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> This is the fundamentally flawed and misguided argument that can literally be applied to any technological progress to curtail advancement.

No, this is the only fundamentally correct way to view this. Before the existence of the printing press, we didn't need copyright law. Yet all that the printing press did was make transcribing books by hand faster.

Quantitative changes enabled by technology are qualitative changes. And not every form that a qualitative change takes is one that leaves the world better off than we found it.




Artists do not have an inalienable right to be paid to do art. There are many reasons why you might argue that the tech is harmful, but that it "will make artists extinct" is not a good one.


And authors don't have any natural right to prevent people from copying their books.

And yet, we have decided that society is better off when authors can make money off their work.


That's exactly OP's point: the output to society is what matters, not the simple existence of a career. It can definitely be argued that society will be the worse because SD replaces artists, but we shouldn't assume a priori that eliminating a specific job is a bad thing.


name one qualitative change resulting from quantitative change that did not benefit the world as a whole?


All of the good changes have also come with new laws that forbid many of the bad uses thereof. Not every form of use of a technological invention is a net positive, and laws reflect that, by forbidding the negative uses.

The automobile revolutionized transportation, but also came with licensing requirements. (And more recently, we are finding to be responsible for a health and climate catastrophe, necessitating new restrictions on fuel economy, leaded gasoline, ICEs, etc.) You didn't need a license to walk or ride a bicycle, or ride a horse, but when we started putting people behind thousands of pounds of steel, all of a sudden we needed to come up with a myriad of new rules and restrictions on how automobiles could be used.

The printing press came with copyright laws. New and more destructive weapons and tools and chemicals came with more restrictions regarding their possession and expected use. The telephone and the computer combined allow robo calling and spam on an industrial level, and those particular uses of those new technologies are forbidden. Radio revolutionized communication, but we don't just let any random asshole blast static into the spectrum. We have narrowly curtailed, permitted and forbidden uses of it.

It would be far easier to name the technologies that net-benefited society, and did not need new rules around them, to prevent their destructive and damaging uses.

This one isn't looking to be one of them.


Atom bombs.

Coal mining (if coal hadn't ever been mined, we'd probably have gotten large scale wind- and hydroelectric power much sooner).

Whitney's cotton gin, albeit due to it coming before automated cotton picking.




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