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Comment by ralph84 | Hacker News Reader

Big surprise, the CEO wants another Industrial Revolution. As long as muh GDP is growing, the human and environmental destruction left in the wake is a small price to pay for making his class richer.

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We all do. Humanity is better off thanks to the industrial revolution.

You wouldn't choose to back to the prior time and same will be true with this revolution.

While I think you're right, your sentiment tends to be used to justify a lot of the bad stuff that is outweighed. "Humanity" is a vague target and can somehow be doing great even when we have plenty of human rights abuses, climate change, economic exploitation, etc.. (If this sounds political, consider that people bring up politics when they wish for power, or rather, change.) Well, most of us on HN are probably going to be in the up-and-up part of humanity no matter what, so there's that, but I don't think that should be the end of the discussion. Please consider that you do not speak for humanity. For that matter, neither do I. Humanity is all of us, not a statistical estimate for someone's purpose. If you feel a certain way about anything, great, but there are likely people who are justified in disagreeing.

I don't think luddites have a tendency of getting chosen to be CEOs of successful companies, nor do they have the tendency of creating successful companies.

Certainly, but I interject that I do dislike how the modern perception of "Luddite" frames them as unthinking objectors to progress when really they were protesting their economic obsoletion. We should have CEOs who care about the consequences of what they're doing to the poorer classes. That's basic human decency, but we're saddled with what amounts to sociopaths and psychopaths instead.

There's technology and then there's the sociopaths, and unfortunately the two are becoming increasingly conflated.

Yes the oligarchs will use this technology against the masses. On the flipside, the masses can also use the technology against the oligarchs

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