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Comment by bigDinosaur | Hacker News Reader

'Technology is neutral' is simply a banal observation that technology is only ever used by humans who can decide what to do with it. It's not saying that a new technology doesn't enable new and terrible human choices, simply that those choices rest with the people, not the technology itself.

Knives seem like the perfect example, really. We do leave them lying around in our drawers, usually under zero real security against any malicious guest, but we recognise it is about the choices of the people we invite into our houses, not the existence of the knives themselves, that is the real danger.

You can certainly argue though as you have that humans simply shouldn't have the choice to do certain things - what comes to mind immediately is nuclear weapons.

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Knives always seem like a perfect example because they really do have so many good uses, along with some bad ones. But just because two pieces of technology both have good uses and bad uses doesn't mean they're morally equivalent. As to your example, even if I trust people who enter my house I wouldn't want to store a nuke in my kitchen drawers :) And there are many ways to discuss the ethics of tech beyond "good and bad uses", such as to what extent a user of the technology controls it or is controlled by it, what are the negative externalities, does it increase power asymmetry, etc.

> Knives seem like the perfect example, really. We do leave them lying around in our drawers, usually under zero real security against any malicious guest, but we recognise it is about the choices of the people we invite into our houses, not the existence of the knives themselves, that is the real danger.

The problem comes from the scale, it is a knife vs nuke question, but you seem to stop a bit too short in your reasoning. Yes both can kill, they just don't operate on the same scale.

You could forge documents 400 years ago, it doesn't mean it would be ethical to release a software that let you forge any document at scale instantly and for free in a single click

One steam engine is a marvel, 1.4B ICE cars on earth is a nightmare

It's always about scale, almost never about the original purpose/intent of the tech. Modern tech develops and spread infinitely faster than anything from even 20 years ago

Yeah, my argument with the knives was pretty weak and I was trying to make the point you make in your last paragraph. I think I meant to type "lying around children". I should've said bombs.

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