🚀 go-pugleaf

This article is from Ron Pfeifle <tektronix!watmath!watdragon!rfpfeifle>
 and was received on Mon Jul 14 21:19:25 1986
 

I don't know--I might have a very naive view of things--but I must say that 
I both agree and disagree with your perception of the "nature" of technology.

Certainly, any item used by human beings (computers, rocks, even ideas) looses 
any "neutrality" it might have possessed when pressed into use by humanity.  
This results simply because the "object" is being used to some *purpose*, and 
this purpose defines the nature of the object in this context.  Even an atomic 
bomb can have non-military applications (although they may be far-fetched; 
perhaps to persuade an asteroid in the (far?) future to leave our planet 
alone).

At any rate, certainly the object itself has no "goodness or badness," even 
though it is easier to use some things for destructive purposes than 
constructive.

An aside--let's assume for the moment that we've developed a thinking machine 
(I see those flame jet's firing up now), and that we "program" it to be "bad".
Is it the machine that's "bad," the "program," the instance of the program on 
the machine at the the machine is running, or is the whole thing neutral and 
the programmers are really the baddies?...

Ron Pfeifle, Lowly UnderGrad
University of Waterloo,
....watdragon!rfpfeifle  (I hope that that's enough pathname...)