this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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There is no such thing as too quickly. People went from shitting in wooden outhouses with no electricity to man landing on the moon and harnessing the power of atoms in one life time, things have slowed down considerably since.
And you don't have to get a brain implant, nor will such a thing realistically even be available for decades still.
Of course there's such a thing as too quickly. Plenty of railroad workers died because people didn't realize that there's a huge difference between falling off a horse running ten miles an hour and a train going thirty. How many people got sick because someone thought putting lead in gas was a swell idea? What about Thalidomide? Heck, people thought heroin would cure opium addiction.
Just because people are reckless doesn't mean that it's a good thing.
I'm sure we'll keep racing ahead, but don't confuse activity with progress.
Those weren't about speed of technology, it was capitalism being capitalism without being held back by regulation or worker protection.
How many people died designing the Internet? How many died to figure out how to land a rocket booster on a barge? How many people died figuring out mRNA vaccines?
A lot of people died designing the internet, because the original digital computers were created as a result of code breaking in WW2 and work done by the defense industry to make better missiles.
Same with space flight. You couldn't have landed that rocket without the V1 and V2 rockets the Nazis dropped on London.
You seem to have some idea that scientific progress can occur in an ivory tower, untouched by base ideas like money or war.
Like it or not, technology grows out of the larger society. If there's capitalism, capitalism will guide what gets built. Anything else is putting the cart before the horse.
Might want to catch a few episodes of this series that deals with the history of technology and how ideas become actual inventions.
https://youtu.be/XetplHcM7aQ
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/XetplHcM7aQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
See how I picked specific, more recent examples? Ones where OSHA existed?
That's the difference. You can't just damn the whole tech tree because the primitive precursor came about during WW2.
The turing architecture, which laid the groundwork for everything, wasn't even about war - it came from a man who was aiming far over the horizon, and used code breaking to fund his dream. His dream was a true AI.
Same with the rocket - it wasn't created to kill, it became a tool of death first because that's how it was funded.
We can do technology safely. Capitalism and war are both just incentives to do it recklessly. They also shape the form it takes, usually not for the better
I don't know why you're saying technology is responsible for war deaths either... The war drives the technology, not the other way around. Technology changes society and changes war, but you can have both with stagnant technology. At worst, technology magnifies the scale we act on, but it's not the source.
Technology comes from people who like to push limits. If you give the right type of people the resources they need, they'll create it.
I've watched plenty of YouTube videos about the development of tech. It's interesting, but I prefer the YouTubers who push the limits in their garage... Especially the things that exist but aren't economically viable, like paint that passively cools or diy algae bioreactors
Where did I damn all tech?
I just pointed out that tech doesn't exist in a vacuum.
It doesn't matter how noble the first rocketeers were, their toys ended up as weapons.
The existence of OSHA proves my point; we only got OSHA because things were so bad that workers started forming Unions, and the Unions had the power to force the government to start protecting the workers.
If you actually watched the video you'd see what I am saying.