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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.
Can't we just ignore it until it becomes either established, obsolete, or discarded technology? We have protocols (however poor) for handling those things.
You can, be my guest. However, if you want to become rich or otherwise highly successful with a technology, you'll need to get involved with it way before this stage. Not necessarily embrace it in the same sense -- for example, you could write Android apps without wasting your life hooked on a phone, but not if you completely disregard them. I guess technically it would be possible to ignore everything around you and invent something brilliant that other people want, but in practice you'd need to know something about what's going on around you.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
its the same damn shit over and over again that no one really wants but gets shoved onto us, then praised as a "technical innovation"
My two favourite examples: hoverboards that don't actually hover, and androids that aren't exactly humanoid robots. Image means everything, actual new technology not so much, unless it helps improve the image. In fact this already happened years ago: Google and Lucasfilm threatened to sue an actual robotics company with "droid" in its name. The company changed its name from Zendroid to Zenrobotics to avoid a lawsuit.
In a way, this is part of a larger quest of a vocabulary Nazi. For example, "cybernetics" used to have a specific technical meaning in control and feedback theory, but now "cyber" just means anything you do on a computer or teh internets. Along with "android" and "bandwidth", everything is collapsing into this vague computer/internet thingy, as if nothing of interest happened outside of them. New technical terms are only coined to describe a new piece of software (which in all likelihood reimplements something already discovered by 60s/70s programmers).
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I love technology but I know that we should be very weary of our own technological advancement because of the amount of power it can give a small group of people or a single individual. Technology itself is harmless (until it starts thinking for itself) but it's the sociopaths that exploit technologies in the worst possible way that you should fear because they will take advantage of it. This means that all new technology should be viewed through the lens of "how could someone use this against me" because it's going to happen.
Welcome to the dystopian present where a large portion of the population is addicted to some smartphone applications as a result of neuroscience.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Technology is not what we consciously choose to make of it; it is like water: it finds its own level. If a thing works, and there is a perceived profit or benefit from using it, it will be used and it will be used recklessly to maximize profit or perceived benefit.
E Proelio Veritas.