Comment by honzabe
12 hours ago
There is no doubt in my mind that your intent was good.
> A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus
What connection between bioengineering and Torment Nexus do you have in mind? The advances of bioengineering that pop up in my mind are mRNA vaccines and new cancer treatments, which I consider awesome and not at all Torment Nexus-y. When you say Torment Nexus, that makes me think of Thiel’s Palantir, but this is not something we do collectively as a society - is it? To me, that is exactly the anti-democratic stuff pushed by a few specific people that we as a society need to rein in.
Nothing more than a fictional hypothetical for use as an analogy. Suppose advanced technology T requires broad societal effort to develop, for which societal mastery of advanced scientific topic S is a prerequisite. The analogy is nothing more than "first society achieves X, then it can achieve Y" where X is desirable but Y is not and both are fairly difficult.
I chose bioengineering because I was imagining something like the neural lace from the culture series except without having any "good" usecase.
The panopticon we've constructed may have individual components driven by a single personality and fabricated by a single company but a great number of such pieces is required. Even something like Flock that more or less stands on its own requires individual adoption by countless local municipalities. An awful lot of independent groups have to approve of it.