[ribadeo]

There are STILL people drinking the techno-utopian kool-aid.

Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I was here when the web showed up, and I can honestly state that we featured blatant techno-utopian rhetoric in nearly every aspect of the industry, as well as our underground nocturnal allegedly musical entertainment.

I now feel rather dumb, aka a product of my time, but the notion that inventing tools would lead to them automatically being used for good was prevalent, if specious.

[toast0]

> Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary.

It's taking a little bit longer than I thought, but isn't the destruction of Twitter a positive for humanity? :P

[Nasrudith]

Tools which are not invented cannot be used for good, there is some logic behind that. It is necessary but not sufficient for good. There is also fundamentally a tension between freedom and good. Since being free to use technology also includes being able to use it for evil. Not to mention the track record of trying to enforce "goodness" has been less than promising historically.

And that is before the inherent fundamentals of dual use. There is nothing we could do to keep fire from being fundamentally capable both of keeping someone alive by preventing freezing to death, and sterilization and is usable as a self-replicating weapon of destruction. Basically you can only control how well our surroundings handle being set on fire, not make arson an impossibility.

[vundercind]

Similar journey here.

I think I’ve become some variety of techno-determinist pessimist. We are what technology lets us be, including when it comes to ethics and government. And major inventions aren’t guaranteed to push the space of the possible in the right direction—but neither can we avoid these changes, as effectively sounding the alarm early enough to matter, while also correctly calling which are bad and how they’re bad, is too hard to practically happen.

Freedom’s a fleeting gift of circumstance, and the world is a machine none of us control and that’s often bad and sometimes destroys important things, I guess is where I’m at now. I’d definite press a button to permanent un-invent the Internet, if someone put it in front of me.

[tim333]

Musk did some stuff with EVs and satellites.