From Dyane Silvester, Arnside, Cumbria, UK
Annalee Newitz’s comments, saying we shouldn’t blame communication technology for authoritarian regimes abusing social media or the nightmare of AI chatbots generating lies, apply to most inventions. Tempering steel and splitting the atom had the potential to hugely improve our lives, but it didn’t take long for us to kill one another using both. Any technology is only as good or as bad as the people who use it, and it seems to me that, as a species, we are particularly good at finding harmful (or, at best, banal and pointless) uses for new technologies, and then blaming the technology itself (8 March, p 18).
