Reaction to... Are We Doomed Yet?

The author of this article makes an interesting point, but perhaps slightly exaggerated. Technology is double edged sword as well as a slippery slope. Technology can make many things much better and more convenient than ever before, however there will always be malicious people who use technology for wrong doing. The slippery slope idea is once some technology is brought forth to us it is hard to take it back, we slide down the slope and its hard to get back to where we were. So if some new technology came out that had far more costs to society than benefits it would be hard to eliminate. An example of this would be napster, although the measurement of costs vs. benefits is relative to the individual. It came out and many people (including myself) loved it, but then the record labels "lost" money, and bands protested it, and it was "shut down." However, now that the technology had been introduced it had been cloned and there were many many file sharing programs similar to napster. They keep finding ways to eliminate them, but there will always be ways around it. I have found a program that is better than napster in just about everyway. If it gets shut down I am sure I will find another. The author suggests that maybe very malicious and sensitve information will be released and readily available on the internet, and just as file sharing still exists despite the shutting down of napster, so will this information find ways to thrive. This threat doesn't seem likely to me, but I do agree that once something sees the light of day, it will almost certainly be able to exist in one form or another.