> You're right, we should stop innovating entirely, because bad people and slippery slope fallacies exist in the world.

There are plenty of areas where innovating would help people tremendously, with much fewer slippery slopes. Just because people ask you to be mindful of the areas where abuse is already the default use case doesn't mean there's nothing you can do.

Making the world a dystopia isn't "innovation".

Sorry state of things indeed.

> innovating

Innovate what, exactly? The demise of democracy? Authoritarian rule? Technology innovation ain't societal progress, and we should aim for the latter.

It sounds like you already understand what technological innovation is, and that failure of a country to govern its own people effectively has nothing to do with that... so I'm not sure where the misunderstanding is.

We need not stop innovation entirely, of course. But tech should not be in the driver's seat. Tech for tech's sake, and the maximised profits. To ensure that technology is better aligned to the interests of people a helluva lot more and better regulation is in order imho. There are obvious useful aspects to many new technologies, but it is also in a balance to all the negative externalities. Unfortunately the latter are more long-term consequences and the former are more on the short-term gains. There are obvious dystopian tendencies to all the stuff we are inventing now, and somewhere we should call a halt to that, before there is no easy return.