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Originally Posted by peter12
As an aside to all this social conformity that is typical to a CP thread...
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Ah, the old "I'm a rebel therefore I must be right!" dodge. Who used that first, was it Plato disrespecting Socrates, or was it Aristotle making fun of both of them in his memoirs?
Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
There is this ideological perspective on technology, that it is plainly inevitable, and nothing we can do will be able to slow or halt its progress. This is demonstrably wrong. Anyone who advised their kids to take nuclear engineering as a career path today would be certifiably crazy.
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Weaponized nuclear tech has only been around for 70 years. I'd be a little hesitant in proclaiming it successfully contained, especially when states like North Korea, Pakistan, and apartheid South Africa had/have such weapons. Besides which, nukes require all kinds of expensive and obvious infrastructure, whereas computers are ubiquitous and cheap, programmers and computer scientists plentiful, and robots and drones easy to buy or make yourself.
Additionally, "we" is pretty vague - who is "we"? If you think the Russians, just as one example, are going to forgo a possible military advantage because it might be dangerous, you are dreaming the big dream indeed. Nor will the Americans (who love the idea of fighting wars remotely more than anyone) give up this research - even if they somehow were convinced to sign treaties to that effect. After all, look at how seriously they took the bans on gas and biological weapons...
Saying that we *could* stay out of such research is like saying we *could* feed all the world's hungry, it's not a matter of what's theoretically possible if people were social insects working for the common good at all times, but what is actually possible given people as unruly, selfish, and ultimately short-sighted and unevenly sentient pack animals.