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New Technology Should Be Neither Feared Nor Trusted (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: How should we think about new and future technologies? The two main stances seem to be extreme optimism and extreme pessimism. A better approach would be careful planning and management. Optimists tend to overlook the fact that the technological successes of the past required a lot of social engineering before their benefits became widely shared. Countries like Maoist China and North Korea implemented perverse economic systems that withheld the bounty of modern technology from most of their citizens. And poor countries didn't really begin to beat poverty until decades after colonialism ended. Pessimists, meanwhile, often assume that new technologies can be stopped in their tracks by act of popular will. They probably can't. Even the most impoverished, repressive regimes of the 20th century adopted new technologies, and often suffered their worst consequences. Scientific research and invention, meanwhile, can be forbidden in one country or another, but probably not at the global level: Someone, somewhere, will study even the scariest ideas.
A better approach, then, is technology management. We should be as realistic as we can about each innovation's potential benefits and dangers. And instead of thinking about how to suppress new technologies, we should think about how to regulate them and channel them toward broad social benefit. Emerging technologies like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence are at our doorstep, and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. But letting them develop haphazardly entails large risks. Instead, government and industry need to be funding proactive efforts to bring them into widespread, well-regulated use. In the end, technology is what we choose to make of it.
A better approach, then, is technology management. We should be as realistic as we can about each innovation's potential benefits and dangers. And instead of thinking about how to suppress new technologies, we should think about how to regulate them and channel them toward broad social benefit. Emerging technologies like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence are at our doorstep, and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. But letting them develop haphazardly entails large risks. Instead, government and industry need to be funding proactive efforts to bring them into widespread, well-regulated use. In the end, technology is what we choose to make of it.
Reasonable regulation of new technology for the better of mankind is not missing because there's only overly optimistic or pessimistic people.
It is missing because those who see a chance to personally profit from the new technolgy fear that their profits could be limited by regulation, and those who expect to not personally profit from a new technology would rather like to not see it being used at all.
Technology fundamentally breaks society in a capitalist world. Markets simply don't exist in a post high tech society.
I watched as software was something people controlled to something stolen on the other side of the internet. The average person is incapable of making rational long term decisions regarding technology.
Videogames are a case in point. We are already in a dystopia, the idea that we aren't is a bit of bullshit. You have no market power where big companies can force policy and you can't do shit about it.
People who believe in the free market at this point are idiots, you can't hold any organization accountable when they are 100's of miles away from you. The idea that 'the free market decides' is bullshit.
The average person is much too stupid and uninformed to even participate in a modern high tech capitalist economy.
Things like league of legends and dota 2 are already dystopian software - it's the rise of the ignorance and stupidity of the masses that enables mass privacy invasion via entertainment and other means.