[onceKnowable]

Hold on, you’re ascribing a lack of dystopias because you don’t see one right now. That’s because laws have been passed to restrict that possibility. The public debate has been conducted on a lot of technologies that could have lead us to a dystopia yet you’re ignoring them totally because dystopia never materialized?

- police state actions and encouragement: entirely possible, especially now that we’ve all got location trackers that also contain our innermost thoughts in the form of our text messages, yet using all of that info against us is totally illegal.

- subliminal messaging & propaganda: never more possible than right now with our totally connected lifestyles, yet totally illegal.

And on and on. Just because the worst hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it wouldnt happen if left unchecked.

Also, Nobel thought he’d created the most explosive substance that would ever be possible, with hindsight we know that TNT wasn’t that but nukes absolutely are; and his conclusion was correct in the context that nukes are the next step up from TNT: with such powerful weapons, battlefield wars between those who hold nukes have effectively ended. (Proxy wars notwithstanding, if those countries had nukes they wouldn’t be used as pawns in a proxy war.)