You frame the disruptions as if they were not a net benefit to society. Sure, governments could have banned the printing press and stayed in the dark ages (scribes would still be making a good living, though.)

Edit: it all depends on tone... I still read the comment with the tone that implies disruptions as being as negative as they are positive, whereas I would frame disruptions are more positive. Granted, that's not to ignore the countless people who have had their lives uprooted by not being able to keep up with fast moving societies.

That's not how I read the comment. I read it as admitting that both things can be (and probably are) true: these sorts of disruptions can be awful and bloody for the people living through them and can also be a net benefit to society. It's looking like we may very well be those people who will be living through the next one of these, so it's reasonable for us to be worried about the awfulness of the transition.

> You frame the disruptions as if they were not a net benefit to society

I don't think he does, though. I'd be much quicker to say that other people frame the disruptions as though they never had significant downsides; I constantly see people saying "most people found new work eventually without too much of a pay cut" as though that implies no one suffered.

More theoretically, we ought to be capable of imagining some net-positive change which causes front-end disruptions so devastating that we can't endure through to the positive result. Imagine rendering 50% of people unemployed in one year and ask whether they would all quietly drift into new jobs, or whether they would set all the data centers on fire and cancel out the progress.

I don't think things are that bad, but pretending a long-run positive exempts you from planning for short-run harms is pretty unfair.

I agree with you about the net benefit in purely economic terms, but it's easy to overweight the benefit when you were born after the costs were paid. Industrialization of production also inevitably led to the industrialization of warfare and we know how that turned out.

I can't say with any certainty that we're definitely better off than if WW2 had never happened. Suppose it had not, and that there had been slower technological development without the necessity of war, so that in 2017 the cutting edge of technology was 2400 bps modems and 300 dpi laser printers (ie a ~25 year technological 'peace handicap'). Is the actual progress we've made over that period worth the ~50 million lives lost in WW2?

Put another way, would you be willing to kill 100 million people now, today, in order to take a 25 year technological shortcut (with no certainty about how well it would pan out)?

I think this is sort of silly - many disruptive technological advancements have happened without causing a war.

Many of the advancements you speak of had nothing to do with war time even, they were made by private companies building things like faster and faster microprocessors.

Yes, war spurts technological advancement, but not in all areas - it might be more realistic to compare something like rockets or nuclear power.

Technological changes caught WW2? A manic dictator, German resentment over Treaty of Versailles had nothing to do with it?

Exactly what were the bloody consequences of tractors or printing presses? If you just say a large number of wars/civil unrest took place during the industrial revolution then the periods before it were no less bloody.

The Luddites and the textile industry come immediately to mind.

"At one time there were more British soldiers fighting the Luddites than there were fighting Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite