[mdp2021]

Jürgen Schmidhuber said years ago during a live QnA that the debate is not dissimilar from that at the invention of fire: "Oh my, it's dangerous" // "Yes, but it is there - it is facts now".

Mass extinction through technology has been a known reality since decades. The technology remains the enabler, the responsible remains the human actor.

[tivert]

> The technology remains the enabler, the responsible remains the human actor.

That's an awful lot like "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Some tech people just want to keep building, consequences be damned. Mentally shifting the responsibility one step further down the road is just a way for them to dodge responsibility.

It's worth remembering the developer is also "human actor." He's still responsible if he builds a dangerous technology, and leaves it for someone else to push the button.

[mdp2021]

It depends case by case. Examples abound, too many.

The atomic bomb? But Nazis had the V2.

The videogame? But the creator rewarded the creative, entertainment and possibly artistic results more than the idea of collective time of addiction, or maybe thought "better than chemicals"...

The axe? It is for chopping trees. Dynamite? Mines. Death ray? To defend yourself from wolves etc.

Sure there will be cases in which someone develops something inherently and only harmful, but it is not the general rule.

[tivert]

It's worth remembering "past performance is not indicative of future results."

Don't reason about the safety of potential future technology from the safety of past technology, generally. That gets you into nonsense like "my highly contagious bio-weapon won't destroy civilization because the axe didn't." You've got to look at the particularly characteristics of the new technology, with a cold and realistic understanding of human nature.

[mdp2021]

You are pointing to the risk that rogue engineers deluded themselves thinking that past technologies were not "that" devastating. That would be an error on more sides: not only you have not died by fall until the ground so past trend does not determine the future, but also, some past technologies /have/ been devastating.

Still, it is pretty uncommon in general to develop a «highly contagious bio-weapon»: when it happens - and it happens - the destructive context is clear. But there are also very many cases in which the productive or destructive adoption of an otherwise neutral technology is critical. The progresses enabled by Yann LeCun: recognize targets, or thieves, or citizens, or tumors...