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Comment by AliAdams | Hacker News Reader

We are trending towards a world where individuals are becoming more omniscient and more omnipotent. Where any motivated US citizen can purchase a drone, look up how to build a bomb or plant a GPS tracker.

Regulation to prevent access to these capabilities feels like throwing rocks into a river; it may slow some things down, but it seems an inevitability that the capabilities of technologically augmented citizens will continue to grow - we as a society need to work out how to adapt to deal with this future in a meaningful way, avoiding knee-jerk policies like drone registration that inconvenience the masses and serve as no real barrier to the malicious.

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Make a better society.

There are a lot of crime of opportunity but just as much criminality from circumstance.

These are smart people doing very bad things, they need to be identified and put to constructive and rewarding work.

Societal change is at a different scale and pace as other changes.

Not saying the idea isn't correct - just that theres a lot left to figure out in the details.

People cant get to gym or eat healthy even if it has massive differences to their life style.

Universal Basic Income and decriminalization of drugs and single payer universal healthcare would go a long way towards making the whole criminality arms race dry up and disappear. Desperation, as a constant social background hum, would largely stop.

Poverty, social misery and drug addiction no doubt leads to lots of petty crime but hostage takings and illegal immigration is not going to get solved with UBI.

Decriminalisation of drugs (Portugal) would not negate the need of going after importers and large scale dealers.

Full drug legalization with standardized safe supply would make importing it as negligible a business as moonshine running.

To solve illegal immigration, UBI has to be extended globally - and then the border can simply be taken down.

Lofty ambitions, won't ever happen.

That's naive, there will always be people looking to subvert the system because they want to see the world burn.

> put to constructive and rewarding work

i like this idea, but i can not quite see how the US constitution's system of individual rights would allow the government to "put" anyone to work. the most it could do is offer someone a job.

and that someone would be free to reject such an offer because it wasn't profitable enough, or because criminal friends and acquaintances might prove to be very threatening to someone if someone were to accept such a job.

I should clarify, I don't mean putting them to work. Like a punitive or job placement type of thing. These are smart people motivated by risk and reward. And they can plan and think and follow through. They just need easy pathways to jobs and lifestyles that can let them do that.

We as a Society need to stop playing in to the fears and come to understand that (in the US anyway) violence is at a all time low and we are not in danger

We also need to stop criminalizing voluntary activity of adult and only criminalize things that injure or harm people involuntarily (i.e legalize drugs, prostitution, etc)

You have to understand that statists, many in government don't want citizens to be omniscient, omnipotent or anything else that gives individuals more power.

Oh no siree bob...that must be stopped with only government authorities to have these abilities

Strongly agree. I feel very strongly that the state needs to be investing into how to use drones to defend against drones. At the end of the day there is no real way to prevent a malicious actor from building an autonomous kill bot, so we need to have the capability to react to this sort of threat.

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