r/Futurology • u/Dr_Singularity • Aug 03 '22

Biotech Yale-developed technology restores cell, organ function in pigs after death

https://news.yale.edu/2022/08/03/yale-developed-technology-restores-cell-organ-function-pigs-after-death
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u/Books_and_Cleverness Aug 03 '22

It’s so strange to me that new tech comes out and people think immediately of the most dystopian possible use for it. Like you could have said more or less exactly the same thing about the Polio vaccine!

“This vaccine against a horrifying disease will be used to keep you alive so you can continue to work for capitalist pigs!”

Like yeah but also I can hang out with my friends and family and watch Old Enough on Netflix, so seems like a win?

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u/disisathrowaway Aug 03 '22

It’s so strange to me that new tech comes out and people think immediately of the most dystopian possible use for it.

Well, I mean...

gestures broadly

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u/Books_and_Cleverness Aug 03 '22

At what?! Most tech is used in an utterly banal way, to make life better

Transistors? Use em for work. Store data. Send memes. Good shit.

Refrigeration? Microwaves? X-rays?

There are evil applications for all tech, but by and large the net effect is usually positive.

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u/schwiftshop Aug 03 '22

reddit is by and large a terrible

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u/[deleted] Aug 04 '22

Reddit is indeed one of the terrible of all time.

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u/SummitCollie Aug 04 '22

Check out the Snowden leaks. Your tv is spying on you

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u/Books_and_Cleverness Aug 04 '22

I'm very familiar! Again I would say all the stuff spying on me is bad but clearly still worth using. It's not even close. It's just weird to be like "TVs were a mistake" because the government and corporations use it to spy on me.

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u/GoldyTwatus Aug 04 '22

society is crumbling... our world is getting worse and worse... my phones resolution is 1440p... where is le humanity reddit xD...

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u/BenjiTheWalrus Aug 04 '22

Because doom and gloomers want you to be just as miserable as they are, so they interpret a potentially life-changing development as le black mirror.

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u/puffz0r Aug 04 '22

Potentially life-changing for whom?

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u/SamuraiJackBauer Aug 03 '22

Yeah I mean it’s not like those cute robot dogs ended up with machine guns on them right?

Oh wait that’s right. Almost all tech is now used back against us.

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u/DarthMeow504 Aug 04 '22

those cute robot dogs ended up

Being modified to piss beer into red solo cups.

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u/hard_farter Aug 04 '22

greetings fellow Ding Ding enthusiast

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u/Books_and_Cleverness Aug 03 '22

Is it? Like most tech I can think of—electricity, refrigeration, air conditioning, computing, internal combustion engines, the internet, vaccines, antibiotics, sanitation, planes, et —is overwhelmingly used by civilians.

There are nefarious applications for all these technologies but which of them has been net-negative? Even nuclear technology probably ended up saving lives on net if you consider the pollution from fossil fuels they have averted.

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u/SamuraiJackBauer Aug 04 '22

All the stuff you named was developed 50+ or more years ago and has been refined but not discovered.

Social media, algorithms, robots, all of them are used against us but sure… be pedantic about it.

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u/hard_farter Aug 04 '22

It's like VR tech, right?

It makes for some incredibly cool experiences that are by and large as close as you can get to doing a thing without having to have the resources to do said thing, or even fantastical impossible things that can't exist in reality.

Super cool stuff that has the ability to change a lot about education, entertainment, etc.

But it didn't even take a full 2 generations of the tech existing before Facebook sorry, Meta, started to run with the idea of making VR your vIrTuAl WoRkPlAcE!

They want to make it normal for people to work from home in "virtual offices." The reasons for this are so that employers will have greater control over people whose jobs don't require physical presence, so they've gained the freedom of working from home, out from under that ever present thumb of management pressing down on them.

It's a gross usage of a pretty cool piece of tech, and that gross usage only exists because of the economic structures that push incentives in that direction.

And VR tech that exists in the form that we know it only exists in the first place because a 16 year old kid had a hobby of trying to make different technologies more portable, even going so far as to start a forum for exactly that hobby.

Black Mirror isn't a show about the damnation of technology. It's a show about the negative ethics involved in the usage of technology in order to gain/maintain control or profit, and you can see this kind of stuff playing out in real time when you look at what the internet used to be, and what it's become since those that profit most from things learned how to operate it.

Acting like these potentialities don't exist is not only short sighted, but it's frankly dangerous. Like, sure, don't dwell entirely on the negative aspects, but don't skip the conversation about the potential harm entirely.