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by pwillia7 178 days ago
I don't disagree with that, just that there's anything that can be done about it. Which technology did we successfully roll back? Nukes are the closest I think you can get and those are very hard to make and still exist in abundance, we just somewhat controlled who can have them
2 comments
username223 178 days ago
> Which technology did we successfully roll back?

Quite a few come to mind: chemical and biological weapons, beanie babies, NFTs, garbage pail kids... Some take real effort to eradicate, some die out when people get bored and move on.

Today's version of "AI," i.e. large language models for emitting code, is on the level of fast fashion. It's novel and surprising that you can get a shirt for $5, then you realize that it's made in a sweatshop, and it falls apart after a few washings. There will always be a market for low-quality clothes, but they aren't "disrupting non-nudity."

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pwillia7 178 days ago
Chemical weapons still exist and are used[1]

So are beanie babies, NFTs and garbage pail kids -- Things that have fallen out of fashion isn't the same thing as eradicating a technology. I think that's part of the difficulty, how could you roll back knowledge without some Khmer Rouge generational trauma?

I think about the original use of steam engines and the industrial revolution -- Steam engines were so inefficient, their use didn't make sense outside of pulling its own fuel out of the ground -- Many people said haha look how silly and inefficient this robot labor is. We can see how that all turned out.[2]

1: https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/timeline-syrian-chemi...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine

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username223 178 days ago
> Things that have fallen out of fashion isn't the same thing as eradicating a technology.

That's true. Ruby still exists, for example, though it's sitting down below COBOL on the Tiobe index. There's probably a community trading garbage pail kids on Facebook Marketplace as well. Ideas rarely die completely.

Burning fossil fuels to turn heat into kinetic energy is genuinely better than using draft animals or human slaves. Creating worse code (or worse clothing) for less money is a tradeoff that only works for some situations.

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stemlord 178 days ago
It's not about "rolling back" technology it's about democratizing its benefit
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