> Jurassic Park wasn't a "don't clone dinosaurs" movie, it was a "don't be an idiot" movie with a dinosaur theme.
This is why we have people building torment nexuses and genuinely thinking they're doing nothing wrong.
Jurassic Park was a "don't clone dinosaurs" movie. They were very clear and explicit about it. The characters had multiple conversations about it. It was the central plot. The moral of the movie was "nature is indifferent to the hubris of man". Not that hubris is the downfall of man, but that the universe does not care about you, your intentions, or your actions. If you clone dinosaurs, they will escape at some point and they will kill and torment people.
Did you watch the movie? Did you miss the entire "life finds a way" scene?
You're taking "this is a torment nexus, please don't build it" and reading it as "torment nexus is fine, it's dumb men who are the problem"
I love that this is precisely the point. I sincerely wish more people were forced to actually take a class on all the ways hubris messes up, and all the ways people explain they just need to build the torment nexus carefully, paired with all the media about people who say the exact same thing and it blows up in their faces the exact same way.
But of course the whole point of hubris is that they’ll see all the examples and think it’ll be different for them because they’ve learned from previous mistakes. It’s brilliant!
Man it'd sure be cool if great thinkers had been writing about hubris since the dawn of history or something. But alas, we'll just have to move forward with the torment nexus
They were also writing a lot about deities and heroes who were constantly drunk in between of casually murdering or raping people. Some of those themes survived to this day. Doesn't mean we should be basing our behavior on them.
They also believed a lot of things we know today to be just wrong, despite their writings making it seem to be right. Again, some discernment and critical thinking is required. Skills presumably taught in liberal arts curriculum, which makes me think that people arguing for libart education in this thread didn't actually get any, judging by lack of aforementioned skills.
I did. My point is that the movie isn't the Holy Bible. The explicit message was wrong, and in a rather dumb way.
"Life finds a way" is just law of large numbers for masses. Big deal. Humans find can find a way too. We've been fighting "life finding a way" ever since humanity learned language. It's not something you run away from, it's something you overcome.
Because you disagree with the message doesn't change what the message is.
The point is that "life finds a way" is not something that can be overcome. You cannot overcome all obstacles, and the universe not only doesn't care about your hard work and positive attitude, but is utterly unaware of and unaffected by your very existence. Life, nature, the universe all do what they do and no matter how hard you try, you can only influence things. You have no real control at larger scales.
To think otherwise is pretty much the definition of hubris. And men with too much hubris clone a bunch of fucking dinosaurs and set them loose on the world.
> Because you disagree with the message doesn't change what the message is.
There's a difference between author-intended message, and message or messages received by the audience. La mort de l'auteur, and all.
> The point is that "life finds a way" is not something that can be overcome.
Hopefully not, because that take is bullshit. Of course you can overcome life finding a way. Were you ever vaccinated or took antibiotics? That's humans one-upping nature.
The point, if anything, is that you can't overcome nature once and for all[0]. You have to put in effort to stay ahead. It's kind of implied in what life is in the first place. Evolution through natural selection is an optimization system. A greedy, short-sighted, incredibly dumb optimization system, but it has scale on its side. Which is why we are, for example, dealing with "superbugs" now. Life found a way around some of our antibiotics[1]. But this doesn't mean antibiotics were a mistake. It means we need to do better, one-up life again. Say, with phages.
It's not hubris to realize we are smarter than dumb natural selection. It's not hubris to recognize we can win, and keep on winning.
> To think otherwise is pretty much the definition of hubris. And men with too much hubris clone a bunch of fucking dinosaurs and set them loose on the world.
Don't confuse hubris with hope or ambition. Or engineering.
Meanwhile, I'll take my antibiotics and phages and RNA vaccines and cars and computers and airplanes[2], and if someone actually gets around to cloning dinosaurs, I trust they'll have people on the team who know what interlocks are, or redundant power supply. Unlike in movies like Jurassic Park, there exist non-idiots in the real world, and we also have case studies and regulations governing handling dangerous animals and technologies.
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[0] - Ignoring for a moment that humans are nature too, and everything we do is part of "life finds a way", too.
