Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Document Notes
A thoughtful treatise on tech and power and the preference of having average/weak people running amok with average morality, over having the few strong rich people wielding it with dubious or outright evil and greedy morality.
Highlights
id987353249
It’s not that the weak are incapable of evil. The steelman proposition here is that the worst kinds of evil are due to a particular mechanism that can create unbounded concentrations of power: capture.
id987353466
Most technologies are like guns. They tend to get aggregated and captured by those who already have a lot. Technology, in other words, generally exhibits preferential attachment to power.
id987353409
Most capture and enclosure phenomena are way more complex but the basic principle is the same. The powerful get more powerful. Most efforts to mitigate that rely on accepting or even enshrining the capture outcome as a given (such as “monopoly on violence” as a doctrinal basis of statehood), and trying to persuade the powerful to also be good through moral exhortations.
id987353594
lofty don’t be evil sentiments shaping laws with too much room for human discretion invariably yield to the reality of power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely
id987352313
I’d rather have a bunch of can’t-be-evil capture-resistant technologies running amok, in the hands of lots of uncoordinated average humans with average morality, than a bunch of captured death stars that began as lofty ideals and ended up weaponized by and for the worst of humanity. Restack Share