Yes Oppenheimer may have looked back in despair at the destruction wrought by the atom bomb, but never in his most feverish nightmares would he have imagined that technology would be used to prevent coyotes from smuggling children illegally into a country.
View attachment 857772
Oh, fuck no.
Fuck no, you ignorant, backward thinking
moron.
We're going back to Philosophy 201 for this.
Technology is amoral. It has to be. It is not alive, it does not have agency. The use of it carries morality, not the item itself. Claiming otherwise is misplaced anthropomorphism at best, and fetishism at worst.
A rock has no more moral value than an atomic bomb. "But you can build with a rock, while a bomb can only destroy!" And what if something morally needs to be destroyed? Like a genocidal empire, or an ELE sized asteroid that can only be blown apart by Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi, and a handful of
nukes? Not to mention the knock-on effects of pure discovery, such as the nuclear power which can fight climate change, that you won't get if you force inventors to justify their scientific explorations beforehand.
Imputing morality to technology is
reversing hundreds of years of progress in our philosophical relationship to industry and objects. The engineers of AWS should not care who buys their services or what their platform is being used for. Claiming otherwise is the same justification used by everyone from religious fanatics to the original Luddites to Jim Crowe laws.
Corporations have their flaws, but it is a huge, unappreciated benefit that they can divorce the producer from the consumer. It creates a clean break in the chain of care needed for economic production; that abstraction enables productivity, freedom, creativity, and even revolution. Forcing some sort of continuing moral duty, like the cancel culture morons seem to want, is just another way to insert authoritarianism into modern progressive corporatism.
Fuck you and your "inventor's responsibility", John. Only someone who has never produced anything worthwhile can be so flippant about slapping restrictions on those who do.
