> When the car began replacing the horse, pessimists didn’t treat it like a great new tool. They called it “the devil wagon,” and said its mission was to destroy the world.

They were absolutely right.

The authors of the website really undermine their own point by including a lot of "hysterical" comments that are still reasonable warnings or complaints, were completely reasonable at the time (things change!) or are just sensible questions.

The sections on computers includes an article matter-of-factly informing about a virus being found on 3000 computers. Calling the virus a time bomb is not hysteria - it was literally designed to be one. And surely computer viruses are an even bigger problem today?

The clipping titled "Perils of the lazy age", which predicts that people sitting down in front of the television instead of chopping firewood will make people "unable to stand on their own feet" sure is obnoxiously written, but the sentiment is not wrong: Obesity and cardiovascular disease is basically an epidemic today.

If these are some of the best examples of past hysteria, I guess we should listen more to those we consider hysterical today?

I'd blame obesity on diet before I'd blame it on television. Six of one, half dozen of the other though. The entire food chain is GMO and soaked in poison.

What’s the issue with GMO? How is it different from cross-breeding and husbandry which we’ve been doing for millennia?

(I’m asking honestly.)

First, it's a bit of a red herring, the biggest issue IMHO is the synthetic pesticide use which correlates it. Many plants are primarily GMO to make them pesticide-resistant. The issues with pesticides you may be aware of.

Another issue is that often GMO correlates with patentry, terminator seeds, IP lawsuits, and so on. But that's also a tangential issue.

The main issue is that, just like anything new, it puts us in the "beta testing in production" area, where the product being tested is "things which none of our ancestors have ever encountered, evolutionarily" and production environment is "our bodies".

Atrazine and glyphosate were also believed to be safe to use. We now know that Atrazine causes Parkinson's and glyphosate causes cancer. Fruits and vegetables now have half the nutrition they did 20 years ago. This is due to herbicides decimating the soil fertility. The pessimists were right.

Last I heard they were still considered safe to use, if environmentally damaging, by scientific sources. Could you provide citations, so I might update my knowlege?

Similarly, my understanding was that soil depletion (caused by farming methods) and crops optimized purely for high yield (via breeding or otherwise) are problems causing nutrition drop in foods. And that neither are problems solved simply by going organic or GMO free.

The EPA uses bogus studies funded by the pesticide industry. Independent studies have found links to cancer, birth defects, and more.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/epa-atrazine-herb...

There is a trove of studies showing the harm so I'm not sure you're being genuine. If you really can't find anything on Google I'll help.

You have some Texas sharpshooter fallacy, and some exclusion fallacy going on here.

Destroying the world was never the automobile's mission. Like many inventions that have benefited mankind, it has come with unintended consequences, both positive and negative.

I would not discount the negative effects the automobile has had and will continue to have. However, I would argue that the effects of the automobile's existence are so profound and far-reaching, we are incapable of arguing whether the world is, or will be, ultimately a better or worse place as a result of its existence.

I feel like leaving the subject of whether automobiles are good/bad as something that cannot be determined is just shying away from the question, and the possibility that the answer to it is that it is generally a bad thing. When you design cities and cultures and entire lifestyles around the assumption that everyone has or must have a car, all the unintended consequences of the automobile become bigger—necessary places aren’t walkable, air becomes so polluted you can’t jog outside, you create huge market demand for cheaply produced energy, and so on.

I’d like to hear anyone’s thoughts to the contrary? Are there any benefits that are bigger than the cons?

A couple of easy ones:

The ability for people to travel to so many places and engage in the human experience in ways they otherwise never could or would. The expansion of humans' radius to get together, be together, work together, exchange ideas, make love, and make families.

Because humans were able to be with so many more humans, I would argue that knowledge, learning, and thought, took place at a level that's orders of magnitude greater than it would have been otherwise. And if you subscribe at all to the idea of the butterfly effect, it's impossible to begin comprehending what mankind wouldn't have if the car hadn't existed. Would we have the cure to as many diseases? Would the rate of poverty have declined so profoundly? Would the Internet exist?

Simply put, yes. The same effects could have been accomplished with extensive public transportation, subsidized to the point of being free for the same cost as the car and road subsidies. And with far greater positive effects on poverty, due to providing a smaller barrier of entry. Also likely far more free money and labor being diverted to more creative endeavors, due to the freedom from funding being forced to be allocated to a car for basic needs.

