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by manojpathak 38 days ago
:-) same thing happened when computer arrived and don't know why this quote stayed with me.

"Either you're part of the steamroller or you're part of the road."

If not AI then something else would have been there to disrupt.

Cheers

1 comments

Not sure if it was the intent, but this is a rather grating and shallow reply. Is that unattributed "quote" meant to be an appeal to inevitability?

If so, I'd just like to point out that none of this is inevitable, and the argument of "If I don't do it, someone else will" is a lazy excuse for abdication of social responsibility and the common good, a textbook race-to-the-bottom mentality. It's possible for a critical mass of individuals behaving ethically to prevent the "someone else" from taking actions that are harmful to society overall in the name of "disruption", as much as those bad actors would try to convince us otherwise.

Oh boi, imagine this: Someone discovered fire, and the people distributing raw meat had the same fear.

Someone invented the wheel, and the people carrying things on their shoulders had the same fear.

The list is long. Labeling a perspective "grating" or "shallow" is easy when you don't stop to ask what the other person actually meant. If you disagree, it’s usually better to ask for clarification than to assign a "lazy" motive to a stranger. My point wasn't an appeal to "social irresponsibility." There is a massive difference between "If I don't do it, someone else will" (an excuse for an action) and "Something else will" (an observation of evolution). I was not defending the ethics of corporations. I was pointing out the inevitability of change. The world moves forward regardless of whether we find the process "grating." So, NietzscheanNull (I hope it is borrowed from F. Nietzsche), it is not about a race to the bottom, it is about the reality of the road.