• maplesaga@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 days ago

    Whats the alternative, let China and Russia build up the technology and we stay in the past?

    The US has the largest military because its the reserve currency, they print money and export their inflation and they spend that money on military expenditures, which prevents people from moving off USD.

    This then lets them sanction other countries and control the worlds shipping lanes, so asking them to stop developing their military is asking for the existing global order to cease to exist, and then you’re at the whims of whatever power fills that void.

      • m532@lemmygrad.ml
        0·
        5 days ago

        This is completely unfeasible. Convincing a bunch of people won’t cut it. For this to work, you’d need to rule the whole world with an iron fist, and then there’d still be secret resistance research labs everywhere.

        • StopTech@lemmy.todayOP
          0·
          4 days ago

          Ruling with an iron fist tends to create resistance and without mass surveillance technology an unpopular regime couldn’t keep everyone in line. But if instead most people are in agreement about something being bad (like they are with slavery or pedophilia) then there is much less resistance to enforcement against it (whether that’s centralized or decentralized enforcement) and therefore that thing is more effectively stopped.

          While lone individuals or small secretive groups could continue doing the bad practice, in terms of technology I don’t think this will matter much because they won’t be able to develop a lot of technology with only a small group of people who aren’t building on other people’s work and their technology also wouldn’t be adopted by a society that is against it.

      • maplesaga@lemmy.world
        0·
        5 days ago

        Having rejected centralised restrictions on technology then, the alternative we are left with is decentralised restriction. This could include boycotts, agreements, social stigma, parallel economies, civil disobedience and more, with the goal of limiting the development, distribution or adoption of anti-human technologies.

        So you require that people just boycott countries like China, stop buying their trinkets and they’ll stop creating doomsday weapons?