Based on our earlier discussion of exactly this topic, I would say he wants to use some way of slowing down technological progress… My main argument against this is that I don’t think we have a way of slowing technological progress that a) affects all actors (it wouldn’t be a better world if only those nations not obeying international law were making technological progress), and b) has no negative ideological effects. (Has there ever been a regime that was pro-moderation-of-progress without being outright anti-progress? I don’t know, I haven’t thoroughly researched this, so maybe I’m just pattern-matching.) Also, I’m not sure how you’d set up the economic system of that society so there weren’t big incentives for people or companies to innovate and profit from it.
Of course, “no one has ever succeeded at X in the past” isn’t an unstoppable argument against X at all… But I am worried than any attempt to transform our current, no-brakes-on society into a ‘moderated’ society would be messy in the short term, and probably fail in the long term. (At our current level of technology, it’s basically possible for individuals to make progress on given problems, and that would be very hard to stop.)
I disagree with your claim that our current society has no brakes on technological innovation. It does have such brakes, and it could have more if we wanted.
But slowing down technological innovation in and of itself seems absurd. Either technological innovation has been a net harm, or a net gain, or neither. If neither, I see no reason to want to slow it down. Slowing down a net gain seems like an actively bad idea. And slowing down a net harm seems inadequate; if technological innovation is a net harm it should be stopped and reversed, not merely slowed down.
It seems more valuable to identify the differentially harmful elements of technological innovation and moderate the process to suppress those while encouraging the rest of it. I agree that that is difficult to do well and frequently has side-effects. (As it does in our currently moderated system.)
Which doesn’t mean an unmoderated system would be better. (Indeed, I’m inclined to doubt it would.)
It seems more valuable to identify the differentially harmful elements of technological innovation and moderate the process to suppress those while encouraging the rest of it. I agree that that is difficult to do well and frequently has side-effects.
I think there might be a part of my brain that, when given the problem “moderate technological progress in general”, automatically converts it to “slow down harmful technology while leaving beneficial technology alone” and then gets stuck trying to solve that. But you’re right, I can think of various elements in our society that slow down progress (regulations concerning drug testing before market release, anti-stem-cell-research lobbying groups, etc).
Sure… this is why I asked the question in the first place, of what kind of moderation.
Framing the problem as the OP does here, as an opposition between a belief in the “unquestioned rightness of [..] innovation that disregards any negative results” and some unclear alternative, seems a strategy better optimized towards the goal of creating conflict than the goal of developing new ideas.
Since I don’t particularly value conflict for its own sake, I figured I’d put my oar in the water in the direction of inviting new ideas.
I don’t think I know anyone who seriously endorses doing everything that anyone labels “technological innovation”, but I know people who consider most of our existing regulations intended to prevent some of those things to do more harm than good. Similarly, I don’t think I know anyone who seriously endorses doing none of those things (or at least, no one who retroactively endorses not having done any of those things we’ve already done), but I know people who consider our current level of regulation problematically low.
Similarly, I don’t think I know anyone who seriously endorses doing none of those things (or at least, no one who retroactively endorses not having done any of those things we’ve already done)
FWIW, I know plenty of libertarians who think regulation is unquestionably bad, and will happily insist the world would be better without regulations on technological advancement, even that one (for whatever one you’d like).
I don’t think we have a way of slowing technological progress that a) affects all actors (it wouldn’t be a better world if only those nations not obeying international law were making technological progress), and b) has no negative ideological effects.
By “negative ideological effects” do you mean the legitimization of some body of religious knowledge? As stated in my post to Dave, if your objective is to re-condition society to have a rational majority, I can see how religious knowledge (which is often narratively rather than logically sequenced) would be seen as having “negative ideological effects. However, I would argue that there are functional benefits of religion. One of which is the limitation of power. Historically technological progress has for millennia been slowed down by religious and moral barriers. One of the main effects of the scientific revolution was to dissolve these barriers that impeded the production of power (See Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia). However, the current constitution of American society still contains tools of limitation, even non-religious ones. People don’t often look at it this way, but taxation is used in an incredibly moral way. Governments tax highly what they want to dissuade and provide exemptions, even subsidies for what they want to promote. The fact that there is a higher tax on cigarettes is a type of morally based restriction on the expansion of the tobacco industry in our society.
Stronger than taxation there is ability to flat out illegalize something or stigmatize it. Compared to the state of marijuana as an illegal substance and the stigma it carries in many communities makes the limitation of the cigarettes industry through taxation seems relatively minor.
Whether social stigma, taxation, or illegalization, there are several tools at our nation’s disposal to alter the development of industries due to subjective moral values, next to none of which are aimed at limiting the information-technology industries. There is no tax on certain types of research based on a judgment of what is right or wrong. To the contrary, the vast majority of scientific research is for the development of weapons technologies. And who are the primary funders of this research? The department of homeland security and the U.S military make up somewhere around 65-80% of academic research (this statistic might be a little off).
In regards to non-academic research, one of the primary impetuses may not be militarization, but is without doubt entrepreneurialism. Where the primary focus of a person or group is the development of capital the purpose of innovation becomes not fulfilling some need, but to create needs to fulfill the endless goal of cultivating more wealth. Jean Baudrillard is a very interesting sociologist, whose work is built around the idea that in western society no longer do the desires (demands) of people lead to the production of a supply, but rather where desires (demands) are artificially produced by capitalists to fulfill their supplies. A large part of this production is symbolic,, and ultimately distorts the motivations and actions of people to contradict the territories they live in.
