The process of chlorinating water was first done illegally.

Also:

  human dissection (grave robbing)
  translating the Bible into English
  silk production outside of China (death penalty for exporting worm eggs)
  rubber production in Asia (seeds smuggled out of Brazil)
  the Underground Railroad
  heliocentrism
  AIDS treatment (see Dallas Buyers Club)
  Needle exchange programs for IV drug users
  Ridesharing/airbnb/napster (obvious ones)
  SF gay marriage licenses (in defiance of CA law)

Translating the Bible into English was not illegal. I very much doubt Bede or the monks of Lindisfarne were breaking the law!

The same for heliocentrism. No one took Copernicus to court.

With silk and rubber the smuggling was illegal, the actual cultivation was not

Grave robbing was illegal (and still is) but dissection was not.

Needle exchange was illegal in some US states but was legal in many other countries.

Reference to support the claim that translating the bible into English was banned (William Tyndale was executed for doing it): https://nobimu.no/en/subject-articles/banned-translations-of...

You can nitpick that "the church executing people for it" is not exactly the same as "illegal" but that's missing the point.

> The process of chlorinating water was first done illegally.

I tried to find a source on this but it doesn't seem to be true? The first chapter of this book describes the history of chlorination: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Chlorina... (which is a source Wikipedia cites) and it doesn't appear to mention anything about illegally chlorinating water. After looking in that book I asked ChatGPT to find a source for the claim, and it reported the claim was false. Chlorination was initially controversial but I can't find anything claiming it was illegal?

>Church membership is down.

I mean church people love to think of this as a decline of society but this is more about the destruction of the church itself as an out of date institution that was using itself as a control mechanism and that broke the moment we discovered the world wasn't made on hocus pocus.

The thing is the essence of the church could still maintain a huge amount of social control because people need to socialize.

I agree and am very anti-religion across the board. That being said, it certainly had and has a place in modern society. As a form of third space community and as a mechanism by which to provide social pushback where the law is lacking or lagging.

>people using these tools to drown me in nonsensical garbage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

>The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

>thinking that anyone can easily copy it

I mean this is how it's always been throughout history.

Creating something new is hard, copying something in terms of energy spent, is far easier. This is software or physical objects that don't require massive amounts of expensive technology to reproduce.

I'm guessing your constraint is impossible as living in the US pretty much requires banking and working with companies that will gladly give government agencies your information. I severely doubt that tech is the only group doing this.

>That's a very different singularity than the one people argue about.

---

I wouldn't say it's that much different. This has always been a key point of the singularity

>Unpredictable Changes: Because this intelligence will far exceed human capacity, the resulting societal, technological, and perhaps biological changes are impossible for current humans to predict.

It was a key point that society would break, but the exact implementation details of that breakage were left up to the reader.

r̶e̶a̶d̶e̶r̶ survivor.

So what does a chemical based computer do?

> Like all ideas, someone had to invent them

Not at all. Behaviors can be emergent based on environmental conditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

is one example.

I was referring to the parent commenter’s specific ideas and conclusions, not general behavior patterns.

A blacksmith was a person that picked up chunks of carbon and heated them to they were glowing red and beat the iron to submission with a hammer in their hands.

Today iron is produced by machines in factories by the mega-tonne.

We just happened to live in the age where code when from being beaten by hand to a mass produced product.

And so the change of technology goes.

And the blacksmiths losing their jobs are not allowed to feel bad about it?

Especially anyone in their 40s or 50s who is close enough to retirement that a career shift is unappealing but far enough from retirement that a layoff now would meaningfully change that timeline or QOL. I don't blame people for feeling uneasy.

I'm probably 7 or 8 years from an easy retirement myself, so I can appreciate how that feels. Nobody really wants to feel disruption at this age, especially when they're the breadwinner for a family.

> far enough from retirement that a layoff now would meaningfully change that timeline or QOL

yeah this is where i am. Turning 50 in April, I have two boys about to hit college and the bills associated with that and i have 15 years before i'm forced to retire. I have to up the salary to pay/help for college and i have to keep the 401k maxed + catchups maxed over the next 15 years to pull off retirement. The change from AI is scary, it may be good for me or it may be devastating. Staring down that barrel and making career decisions with no room for error (no time to rebuild) is pretty harrowing.

You either become a foreman operating the machines or a Luddite burning them.

What if in reality it's not one or the other, but having 10% odds of being good enough to be selected to become a technician operating the machines, 10% odds of getting so enraged as to dedicate your lives to pushing back, and 80% odds of being shoved out due to lower demand and value of your work, having to go do something else, if you still can?

No. By this logic, if they wanted to stay with the times they should have sought capital investment for their own industrial forges, joined their local lodges, climbed the ranks, lobbied their governments for loose safety regulations, and plied their workers with propaganda about how "we're in a recession and have to tighten our belts".

Think of the wonderful world we could have if everyone just got their shit together and became paper trillionaire technocrats.

The software world pretty much demanded this outcome.

Go back 10 years and post "SWE's should form labor unions"

Then watch as your post drops to [dead] and people scream "How dare you rob me of theoretical millions of dollars I'll be making".

I wonder how many of these same downvoters are now worried about getting replaced with AI.

Let's keep it real. No union would save your jobs against a manyfold productivity gain of machines.

Some of them feel bad about it and some of them refined metallurgy to build Saturn V rockets and go to space. We are very much living in the new space race. The discussion here is split 50/50 between the “Thank you! I feel the same way” folks and the “I am having the time of my life!” folks.

Blacksmiths were replaced by factories which produced deterministic products with 100% predictability.

AI can't produce code yet with 100% predictability. If that day ever arrives, the blacksmith analogy will be apt.

>with 100% predictability.

Not sure what world you're from, but lots of products get sent back to the manufacture because they break.

And your point is? Sometimes we make predictions that take hundreds of years to be turned into products.

My point is that you shouldn't believe in marketing claims that are obviously too good to be true, like

> The second we're able to understand and capture this [cold fusion] energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective.

I mean obviously this statement is false as we live in a finite section of the visible universe.

This said beyond the marketing there is a reality that if cold fusion did show up that there is a singularity event that occurs that making predictions past that point will almost always fail as the world would change very rapidly.