I wonder how libertarianism will survive in the future when the average citizen will have access to the technology to cook up a pandemic in their bathtub or create a paperclip maximiser on their PC.
There are bad actors who will do so - see bushfire arsonists here in Australia
Definitely - but it’s abuse doesn’t constitute an existential threat every time a broken individual lights up a national forest and destroys nearby towns.
Absent a global totalitarian surveillance state one these individuals only has to succeed *once* to end it all for everyone
there's something about this argument that 'feels' like it has a fallacy in it, like there's some intuitive tag around it, like... something like we've advanced HUGELY in tech over the last 200 years but haven't seen a proportional amount of individuals fucking over others
What there has been is an increase not in the proportional *number* but in the *capability* of individuals to enact mass harm. A century ago a man could stab 3 or 4. Today he can mass shoot 30 or 40. Tomorrow he can kill 30,000 or 40,000. A century from now...?
I don’t disagree. I’m not blaming the catastrophic 2019/2020 fire season on arsonists - I’m just acknowledging that they exist and would probably do worse if they had the means