What's a quote that has stuck with you for your whole life?

zinklog@lemmy.fmhy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 609 points –

I always loved browsing such posts on reddit, so thought I should make one on lemmy too

Edit: Usually these kind of posts only used to have excerpts from books or ancient proverbs, but now I am seeing a lot more quotes from shows/movies/games are also resonating with people. It's pretty cool to see.

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I have two that have stuck with me most my adult life-- and I find that they apply frequently.

I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

-- Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty Speech, 1944

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

  1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

  2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

  3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

-- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt, 2002

Omg! I'm old because I'm terrified of AI! Wait... I'm terrified of AI because I'm old?

It's funny because lately I have been applying that quote to people being terrified of "AI". (I hate that we use that word to describe stuff like LLMs, but that's another topic.)

There are countless points in history where a technological advance has rendered some human labor less or no longer needed. There's nothing to be done about it; that's how progress works-- it's why we're not mostly farmers anymore.

The solution to technology rendering human labor less or no longer needed is for society to divorce the need to work from living a comfortable life. It's certainly not to try and hold back or eliminate the technology solely to protect human labor.

Don't be terrified of "AI".

But don't you feel like this is the one that we've been warned about a lot? I'm not concerned about losing my job; I'm worried about being killed by M3gan.