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Comment by memling | Hacker News Reader

> I saddens me to see here these sort of posts.

We should actually be much more proactive about technology: it is not an unalloyed good, and an unwillingness to consider its downsides leads to naive designs. Even leaving bad actors aside (which I don't recommend doing), what works well in a group of 10,000 users may not scale to one billion users. Where one scale has no effect on social cohesion, another scale may have a tremendously deleterious effect.

We've been doing these experiments in search and social for years now. Taking lessons from that and applying it to the next great wave of AI innovations seems like a Good Idea to me.

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It is a fool's errand to try to evaluate the net societal impact of a particular technology, even with perfect predictive power.

Looking back, what technology would you have retroactively stopped? Tetraethyl lead? Perhaps. Nuclear? Cable TV? ANNs? The Internet? Drones?

Also, the financial incentives aren't aligned. Certainly it makes sense to hold back technology to avoid embarrassment if you're a trillion dollar company; you have more to lose than gain. However, if you're a scrappy startup, it makes way more sense to roll the dice.

> It is a fool's errand to try to evaluate the net societal impact of a particular technology, even with perfect predictive power.

This really isn't true. We regularly do cost-benefit analyses for business; we don't skip them because they're not perfect predictors. We do market analysis and all kinds of customer deep dives to perfect UI/UX and customer response. We've created targeted dopamine-delivery services that are continually refined to maximize impact.

All of this implies a certain kind of ability to evaluate. Looking at tradeoffs and potential uses of technology is well within our abilities, and we should do it. We should be more skeptical of human nature, look harder at the extremes and edge cases, and work towards mitigating the risks. Will it be perfect? No. Will it be helpful? Yes.

We have bans on chemical and biological weapons, nuclear weapons are carefully monitored and there are considerable efforts to prevent proliferation. In hindsight, I think people today would have prevented the nuclear arms race, as it puts civilization at risk, and there is no end date for that.

Bang on. To add fuel to the fire (heh), the fire mentioned by parent wasn’t perceived as deadly and then suddenly was safe. It was and is deadly unless the precautions our society has spent thousands of years developing are carefully followed. Exactly what we must do with technology. Except we don’t have thousands of years.

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