9th April 2018, 7:20 PM
Quote: If only we could spot them in advance.Yes, because Minority Report worked so well...
But really, you're talking about a lot of different things here -- traditional corruption, exploiting people, harassment/ sexual assault, supporting hateful and discriminatory political policies, pushing anti-consumer business policies in the name of corporate profits, and more. They're all bad things, but they're mostly unrelated. Keeping every person who might do any kind of bad thing away is impossible. There definitely are things that can be done, though, such as having much better investigations of sexual harassment claims, not just crushing bad stories about a person just because they are popular or powerful, and such. It does seem that society is headed in that direction at least in part.
As for solutions, what should be done depends on the type of thing. For harassment, gender discrimination, incompetence, and corruption, public airing of claims, hopefully followed by prosecutions, works well. Trying to change corporate behavior is much harder, though. Trying to shame or protest companies like Facebook and Google until they change can work once in a while, but big companies want to make money and will keep looking for ways to do that, regardless of what the impact on regular people is. It can be very hard to change corporate behavior, but it is possible, either through new laws or enough public pressure... until they look for a way around the restrictions, but that's a never-ending problem.
Really, the world today is the most peaceful it has probably ever been. We learn every detail of every war halfway around the world in a way that was impossible until the last couple of decades, and there are a lot of huge problems the world faces now such as global warming, limited resources, fighting how culture devalues and discriminates against women and minorities, and more, and this causes people to not realize just how good things are right now... but, despite Trump, for the most part they are good. People always have and always will do bad things, but it's harder to get away with things now thanks to the global nature of the internet, and society is changing in some good ways.
So, I may be a natural pessimist, but things aren't all bad.