THE FREE MARKET CAN’T SAVE US FROM BAD INNOVATIONS

(The following was written without CHATGPT, etc. And it is about a 2 minute and 20 second read.)

Hello -

Here's another reason why I believe Humanoid Robots should be 'stopped" : THE FREE MARKET CAN’T *SAVE US FROM BAD INNOVATIONS  (please excuse title error in which I wrote 'Safe' - instead of 'Save'.)

It is not enjoyable to speculate how bad the Humanoid Robot could be -  in part, this is because the life of the modern westerner depends on the assumption that a product made by a reputable company and sold at a reputable store is going to be generally safe. In a way, to question the Humanoid is, to question the very market phenomenon that underlies civilization - affording so many of us with historically unbelievable material abundance.  

But - as we all know - unfortunately we need to expend some precious energy to reassess this good faith assumption, from time to time. New products - that seem perfectly reasonable - can indeed turn out to be a total bad for humanity. Asbestos, teflon, lead, and plastics - are on the usual short list of man-made scourges.

We should expect that bad innovations will happen - they're an inevitable development in what we know as a free market. And in part, they occur because the speed by which innovations can proliferate throughout society is often much faster than our ability to know if a product is going to be a success or failure. Great companies know well that the most important information about a product is learned only after it has been able to ‘interact’ with the general public.

With this reality in mind, the special challenge with the Humanoid Robot is the degree to which it could perpetrate harm throughout society IF it turned out to be a bad innovation. 

Unlike, say, some inert product like asbestos, the Humanoid Robot promises to be a machine at least as capable as a human, and thus technically capable of physical combat. Moreover, if we wait for the evidence that a ‘Terminator-style’ uprising is possible - evidence skeptics seem to require - it would certainly be tragically (or comically) too late to make use of it.  

Therefore - the question applied to such a super machine can’t be, "what evidence is there that this product is bad?" Instead, the question must be something more like, "Is it technically possible for this product to be bad?" And for the Humanoid - a machine that's list of good use cases is rivaled by its list of bad ones - the answer is yes. 

Even advocates of the free market have to keep in mind: the free market can't protect us from bad innovations. It seems reasonable, then, to not underestimate the degree to which some bad innovations could be bad.