Radical Openness

It is a warning to the young and impassioned. It is not a cry against progress.

There are few truly original ideas and most advancements are just taking something that already exists in one form or another and bringing it to the next step.

Often times people underestimate the effect and impact of their actions and the inherent power of science. Wielding it like a child with a toy gun. And so they take little responsibility for the outcome.
Which is a dangerous attitude to approach the evolution of technology with.

I happen to know exactly how “difficult” it is to produce something new. To take an existing product and evolve it to the next level. To bring forward a revolutionary idea. That just happens to be my job, what I get paid to do.

And there have been advancements that I have scrapped. Not because they didn’t work, but because they could easily be abused.

That is the warning. Just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should do a thing. Take responsibility for your actions.

Khaos wrote: Really, lets not use newer, safer medical techniques, or materials or lets just ignore all the positive contributions scientists make every day.

You may have mis-interpreted the quote. It was not about never advancing technology but rather warning against advances in technology that might be irresponsible, perhaps because they could be abused or misused or altered in such a way that would be detrimental.

Take 'killer robots' for example. People recently (I am unaware if they succeeded) wanted to preemptively ban killer robots - robots capable of identifying and killing targets with human-out-of-the-loop programming (i.e. no human oversight). Just because we can build robots that can kill things without human oversight does not mean that we should.

Just because we can make chemical weapons and anthrax and napalm does not mean that we should.

That is what the quote is about.