[1] - In big part because human societies are dumb too. Clear parallels to Jurassic Park here.
[2] - Oh my god what an exercise of hubris powered flight is! Didn't we learn anything from the story of Icarus?!
If you clone dinosaurs, they will find their way out and kill people. Maybe not your park, but your competitors are eventually gonna slip up. Hippos are now practically indigenous to Colombia thanks to Pablo Escobar. And yep, they hurt and kill people all the time. Good luck unringing that bell.
> If you clone dinosaurs, they will find their way out and kill people. Maybe not your park, but your competitors are eventually gonna slip up.
That's not at all a given, not until such cloned dinosaurs become ubiquitous.
What is the rate of lions and tigers escaping zoos and killing people? Zoos aren't a new thing. I wouldn't be too worried about experimental lions escaping a high-tech, super high-profile zoo.
> Hippos are now practically indigenous to Colombia thanks to Pablo Escobar. And yep, they hurt and kill people all the time. Good luck unringing that bell.
We're a bit more advanced and organized worldwide than in times of Pablo Escobar. Extincting large animals isn't a very difficult feat, especially if people were to react quickly. We usually have the opposite problem - keeping larger animals from being entrepreneured into extinction.
I mean, how much do you think a nu-dinosaur bone would fetch on the market? Also, imagine the damage control budget flowing in if one of the victims of escaping dinosaurs happens to be a US citizen. "We Have To Do Something" is a force to be reckoned with. Civil liberties get trampled, and whole countries get blown up, once the public fear ripens enough to go past Thoughts and Prayers stage.
> Extincting large animals isn't a very difficult feat, especially if people were to react quickly. We usually have the opposite problem - keeping larger animals from being entrepreneured into extinction.
Yet. Hippos still roam the jungles of Colombia freely. I'm sure they've even killed a few Americans. Nobody cares.
When you're dealing with nature, you're dealing with something much bigger than you are. Sure you can throw more resources at the problem. Doesn't always work.
Australians fought a war against emus and lost. The tumbleweed war in the American prairie is going nowhere. You seem to have this limitless faith in human ingenuity against nature that just doesn't make any sense. You open biological cans of worms, and it's going to take more resources than it's worth to fix properly. How many billions went into containing Chernobyl? And it's still not fixed. You just seem to want to give carte blanche to the Elon Musk's of the world because you want to believe they can dig us out of holes rather than dig us further into them.
Were you really one of the ones who thought he could actually do something positive with Twitter?
> Yet. Hippos still roam the jungles of Colombia freely. I'm sure they've even killed a few Americans. Nobody cares.
Because what's there to care about? It's normal hippos. Not dinosaurs. Not even genetically engineered hippos. Animals roaming the wilderness and occasionally killing people is still a normal occurrence. Has been everywhere around the world, and it always ends the same way: people start using technology to defend themselves effectively, and to develop the land they live on, and expand their reach, and suddenly they need to self-constrain in hopes they don't extinct the previously dangerous animal.
> Australians fought a war against emus and lost. The tumbleweed war in the American prairie is going nowhere.
Which is why I mentioned large animals. Low r, high K. Not rabbits, that can breed as fast as you can make bullets, but more like elephants, which are all too easy to hunt down to extinction. Jurassic Park dinosaurs were more like the latter than the former.
> You seem to have this limitless faith in human ingenuity against nature that just doesn't make any sense. You open biological cans of worms, and it's going to take more resources than it's worth to fix properly.
Yes, I do. And that faith includes awareness that we can just as well destroy ourselves with that power (we're part of nature too, after all). This is why avoiding stupidity is important. This includes stupidity of the flavor I'm criticizing here.
> How many billions went into containing Chernobyl? And it's still not fixed.
That has little to do with nuclear power per se, and much more to do with why some parts of US still drink water contaminated with heavy metals. That, and most recently, war.
> You just seem to want to give carte blanche to the Elon Musk's of the world because you want to believe they can dig us out of holes rather than dig us further into them.
