Comment by srl
6 years ago
It reminds me of a CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc. In that video (okay I'm interpreting a bit...) society itself acts as Scissor, "breeding" some ideas to become maximally controversial.
Which, if you take SA's story too seriously, is actually good news: it implies that we've probably already seen just about the worst scissors possible, because society's been trying to produce them all along!
> Which, if you take SA's story too seriously, is actually good news: it implies that we've probably already seen just about the worst scissors possible, because society's been trying to produce them all along!
I don't think we did. SA's machine learning based scissor generator is to what you described what engineered bioweapons are to natural evolution. The latter can produce nasty stuff over time, the former is about taking the latter, refining it, and improving on it much faster.
Like any invention, not everything that can be invented has been invented. The current culture war has only been going for around 5 years. Things can change and new divides erupt all the time.
5 years? Lots of it can be traced directly all the way back to the Vietnam war, surely? Certainly abortion has been a scissor issue since at least 1973.