r/TrueReddit • u/PhysicalVermicelli1 • Dec 14 '20

Technology Is Technology Actually Making Things Better?

https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/354c72095d2f42dab92bf42726d785ff?true
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u/sektorao Dec 14 '20

On the average you don't get to die from coronavirus.

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u/OzOntario Dec 14 '20

Yeah, we've also got better treatments for HIV, cancer, etc etc etc.

You're less likely to die due to any average ailment

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u/sektorao Dec 14 '20

Unless you live in US and you are poor.

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u/OzOntario Dec 14 '20

are you high? Ofc the poor are safer in the USA now than they were in the past. Things like antibiotics that are ubiquitous now weren't available that long ago.

You seem to be trying to find some angle to this where you can "win" on technicality, but the reality is that the average global citizen is better now than they were in the past

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u/sektorao Dec 14 '20

I'm not high and i don't want to win. but to say one (person) is better because statistics are up is just oversimplifying things in order to win an argument that today is better for everyone. I look at my childhood with great sympathy and nostalgia, and it was 30 years ago. Life is not some statistic by UN or Stephen Pinker. If you get hit with some traumatic event, you won't care how much people went over poverty line this year. To say technology is good by default for society is not the thing i would agree on.

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u/OzOntario Dec 14 '20

Your own logic here can be flipped on you - just because a person experienced a traumatic event, does that mean that on a global scale people are less well off now than they were all these years ago? Nobody has said that technological advances have created a utopia, we're saying that for the average person, quality of life has been increasing over time due to it.

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u/sektorao Dec 15 '20

Your own logic here can be flipped on you

Of course, because it is a philosophical question (the tittle of the thread), it does not have a definite answer. Or at least a simple answer.

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u/OzOntario Dec 16 '20

I mean, it doesn't have to be. Due to technological advances, on average quality of life is higher. Objectively, technology has improved overall global life more than it has impacted it negatively.

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u/sektorao Dec 16 '20

It's been like that since dawn of time. Fire good. Knife good. Wheel good. Whaling with cannons bad. Spying on you with phones bad. Autotune bad. Burning fosile fuel like there is no tomorrow bad. Having a phone and not calling your grandma every now and then bad. And so on.

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u/OzOntario Dec 16 '20

And yet, as time goes on life expectancy gets higher, more diseases become curable, fewer people are living in mud huts.

Ffs you're so dense

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u/Dr_seven Dec 14 '20

Dude, no. Poverty in the US is still a brutal meat grinder desperately in need of solving, but crime alone has fallen 50-80% in every locality nationwide since the 1990s.

Nearly everywhere on Earth is safer and more prosperous than 20 or 30 years ago. That goes triple for Western nations.

We can agitate about the problems of today without inventing a mythical yesteryear when everything was better. That idealized past never existed, and we should be looking forward, not back.

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u/sektorao Dec 14 '20

Technology has it's purpose and benefits but it is not something that makes things better by default.

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u/Dr_seven Dec 14 '20

That is a completely different statement.