What single human invention do you think has caused the most net harm to mankind and it's development and why?
By net harm I mean harm that outweighs the benefits that it has brought.
This is assuming that the goal of human development is prosperity and health etc.
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Women.
Everything bad today can be traced back to the enlightenment in some way.
Social media.
It has been the easiest way to brainwash people for they can look at it anywhere at anytime.
It has given every single peasant a voice in the world to share their opinion on matters they have no right to and they get likes for it and makes them think they are important and superior to others for it.
Yes but without the enlightenment women would only be baby making machines. The enlightenment turned them into roasties.
The Internet is just the printing press of our time. Look at how much chaos the printing press caused, enough to start a civil war in England due to all the false shit being printed by both sides.
The end of history is a fucking meme.
The Internet was a mistake. The average person cannot handle this much knowledge.
I'm not talking about the internet i'm talking about social media.
The internet is the greatest invention in history for the soul reason it gave people vital information and more importantly access to the truth at the touch of a button and made it easier to communicate with each other on a global stage.
The internet is the best invention in history, social media is the worst.
The printing press comparison applies more to social media anyways.
How can you say that the printing press is the worst invention in history when it would have printed thousands of influential books they help our living standards, tell us of history and teach people on things?
Social media was an inevitable outcome of the internet dude. People love showing off and being opinionated so now the entire world is infatuated with uneducated yet charismatic plebs and polarizing outrage stories that have no tangible effect on our everyday lives IRL.
Yes thats what i am saying, it's the worst invention because it gave people the ability to do that.
Isn't communicate with each other on a global stage exactly what you're complaining about?
Oh god yes about the end of history. I want to laugh in Fukuyama and his ilk's faces for suggesting it. History is not anthropomorphic but by god it seems to take on the quality of a Greek god punishing hybris when people make smug sweeping statements. Instead of an end to history and western liberal secular free market democracy winning we're seeing retrograde motion across the board.
I do agree about social media. But it's less an invention and more an opening of the internet beyond the narrow of professionals and nerd-faggets to the wider 'normie' landscape.
Probably something related to 'bad' food. I do not know enough about specifics of HFCS or a process of salting or whatever but you see it with the rising epidemics of obesity now in the third fucking world after being the domain of the first.
Honestly, probably coal.
GUNPOWDER tang dynasty china. 9th century.
Once back powder was invented the whole Pandora's box of ways to kill people and destroy the world was opened.
the chemical reactions of advanced combustion that followed undoutably led to more human and animal/plant misery then prosperity and health.
If we could have electricity without chemical combustion I would be so happy. I hope they work towards this in the future.
Posting a vieo on Facebook about how your life is hard and people should feel sorry for you or writing a tweet mocking someone that gets lots of likes isn't the same communication as being able to video call your family while overseas on a business trip.
bump
Anime.
Here is the real answer.
>he doesn't like guns
lmao fag
Gunpowder
usury
I want to say the internet, but too much good have come out of it.
Probably social media and 24 hours news coverage.
The real answer is alcohol though.
Uhm, no. People have been killing each other for millennia. Chemical and biological warfare were used thousands of years ago.
Gunpowder actually made the common man into a decent warrior, without needing too much resources or training. Gunpowder made the knights go away, and that's a good thing.
>alcohol
ethanol is incredibly useful
It took thousands of years before we actually used it for anything useful though.
Up until that point, it was destructive as hell, and still is.
This shit should be banned.
/r9k/
Religion, imagine the world without it.
its vast amount of industrial uses nowadays wholly makes up for the people its killed in the past imo
nah, it's a defensive weapon. Good for poorer nations to defend themselves against an enemy with superior armor. Anti tank mines are great.
why is this a gif
If you leave it open for 3 hours a naughty picture pops up.
Well, ethanol is good and all.
But the invention of drinkable ethanol has definitely more bad outcomes, than good.
> alcohol is bad for civilization! XD
> better to drink totally safe medieval water
Our chemical knowledge of ethanol comes from stuff purified from beer way back in the 1800's, drinkable ethanol directly resulted in our discovery and usage of it on an industrial scale.
our chemical knowledge comes from a lot of different inventions. Gunpowder included.
this is true though.
>our chemical knowledge comes from a lot of different inventions.
Right, but for ethanol specifically it comes from drinking alcohol.
Civilization.
>scientific advancement
That's a real nice objective statistic right there
The French revolution. Most modern problems in the world can be traced back to something that can be traced back to something that got its origins or inspiration from the French Revolution.
The pill.
The combustion engine ruined our cities
where's that fat bitch when you need her
Propaganda. Corrupting history through mass education and censorship so that any goal of the state can seem justified in the eyes of the masses.
Fake as shit. It doesn't go into the other nations before the Egyptians.
That wasn't gunpowder.
Also people would kill each other anyway.
The idea of mass.
Mass anything is a net bad for humanity.
It devalues.
I unironically wish that wars were still fought with hand to hand weapons. Yes, I'm an autistic weeb, but the modern combination of MAD, asymmetrical warfare and drone strikes is fucking gay.
Anal sex
Didn't work
Printing press.
Mating press.
I think that would be dehumanisation. Any potential benefits are cancelled out by the massive amounts of atrocities carried out using it. It’s as old as we are, too.
Consciousness
Banking/Interest. Loans have enabled conflicts over a previously impossible scale, encourage people to live above their paygrade or indebts themselves for the vast majority of their lives just to afford a home, interest creates endless cycles of debt that end up costing people and states hundreds of billions.
...
And it also gave too much economic power to the few.
The atomic bomb
sent on a social media site
Vaccine
Nothing that really stoped us from becoming overpopulated, which is a strange value to define as the main component of human progress.
Centralization. The idea that the Federal state ought to handle most things, instead of the local governments and individuals respectively, has done the most damage with the least amount of good to help balance it.
this
calling the "enlightenment" the enlightenment is enlightenment propaganda
That's solely due to people being too retarded to understand and too afraid to use the word overconsumption, so we say overpopulation instead so it sounds like we can blame the world going to shit on India and China.
>It has given every single peasant a voice in the world to share their opinion on matters they have no right to and they get likes for it and makes them think they are important and superior to others for it.
The irony is palpable
Fracking
> Destroys the water table
> Causes earthquakes
> Extends the lifetime of the carbon economy
> Geopolitically is in the proces of upheaving world order, 50 years before China would have been in a position to do it on its own
> Has put nuclear power on the backburner in the US, causing emission free electricity to go down as a part of the overall mix
The printing press was a mistake. The average person cannot handle this much knowledge.
Could a question ever be more rhetoric?
Internet.
It ruined society and social lives of millions of people.
Gunpowder
Fiat currency systems.
In recent history, I'd have to say corn syrups