We desperately need longitudinal news media.

Current news works like this:

1. Something looks bad 2. Generate outrage 3. Forget all about it 4. Go to 1, on another topic.

Can you imagine a form of journalism that picks its topics for the year, then relentlessly follows up on them every day, not getting distracted by passing outrage, but actually digging deeply?

Sites like this could be a start, to help us stop forgetting.

Digging deeply into anything requires time and focus most people won't put in if they have any choice at all.

We have far greater means to temporally cross-reference media now than at any other point in history, and yet most news outlets outright abitually lie about publicly available information.

We vastly overestimate how much people care whether things are true or false.

https://private-eye.co.uk/ do some excellent investigations and special reports, I think mostly only available in the print copy though.

In many ways, the news that we get is the news that consumers of news generally care about—so if an issue gets buried under much more current ones, it’s just a consequence of people caring about the current ones. We’re pretty much asking for human nature to change here. You also can’t reasonably expect journalism to report on something where there is nothing new or significant to report, which happens a lot in long legal cases.

That’s one reason I appreciate podcasts like “You’re Wrong About” that revisit past news stories and tell them properly.

This is representing only one quadrant of the predictions × outcomes matrix.

Where are the pessimistic predictions that turned out to be accurate? Where are the optimistic predictions on disruptive tech that did turn out net negative? Where are the nuances?

How many bad outcomes did the pessimism prevent!

Not surprised seeing Pinker is a fan. These are the same type of people that parrot the "technology is neutral, it's how you use it" line.

"Only by looking back at fears of old things when they were new, can we have rational constructive debates about emerging technologies today that avoids the pitfalls of moral panic and incumbent protectionism."

Sure ok, start with this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228250.Four_Arguments_fo...

> "technology is neutral, it's how you use it" line.

Seems like such an obviously true statement to me, that the only thing to add is that you cannot un-invent, abolish or wish it away. Folks who believe in the "complete nuclear disarmament" fairy tale have a hard time with this.

You might not be able to wish away nuclear weapons, but if all countries in the world wanted there to be no nuclear weapons, they could (after solving climate change) introduce a global ban on nuclear energy and the possession of fissionable elements.

This would have to be accompanied by a powerful inspections regime, with big rewards for whistleblowers. Also, if a country did announce it had secretly produced nuclear weapons, or was discovered to have them, that would probably have to be treated as a casus belli, and all other countries would have a legal duty to launch a massive (conventional) bombardment of that country.

The entire world was able to come together to ban CFCs, so there’s at least one precedence of a harmful substance getting universal prohibition. And there are all sorts of human rights conventions on what may or may not be used in war.

Is Twitter neutral?

Yeah, up to a point, right? It's interesting they have TV in there but TV addiction is (probably) a real thing (http://sites.oxy.edu/clint/physio/article/televisionaddictio...).

Wouldn't TV addiction be an addiction problem?

There also are knife accidents, car accidents, swimming pool related drownings, email addiction, work addiction. These exist, but what are the externalities in general?

Heroin addiction is an addiction problem too... but TV addiction, like heroin addiction, seems quite widespread. (Average screen use is now something like 8 hours per day, IIRC.)

There might also be externalities. Suppose you want to play outside, but all your friends are watching TV.

TV addiction is almost definitely a real thing. So is social media addiction.

This is bias in propagandist form. Give me pessimistic archive with right vs wrong facts. Why in the era of digital information we don't have public tools to fact-check political and corporate propaganda vs scientific evidence. This will be a good nonprofit"startup" :)

What is a “wrong fact”?

The website decided to randomly turn into a blank white page after clicking through a number of items on the timeline. Said timeline also obscures the bottom of the tweet embed on a small viewport. Between that and the cutesy center-justified monospace, perhaps the pessimists were at least right about Web Technologies™.

Ok, but television really did make the world worse. Arguably also the personal automobile.

It's certainly the case that neither television not automobile were inventions completely free of negative effects. But to say that they made the world worse is a very myopic view, focused on first world moral panics rather than attempting to evaluate what these inventions meant for a Turkish or an Indian village, for example.

The 2015 bitcoin entry will just be a link to news.ycombinator.com

I really hope AI will be added in future.

this is hilarious. I'm wondering if blockchain will be there :D