 99% of threads on all sites are tangentially related philosophy discussions that only loosely referenced the original article.