Based on our earlier discussion of exactly this topic, I would say he wants to use some way of slowing down technological progress… My main argument against this is that I don’t think we have a way of slowing technological progress that a) affects all actors (it wouldn’t be a better world if only those nations not obeying international law were making technological progress), and b) has no negative ideological effects. (Has there ever been a regime that was pro-moderation-of-progress without being outright anti-progress? I don’t know, I haven’t thoroughly researched this, so maybe I’m just pattern-matching.) Also, I’m not sure how you’d set up the economic system of that society so there weren’t big incentives for people or companies to innovate and profit from it.
Of course, “no one has ever succeeded at X in the past” isn’t an unstoppable argument against X at all… But I am worried than any attempt to transform our current, no-brakes-on society into a ‘moderated’ society would be messy in the short term, and probably fail in the long term. (At our current level of technology, it’s basically possible for individuals to make progress on given problems, and that would be very hard to stop.)
I disagree with your claim that our current society has no brakes on technological innovation. It does have such brakes, and it could have more if we wanted.
But slowing down technological innovation in and of itself seems absurd. Either technological innovation has been a net harm, or a net gain, or neither. If neither, I see no reason to want to slow it down. Slowing down a net gain seems like an actively bad idea. And slowing down a net harm seems inadequate; if technological innovation is a net harm it should be stopped and reversed, not merely slowed down.
It seems more valuable to identify the differentially harmful elements of technological innovation and moderate the process to suppress those while encouraging the rest of it. I agree that that is difficult to do well and frequently has side-effects. (As it does in our currently moderated system.)
Which doesn’t mean an unmoderated system would be better. (Indeed, I’m inclined to doubt it would.)
I think there might be a part of my brain that, when given the problem “moderate technological progress in general”, automatically converts it to “slow down harmful technology while leaving beneficial technology alone” and then gets stuck trying to solve that. But you’re right, I can think of various elements in our society that slow down progress (regulations concerning drug testing before market release, anti-stem-cell-research lobbying groups, etc).
Sure… this is why I asked the question in the first place, of what kind of moderation.
Framing the problem as the OP does here, as an opposition between a belief in the “unquestioned rightness of [..] innovation that disregards any negative results” and some unclear alternative, seems a strategy better optimized towards the goal of creating conflict than the goal of developing new ideas.
Since I don’t particularly value conflict for its own sake, I figured I’d put my oar in the water in the direction of inviting new ideas.
I don’t think I know anyone who seriously endorses doing everything that anyone labels “technological innovation”, but I know people who consider most of our existing regulations intended to prevent some of those things to do more harm than good. Similarly, I don’t think I know anyone who seriously endorses doing none of those things (or at least, no one who retroactively endorses not having done any of those things we’ve already done), but I know people who consider our current level of regulation problematically low.
FWIW, I know plenty of libertarians who think regulation is unquestionably bad, and will happily insist the world would be better without regulations on technological advancement, even that one (for whatever one you’d like).
Yeah, I believe you that they exist. I’ve never met one in real life.
By “negative ideological effects” do you mean the legitimization of some body of religious knowledge? As stated in my post to Dave, if your objective is to re-condition society to have a rational majority, I can see how religious knowledge (which is often narratively rather than logically sequenced) would be seen as having “negative ideological effects. However, I would argue that there are functional benefits of religion. One of which is the limitation of power. Historically technological progress has for millennia been slowed down by religious and moral barriers. One of the main effects of the scientific revolution was to dissolve these barriers that impeded the production of power (See Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia). However, the current constitution of American society still contains tools of limitation, even non-religious ones. People don’t often look at it this way, but taxation is used in an incredibly moral way. Governments tax highly what they want to dissuade and provide exemptions, even subsidies for what they want to promote. The fact that there is a higher tax on cigarettes is a type of morally based restriction on the expansion of the tobacco industry in our society.
Stronger than taxation there is ability to flat out illegalize something or stigmatize it. Compared to the state of marijuana as an illegal substance and the stigma it carries in many communities makes the limitation of the cigarettes industry through taxation seems relatively minor.
Whether social stigma, taxation, or illegalization, there are several tools at our nation’s disposal to alter the development of industries due to subjective moral values, next to none of which are aimed at limiting the information-technology industries. There is no tax on certain types of research based on a judgment of what is right or wrong. To the contrary, the vast majority of scientific research is for the development of weapons technologies. And who are the primary funders of this research? The department of homeland security and the U.S military make up somewhere around 65-80% of academic research (this statistic might be a little off).
In regards to non-academic research, one of the primary impetuses may not be militarization, but is without doubt entrepreneurialism. Where the primary focus of a person or group is the development of capital the purpose of innovation becomes not fulfilling some need, but to create needs to fulfill the endless goal of cultivating more wealth. Jean Baudrillard is a very interesting sociologist, whose work is built around the idea that in western society no longer do the desires (demands) of people lead to the production of a supply, but rather where desires (demands) are artificially produced by capitalists to fulfill their supplies. A large part of this production is symbolic,, and ultimately distorts the motivations and actions of people to contradict the territories they live in.