When I read these stories you tell about your past thoughts, I’m struck by how different your experiences with ideas were. Things you found obvious seem subtle to me. Things you discovered with a feeling of revelation seem pedestrian. Things you dismissed wholesale and now borrow a smidgen of seem like they’ve always been a significant part of my life.
Take, for example, the subject of this post: technological risks. I never really thought of “technology” as a single thing, to be judged good or bad as a whole, until after I had heard a great deal about particular cases, some good and some bad.
When I did encounter that question, it seemed clear that it was good because the sum total of our technology had greatly improved the life of the average person. It also seemed clear that this did not make every specific technology good.
I don’t know about total extinction, but there was a period ending around the time I was born (I think we’re about the same age) when people thought that they, their families, and their friends could very well be killed in a nuclear war. I remember someone telling me that he started saving for retirement when the Berlin Wall fell.
With that in mind, I wonder about the influence of our experiences with ideas. If two people agree that technology is good overall but specific technologies can be bad, will they tend apply that idea differently if one was taught it as a child and the other discovered it in a flash of insight as an adult? That might be one reason I tend to agree with the principles you lay out but not the conclusions you reach.
When I read these stories you tell about your past thoughts, I’m struck by how different your experiences with ideas were. Things you found obvious seem subtle to me. Things you discovered with a feeling of revelation seem pedestrian. Things you dismissed wholesale and now borrow a smidgen of seem like they’ve always been a significant part of my life.
Take, for example, the subject of this post: technological risks. I never really thought of “technology” as a single thing, to be judged good or bad as a whole, until after I had heard a great deal about particular cases, some good and some bad.
When I did encounter that question, it seemed clear that it was good because the sum total of our technology had greatly improved the life of the average person. It also seemed clear that this did not make every specific technology good.
I don’t know about total extinction, but there was a period ending around the time I was born (I think we’re about the same age) when people thought that they, their families, and their friends could very well be killed in a nuclear war. I remember someone telling me that he started saving for retirement when the Berlin Wall fell.
With that in mind, I wonder about the influence of our experiences with ideas. If two people agree that technology is good overall but specific technologies can be bad, will they tend apply that idea differently if one was taught it as a child and the other discovered it in a flash of insight as an adult? That might be one reason I tend to agree with the principles you lay out but not the conclusions you reach.