Carte blanche is a bit much, but I definitely put more trust in Musk and Gates and anyone who's trying to directly tackle real problems with science, technology and resourcefulness, over randos constantly whining about "playing god" or "hubris", etc. - who don't even believe in their own bullshit, because if they did, they'd all pack up and find some nice caves to live in. Because seriously - how else do people think we can dig ourselves up of the holes we're in? The answer has always been human ingenuity.
> Carte blanche is a bit much, but I definitely put more trust in Musk and Gates and anyone who's trying to directly tackle real problems with science, technology and resourcefulness, over randos constantly whining about "playing god" or "hubris", etc. - who don't even believe in their own bullshit, because if they did, they'd all pack up and find some nice caves to live in.
This is... hilarious. It's either believe in Lord and Savior Elohim Muskiah and crew to save the human race through glorious, heroic science, or give up on technology entirely. Do you not even see the stupidity here? Of course you don't.
These idiots don't represent science. They don't represent technology. They didn't invent the modern world. They're not making the world a better place, the best example of which you completely ignored in my last reply, do I need to spell it out, yes I do, it's the big Xitter. Twitter was doing just fine before ole' Elmoid decided to save the human race from its evil wokism.
You do see them as representative of science and "human ingenuity." You are completely saddened by the fact that science fiction author(s) are coming out of the woodwork to warn against drinking this kool-aid, and then moving hell and high water in the comments to defend the faith, circle the wagons. Human ingenuity is fine. It's always been fine. You're motte and bailey'ing this. You want to believe in techbro Jesus and then when called on you retreat back to "oh it's just human ingenuity I believe in."
No. I'm not letting you do that. If so this article wouldn't make you sad. You'd be seeing it as yet another example of such ingenuity. You'd see the work authors do as valuable. But instead you just see myths being shattered. The only representatives of ingenuity you seem to value are techbros. If the science mythologists aren't doing their job by properly mythologizing the techbros, then they aren't contributing to glorious science revolution.
Yeah, humans find a way to mess up. Lots of things are in theory perfectly safe, and yet end up playing the lead role in a disaster. Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima were both caused by a corporation cutting costs on safety measures. That is the thing humans always find a way to do.
> Yeah, humans find a way to mess up. Lots of things are in theory perfectly safe, and yet end up playing the lead role in a disaster.
Sure. This is part of how we learn. We could do better in many aspects, but in general, stumbling on the boundaries is how you expand them.
(Not to mention, "nature" / "god" is 100% growth by mistakes and disasters. Evolution means continuously throwing random mutations at a wall in hopes some will stick. We can't possibly do worse than nature.)
Also, "disaster" is quite a misleading term here...
> Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima were both caused by a corporation cutting costs on safety measures.
... neither of those were disasters in terms of loss of life[0]. All of those were disasters in terms of unnecessary destruction, but they don't prove oil rigs or nuclear energy are fundamentally bad ideas. They only prove corporate greed (in the former case) and paranoia (in the latter case) are problems.
> That is the thing humans always find a way to do.
Among many other things, including clean victories with no loss of life or ecological damage.
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[0] - Hydroelectric plants are disasters in terms of loss of life, if you want to look at specific failures. Solar PVs are a disaster, if you know how to add numbers. Coal power plants are a disaster, if you know how to integrate.
Before Fukushima happened, I'd heard lots of people claim that nuclear power could be completely safe. Chernobyl was a fluke; it was because of the old model, the communist system and the unsafe experiment they did, but a modern reactor in a modern country could be perfectly safe, and Fukushima proved that a lie. People will cut corners, they will cut costs, and anything that can go wrong, will at some point go wrong.
And yes, Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon were absolutely disasters. Trying to paint them as not disasters is ridiculous. There's no winning argument for you there. And we can absolutely do worse than nature.
> Before Fukushima happened, I'd heard lots of people claim that nuclear power could be completely safe. Chernobyl was a fluke; it was because of the old model, the communist system and the unsafe experiment they did, but a modern reactor in a modern country could be perfectly safe
Still true.
> and Fukushima proved that a lie. People will cut corners, they will cut costs, and anything that can go wrong, will at some point go wrong.
