Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2ndorderthought | Hacker News Reader

Nope. That's not how any of this is trending at all. Being optimistic is good for getting through tough times. Albeit sometimes. It might help people sleep at night but sleeping our way into technofacism won't make it any better for us or our children.

View on HN

Did you have a better path forward?

I point to Michael Nielsen's commentary on Vulnerable World Hypothesis [1] again:

>do you think inexpensive, easy-to-follow recipes for building catastrophic technologies will one day be found, given sufficient understanding of science and technology?

With every increase in technology and science, the probability increases, and as a result, society will necessitate ever more surveillance. The reason provably beneficial surveillance is important to discuss is that we need a careful middle path between totalitarianism and outright catastrophe. It is the opposite of "sleeping our way" into technofascism.

1. https://michaelnotebook.com/vwh/index.html

I disagree on a fundamental level. Crime is down. It's been trending down since the 90s. The 90s to the early 2000s ushered in more technological change than the century prior as far as the common person is concerned.

There's no need for mass surveillance and there never will be.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.", spoken by someone who knew better and just so happened to help found this country.

Additionally, you say there is no need for mass surveillance, but we already have mass surveillance. Every big tech company knows a lot more about the average user than any government has known about a citizen prior to the 1980s. We should consider how to deal with mass surveillance, not to pretend like it will go away.

I disagree. We should write laws to protect ourselves and our children instead of continuing down this path. Other countries have. They are so relieved each time tech companies get high on their own supply.

If car companies had no laws around safety we wouldn't just accept it right? No we would be pissed off and make our representatives represent us.

If you zoom out more, we are incredibly fortunate that nuclear weapons turned out to be very difficult to build. There is no guarantee that future discoveries won't uncover things that are both easy to build and incredibly destructive.

Examples listed in the article [1]: >easily constructed nuclear weapons, perhaps inspired by one of the Taylor-Zimmerman-Phillips designs; easily-constructed antimatter bombs; destructive self-replicating nanobots – while the notion of "grey goo" is sometimes ridiculed, something like grey goo has happened at least twice on earth (the origin of life, and the great oxygenation event); large-scale computer security compromise, leading to failures or takeover of crucial systems (electric grid, banking, the supply chain, the nuclear strike capability, and so on). And then there's the risk many see as most imminent: biorisk, small groups deliberately or accidentally creating or discovering pathogens far more devastating than COVID-19. Unfortunately, this gets easier every year.

1. https://michaelnotebook.com/optimism/index.html

Nope still doesn't matter.

Most threats on this scale ex grey goo or inviting aliens to come destroy the planet are going to happen if they can happen. No amount of cameras or monitoring will fix it. Not without unlawful and indefinite detainment if pretty much every person anyways.

Now let's say someone is doing something less apocalyptic. Same problem. We have had school shooters be investigated by the FBI before they did what they did. Guess what! Nothing changed. Why? Because you can't predict the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com