> perhaps I am simply living the banality of evil.
Possibly. Since we've already gone godwin, IBM sold computers to Germany. Those machines were used for something we do these days as a matter of routine - a census. It's hard to get more banal than a census. Yet that census was invaluable in identifying and segregating large chunks of people based on ethnicity. It was so instrumental to the Third Reich that James Watson of IBM was given a medal of honor.
The tech is just a tool. It's who you give it to and what they do with it that matters. The question is, what do you do about it? You can't really restrict the dispersion of technology. Every attempt to do that so far has failed, for everything from munitions to cryptography. You can make certain uses illegal. That doesn't seem to be stopping the government or police these days. All that seems to do is put a lot of private citizens in jail. The only solid solution I can come up with is to come up with countermeasures of some sort.
How to solve a problem like human nature. It's quite a humdinger.
Possibly. Since we've already gone godwin, IBM sold computers to Germany. Those machines were used for something we do these days as a matter of routine - a census. It's hard to get more banal than a census. Yet that census was invaluable in identifying and segregating large chunks of people based on ethnicity. It was so instrumental to the Third Reich that James Watson of IBM was given a medal of honor.
The tech is just a tool. It's who you give it to and what they do with it that matters. The question is, what do you do about it? You can't really restrict the dispersion of technology. Every attempt to do that so far has failed, for everything from munitions to cryptography. You can make certain uses illegal. That doesn't seem to be stopping the government or police these days. All that seems to do is put a lot of private citizens in jail. The only solid solution I can come up with is to come up with countermeasures of some sort.
How to solve a problem like human nature. It's quite a humdinger.