I don't agree with you or Kevin Kelly. A hammer might be designed for hammering nails, but you can beat someone to death with a hammer or use it to build a house. A drone that is used to kill people can easily be turned to other purposes; consider the fact that satellite photography was once used primarily for espionage and military target identification, but has since become an invaluable tool for everything from mapping services to environmental observation. We wouldn't have been able to properly observe things like deforestation in the Amazon, the ozone hole, or shifting temperature gradients without this military-originated technology.
Kelly has interesting points to make about path-dependency, but I don't share his teleological viewpoint, though having said that I've only read extracts and essays by him rather than the full book.
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I don't agree with you or Kevin Kelly. A hammer might be designed for hammering nails, but you can beat someone to death with a hammer or use it to build a house. A drone that is used to kill people can easily be turned to other purposes; consider the fact that satellite photography was once used primarily for espionage and military target identification, but has since become an invaluable tool for everything from mapping services to environmental observation. We wouldn't have been able to properly observe things like deforestation in the Amazon, the ozone hole, or shifting temperature gradients without this military-originated technology.
Kelly has interesting points to make about path-dependency, but I don't share his teleological viewpoint, though having said that I've only read extracts and essays by him rather than the full book.