[delbronski]

A company named 9 mothers, which sells a service to stop artificially intelligent machines from falling from sky and blowing up everything… funded by another company that lures smart young men and women with billionaire dreams that wreak havoc on society.

Not dystopian at all.

[ianm218]

I mean killer drones are absolutely dystopian but they already exist. This critique is like the common Bay Area tactic of pretending homeless don't exist because they are inconvenient.

There is tons of offensive capability companies YC has invested in they seem like a more appropriate target. I feel like most people want there to be protection from drone swarms.

[delbronski]

Yeah, but the whole thing is still dystopian. If there was a company A planting mind controlling chips in your mind, and company B selling a service to destroy those chips… neither company makes the whole thing less dystopian.

[ianm218]

In this situation company B is clearly making the world less dystopian then.

But anyway - the parent comment is upset about YC investing in a defense company that isn’t doing offensive systems because they find the idea that dystopian weapon exist at all uncomfortable. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

[mediaman]

It sounds like you feel that autonomous killer drones are a dystopia, and that anything related to the drones -- including mitigating their effect -- is therefore dystopian in itself, even if it is combating that dystopia? Sort of a tarring by contextual environment? I suppose by that reasoning a socialist is a capitalist because even though they fight capitalism they live in a capitalist society.

I'm not really following.

[delbronski]

“It sounds like you feel that autonomous killer drones are a dystopia, and that anything related to the drones“

Yes!!! What do you think a dystopia is? The entire world of 1984 is a dystopia. Just cause there’s a company making money to “combat” that dystopia doesn’t make the thing any less dystopian.

[mediaman]

That sounds like a fallacy of composition to me.

That some element of the world is dystopian means the world is therefore dystopian.

And if the world is dystopian, then every element of it is dystopian: no element of the world is not dystopian.

It's an interesting "poison the well" type of argument, but it also means that if one accepts that all of human history has had dystopian elements (chemical weapons, slavery, feudalism, etc etc), that therefore the world has always been dystopian, and that then therefore everything in the world has also always been dystopian. And you've created a label that includes everything that has ever existed and excludes none of it, which is meaningless.