Hacker News Reader

Comment by oldandtired | Hacker News Reader

Technology of any kind is not inherently evil, not guns, computers, genetic manipulation, not even nuclear bombs. Evil only arises when man uses and formulates technology for evil purposes.

Too often, people get "a bee in their bonnets" over some form of technology when it is abused and misused by other people. They don't separate the tool from the tool user and associate evil with the tool.

Sometimes there is a case for not developing some form of technology because the development requires the destruction and damage to people and the environment. Here the problem is still people not the technology itself.

View on HN

This is a bit of a slippery slope. Take gas chambers for example. We all know what they were designed to do, and what they were used to. So was it ok to design them, because only those who used them were at fault? Was it ok to build them? Was it ok to execute the command of pushing the button, because you didn't issue the command? Who's at fault here?

Why is it ok to design and build algorithms that make people unhappy?

Before the gas chamber was the firing squad. Before that was the noose, the axe, and the guillotine.

Humans have a long history of killing each other, and typically over time (with a few exceptions such as the electric chair) the methods have generally gotten more humane (if state sanctioned punishment resulting in death can ever be considered humane) and when those methods failed to be available, no human government has ever held off on using a more barbaric act of killing in it's place.

Technology will either evolve without us, or less humane methods will continue to be used. Progress is both a promise and a threat.

> Before the gas chamber was the firing squad. Before that was the noose, the axe, and the guillotine.

That doesn't answer any of the questions posed.

Right, you need to continue reading.

Even if the Gas Chamber had never been designed, those people would of still been marched outside and shot by firing squad.

Technology, and the obesssion with it and being "dynamic" was absolutely a cornerstone of Nazism. You don't know the first things about it is all.

“But does it scale?”

I mean, how much harm has to be done before some tech is unethical?

Take World of Warcraft, for instance: no one will dispute that the game was designed to keep you playing a very long time, and that many players were (are) addicted and wasted an excessive amount of time on the game, many people lost jobs, got kicked out of school, even ended marriages. That's real damage. But, many people also simply enjoyed the game, spent time with friends, one of my old school buddies even found his wife playing the game.

So, was creating WoW an unethical move on the developers' part?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com