[scylla]

How will the people who continuously rationalize cars justify that they are destroying a profession - horse carriage driver - that was fun and profitable ?

How will the people who continuously rationalize the Internet justify that they are destroying a profession - travel agents - that was fun and profitable?

If we blocked every possible innovation because it lowered the fun of something existing we'd never have progressed past the Stone Age.

[3451298]

Professionally driving a horse carriage wasn't fun. Noise, boredom, unloading things manually if it was a carriage for goods. It was probably a moderately horrible job.

Travel agents used to give better recommendations and even cheaper flights. There is little innovation in the ad laden travel sites that give bad deals. Case in point: Often if you call a hotel directly you get a better price than on the sites and they don't give you the room next to the elevator that appears to be reserved for people who order via the sites.

Real anti-stone-age innovation has mostly been in the physical world to free up time for thinking. That is what the rich people who cannot think for themselves now want to take away.

[scottious]

cars are not exactly a success story. Both of your examples (cars and internet) are things that had some great applications but also have been mis-used or over-used.

cars: people now live completely car-dependent lives and drive way too much. our infrastructure cannot handle people driving so much and it's extremely expensive and bad for our health and terrible for the environment

internet: well... obviously... social media and all the harms that come with that.

[scylla]

Even if you believe that humanity would have been better if a some global dictator could have stopped the Internet and the Internal combustion system, that's simply not how society works.

If you want another analogy, it's like Feudal Knights complaining about the introduction of the crossbow. Not only were their efforts doomed to fail even the question became irrelevant with the unstoppable march of technological innovation.

[scottious]

But I'm not arguing for stopping the internet or stopping cars from existing. I think both of those things have great applications that shouldn't be ignored.

All I'm saying is that many technologies are a double-edged sword. They can have wonderful uses that make life better, but they can also make life worse in some ways. The Internet and cars are two perfect examples of that. And by the time we realize the harms of these technologies, it's too late.

So perhaps the challenge with any technology is figuring out how to reap the benefits without letting things get out of hand.

[throw4847285]

Help, the whigs are loose on HackerNews again! Quick, grab even a rudimentary understanding of human history. It's their one weakness.