Comment by Alex_U2 on The Magnitude of His Own Folly · 2008-09-30T19:01:51.000Z · LW · GW

Couldn't Pascal's Wager-type reasoning be used to justify delaying any number of powerful technologies (and relatively unpowerful ones too -- after all, there's some non-zero chance that the water-wheel somehow leads directly to our downfall) until they were provably, 100% safe? And because that latter proposition is a virtual impossibility, wouldn't that mean we'd sit around doing nothing but meta-theorizing until some other heedless party simply went ahead and developed the technology anyway? Certainly being mindful of the risks inherent in new technologies is a good thing; just not sure that devoting excessive time to thinking about it, in lieu of actually creating it, is the smartest or most productive endeavor.