Technology is not our salvation

[Dark Jaguar]

Plastics are the problem.  I'm starting to think that our PCs and game consoles should be encased in wood and our disposables should be reduced as much as possible.  Heck, plastic bottles likely should go back to glass.  Our physical games likely should be wrapped in paper (cardboard) rather than plastic boxes.

Anyway, remember this one thing.  The light reduction in plastic used in modern cases, with those silly "recycle" design cutouts, are there for the sake of the company, not the planet.  Capitalism is incapable of resolving this issue either.

[Dark Jaguar]

Well, related to this: remote control kill-bots are ALSO not our salvation.  I mean, did I need to point that out?  DID I?!



Quoting Penny-Arcade of all things:

I have two kinds of anger. One is traditional and demonstrative, and one is something I instinctively hide. Let me say that his statement made me very still inside. What a crazy thing to fucking say out loud when you're talking about absolving the use of lethal militarized robots on civilians. As we suggest in the strip, "reasonable people" are always tsk-tsking when you talk about Slippery Slopes, or as I call them, "observable reality." It's a way for them to not have to do anything while appearing to do things, which is a really neat trick if someone lets you get away with it.
First of all, bro, those cows have left the barn. There is nothing you can do about that, and even if there were, you trying to scooch pieces around in some electoral metagame when a vote like this is literally in front of you is monstrous. It doesn't matter if progressive candidates get elected if progressive ideals are not manifest in the world as a result. You authorized this wickedness because you think it will be used on someone else, because you know it will, when the only thing you should imagine is one of them coming into your living room because its operators and indeed the entire apparatus of State force is staffed by finite, eminently fallible human beings. Oh! And the deadly robots you just gave them.

[Weltall]

The slippery slope for kill bots descends all the way from the very idea of robotics. As soon as we figured out the concepts necessary to create functional robots, we were casting our wet primate minds ahead to robots that can be used to kill people. The Wright Bros. invented the airplane, and within a decade we had machine guns and bombs strapped to them. We discovered atomic physics, and it took about 13 seconds for the same giant brains to realize you could make the worst thing ever if you knew what you were doing. 

Thankfully, we have had the better part of a century to explore the ramifications of such awful inventions as a kill bot, and some fictional explorations of the subject are deeply ingrained in pop culture and the mass consciousness. Because, otherwise, a lot fewer people would think robotic police executioners is something we ought to stringently avoid making mainstream.

[Dark Jaguar]

And yet, we have certain people who apparently looked at that LONG history of sci-fi kill bots and said "hey that's pretty cool let's make that a reality!", and some of them are leading the SFPD.