The video in the article shows them testing with an electric leaf blower.

No discovery is useless. Even if it isn’t used now, it could lay the groundwork for more useful discoveries later.

Just put the laser high enough above the ground, like in orbit, and nothing will ever reach the lens.

How exactly is that a strawman argument? You act like technology does nothing for us. I agree that fighting for higher wages and other protections also makes things better. I don’t understand why any of this makes the luddites right. Tech literally does work for us. You say tech makes people appear richer but it really only hurts us. What about medicine? What about the learning we can do through the Internet? What about the million other things that we can do that our ancestors couldn’t?

Yeah bring back telephone operators too while we’re at it! No one should ever lose a job! Jobs are a person’s whole life and they should get to do it even if something else could do it better!

/s

Stopping tech from taking jobs just doesn’t make any sense. If we did have the perfect economic system, having that tech would lower the overall amount of work that needs to be done. That is a good thing. We should fight for fair labor practices, but fighting to keep labor itself around is the wrong idea. Why keep useless jobs around? Just to keep people employed?

People like you are the problem. All this pointless violence and you just want more.

Why would people want this? How else do you find videos to watch?

I did. Change is hard but it’s hard to argue that we would be better off without that robotics. It does a lot of work for us and we can all have better stuff because of it. In a better world we’d be excited because it means we all have to do less work but the upper class just keeps finding more stuff for us to do.

How is that worse than the huge amount of money they have to pay for insulin now?

We already have tons of terrifying sounding technologies. Almost every technology can be used in good and bad ways. We could use current gene editing to make super viruses that wipe out the entire world population. Gene editing has also given us the power to make way more food than we ever thought was possible. This new tech could create miracles for people with genes that harm them, like diabetes. Nuclear physics gave us the atomic bomb but also gave us an amazing and world changing source of energy. Staying ignorant of some science just because it could theoretically be used for something bad is never the right way to go. We have to learn everything and try to use it for the most good that we can. Plus I doubt this is something they could just randomly do to people. It’ll probably still be a rather complicated procedure only done in certain situations.