[pwillia7]

Chemical weapons still exist and are used[1]

So are beanie babies, NFTs and garbage pail kids -- Things that have fallen out of fashion isn't the same thing as eradicating a technology. I think that's part of the difficulty, how could you roll back knowledge without some Khmer Rouge generational trauma?

I think about the original use of steam engines and the industrial revolution -- Steam engines were so inefficient, their use didn't make sense outside of pulling its own fuel out of the ground -- Many people said haha look how silly and inefficient this robot labor is. We can see how that all turned out.[2]

1: https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/timeline-syrian-chemi...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine

[username223]

> Things that have fallen out of fashion isn't the same thing as eradicating a technology.

That's true. Ruby still exists, for example, though it's sitting down below COBOL on the Tiobe index. There's probably a community trading garbage pail kids on Facebook Marketplace as well. Ideas rarely die completely.

Burning fossil fuels to turn heat into kinetic energy is genuinely better than using draft animals or human slaves. Creating worse code (or worse clothing) for less money is a tradeoff that only works for some situations.