this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
336 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
87685 readers
2765 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But where's the motivation? How do you join the $10B club "doing so much good"? That would take soooo much longer than just being evil, evil is easy, evil is profitable, and evil can masquerade as good long enough to cash out to a level where you can hire lawyers good enough to never worry about being prosecuted for being evil.
Where's the structural societal incentive to "do so much good", and why would we need it? We are social animals, most of us are hardwired for altruism, we'll do good without expectation of compensation, so our "great society" has chosen to just use those base human instincts to "do good enough" and meanwhile reward the rare psychopaths with wealth and power - because: it's a dog eat dog world out there, if our dogs aren't eating theirs, theirs will eat ours.
That's a great question. There are some college courses that can help you answer that. The short answer is "because in terms of the flourishing of an entire species, cooperation trumps competition, but it's a recent evolution and doesn't come naturally to everyone". If we are to flourish and advance instead of strangling ourselves in the crib, we need to stop tolerating the kinds of selfish behaviors that prove detrimental to every society that permits them.
The "why would we need it" question was intended as rhetorical.
I feel that as society grows orders of magnitude larger, these overall detrimental selfish behaviors keep resurfacing as advantages in special niches where they flourish, with the potential as you say to strangle us in the crib.
There's also the looming spectre of mandatory birth control, if the magically predicted end of population growth doesn't happen we're going to have to do something to lessen our resource demands on the planet, because we're already significantly degrading it far more than previous generations with 1/4th and less of our current population which simultaneously made much lower per-capita resource demands...