Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: UllrsIshtar
At some point, when we advance enough, my neighbor has going to have WMD, whether they're trying to regulate him from not having them or not.
This is an underappreciated point.
I have a weapon between my ears. It's called a brain, and it can do amazing things. Wondrous or terrible.
Technology and knowledge amplify individual humans beyond their essential means, which originally, from a pragmatic point of view, largely extend as far as managing some small agricultural or hunter/gatherer societies that wielded spears and preferred posturing to fighting in terms of combat strategies. Human beings haven't come far since then. Knowledge and technology, however, have. And those two continue to evolve at a pace that outstrips any growth in human wisdom, if one is even inclined to entertain the notion of growth in that department.
Those of us whose brains are already WMD grade will be the first to be seriously dangerous as individuals, true. But the rest will eventually follow. At some point, either WMD level powers will be within reach of a vast majority of people of average intelligence and experience in the industrialized world, or we'll be a society that even George Orwell and Aldous Huxley taken together would not dare to envision. The former, as far as I'm concerned, is preferrable, to the point that it's not even open for debate until we've colonized a new world so the sides can part ways on this issue.
What this leaves us with, as you say, is that we have to deal with the future reality of WMDs being an accessible thing at some point. Humanity does not have a good track record of planning ahead, and certainly not on long time scales, nor do we have a good track record of predicting timelines and the pace of technological evolution. Natural selection against the people that make poor decisions can help. Cultural improvements as regards individual greatness can help. Regulation is unlikely to have a substantial impact on anything but impulse acts, if even that.
I would rather we face the cost of our failures as soon as possible, while the stakes aren't at the WMD level yet.
quote:
Regulation doesn't fix anything unless you really take it to it's end conclusion of mass totalitarian slavery, with a culling of the noncompliant.
Which would require a war. One that would have a number of walking, talking WMDs with nothing to lose on the side of grumpycat in saying "No." and the probable conclusion that cutting the population and technology level to one tenth will be the only reliable solution to the conflict... these may well be the exact same people that are willing to implement such a solution. Not a very desireable solution, and one whose every step will be anticipated by those people, ahead of time, meaning the whole thing will probably end right about the time when the enslaving side's finger enters the trigger guard.
As I said, nice to see someone raise the point about the inevitable conflict between freedom and security due to asymptotic omnipotence.
This is absolutely on topic, as gun control is precisely a microcosm of this conflict.
So, yeah, just expanding on what you said and agreeing enthusiastically.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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