Yeah, a quite unlikely course of events cracked a plant open enough to cause a leak. Approximately all of the actual negative consequences have came from unnecessary evacuation of a large area.
Or were there some new, ground-breaking discoveries made about Fukushima in the last 2 years, of which I'm not aware?
> And yes, Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon were absolutely disasters. Trying to paint them as not disasters is ridiculous.
Please read with comprehension. "Disaster" as in ecological damage, yes (or sort of, in the case of Fukushima). "Disaster" as in direct cause of large amount of death and sickness? Nope. That's what I said. Two different meanings of the world all too often used to equivocate.
> There's no winning argument for you there. And we can absolutely do worse than nature.
Yes, there is, and nah, we generally can't, because nature is dumb and doesn't care. It would take a lot of combined malice and ingenuity to outdo it.
(Okay, I can accept the argument that we're sorta able to do worse than nature now, because our technology is finally starting to work on comparable scales. Though so far, most of us doing bad is driven by higher-level evolutionary forces - we can't coordinate for shit at scale, so we instead play a lot of "survival of the fittest" games.)
Hubris. Philosophically, it is opposed to reason. The story of Icarus is the classic tale of hubris. As a sort of omnipotence with unlimited power, it is irrational precisely because it appropriates a belief in the possibility of transcending physical limits.
The story of Icarus is the story of inadequacies of wax as an adhesive.
I'd understand your take, if you wrote this 200 years ago. But holy shit, we've been doing powered, heavier-than-air flight for over a century. People put their footsteps on the Moon, and then they safely came back to tell about it.
If anything, I see such takes as a great example why the talks about "hubris" and "playing god" are not just wrong - they're dangerous, perverse, mind-consuming memes. Literally every advancement we've made in recorded history came from ignoring this take on hubris.
(To be clear: there exist hubris that is dangerous. It's not this though.)
It's death-of-the-author applied to stories which no longer make sense as they were originally intended, due to reality being other than what the author believed. This is as true for Jurassic Park as for Icarus, except that the explicitly intended message of JP was obsolete when it was written, and it still was written that way for reasons (money, Luddism, or whatever) other than that anyone should have believed it. It's ironic that a similar message about AI, in 2023, is much more well-grounded, but largely ignored due to decades of crying wolf about nuclear energy, genetic engineering, etc.
> The story of Icarus is the classic tale of hubris.
Ancient Greeks thought the sun was a chariot guided by the hand of Apollo. Meanwhile in real life, we've been to the moon and back in the Apollo program and that name was chosen deliberately.
Hubris is specifically extreme or excessive pride, or dangerous overconfidence — if you're genuinely better, for whatever reason, it's not hubris. Doesn't matter why, it could you use maths to prove your vehicle won't melt, or that you starting Dinosaur Island with just herbivores until you know more about the gene splicing tech and only then introduced one carnivore that can be all alone with nothing but a tire on a rope for company like some zoological gardens look like they do with tigers.
With AI? I think quite a lot of the development is absolutely hubris.
But if you want an effective example there, it's hubris to use Ancient Greek mythology as your example. Instead, use a modern reference from the real world — there are many modern military examples (the US has Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, WW2 had Pearl Harbour and Germany attempting Blitzkrieg on the USSR, and now Russia is repeating all of the USA's mistakes from Vietnam with their invasion of Ukraine) or you could have many companies with grand visions followed by collapsing valuations (X being only the most recent in major headlines, and nowhere near the most severe).
This is why we have people building torment nexuses and genuinely thinking they're doing nothing wrong.
Jurassic Park was a "don't clone dinosaurs" movie. They were very clear and explicit about it. The characters had multiple conversations about it. It was the central plot. The moral of the movie was "nature is indifferent to the hubris of man". Not that hubris is the downfall of man, but that the universe does not care about you, your intentions, or your actions. If you clone dinosaurs, they will escape at some point and they will kill and torment people.
Did you watch the movie? Did you miss the entire "life finds a way" scene?
You're taking "this is a torment nexus, please don't build it" and reading it as "torment nexus is fine, it's dumb men who are the problem"
You are the problem.