Comment by scriptman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scriptman | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think you are just proving the author's point.

The author is saying that people living today are overly concerned about the environmental effects of experimenting with new technologies when compared with people in the recent past.

You, being a person living today, have just expressed that you are overly concerned about the environmental effects of experimenting with new technologies. That's not a criticism, we are all a product of the time we live in.

That's not to say that people in the past had no concern about the environment, it's just that they weighted the costs and benefits differently to modern people when comparing anticipated benefits for humanity against potential environmental effects.

The author correlates this different weighting with increased technological progress in the past. I think that is very hard to measure as it really depends on what you value.

I agree that you can list examples of people racing ahead to use new technologies and there being negative consequences. But what about all the times that humans raced ahead with new technologies and there were positive consequences? If we didn't race ahead would we be better off or worse off overall? When you delay implementing a technology due to concern about the potential side effects you make people worse off in the interim than what they would have been if you went ahead. We can never really know what all the consequences of our actions will be until we act.

>have just expressed that you are overly concerned

The "overly" in that sentence is a value judgement. It may or may not be 'overly' to have a number of concerns over certain advances.

The difference between the 60's and current day is that they had fewer examples of the disastrous negative consequences that can accompany new inventions.

"We cannot know the consequences of our actions until we act" is not entirely true - we can infer and put in reasonable risk management processes.

>The "overly" in that sentence is a value judgement. It may or may not be 'overly' to have a number of concerns over certain advances.

I agree, it is a value judgement. I agree it is possible that people today may or may not be overly concerned. But outside of maths, we only have value judgements to know what is a good decision and what is a bad decision. It all depends on what we want. What the author is pointing out is that you can't have your cake and eat it too - if we are so concerned about the environment to the point that it limits technological progress, then we'll have less technological progress than we would otherwise have had. I'm not sure you can argue with that. Maybe that's a good thing from some people's point of view, but for other people (including probably many people living several decades ago) the current level of concern that we have for the environment today would be unduly high compared with their perceived benefits from technological progress. But maybe we have our level of concern exactly right? Who knows?

>The difference between the 60's and current day is that they had fewer examples of the disastrous negative consequences that can accompany new inventions.

In absolute terms this is correct. Of course the present has more examples of something happening than the past. But you are forgetting that we have more examples of positive consequences in that have accompanied new inventions too. Why should the negative consequences be weighted more heavily than the positive consequences?

In relative terms, I have to disagree with you though. People living in the 60's had either lived through 1 or 2 world wars or had relatives and friends that recently lived through 2 world wars. Both of these wars exploited technological advances that meant more people could suffer the brutality of war than at any previous time in history.

>"We cannot know the consequences of our actions until we act" is not entirely true - we can infer and put in reasonable risk management processes.

You changed what I wrote, which isn't very polite. I said we cannot know "all" the consequences. I think when the word "all" is included it's hard to argue with. You are right though that we can try to manage risks, but the point I was making in the context of the article is that there is a risk when not acting too, which is difficult to measure but isn't 0.

I think this discussion has made me think more about what the author was trying to say - that people living today focus on the negatives of technological advances. I actually wonder if the language of "risk" has made that worse. I talk about risks myself all the time in my day job... something to think about :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com