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Notes -
I mean, good? I do not want members of the public to have veto power over what smart engineers are permitted to develop (as long as they're paying for it, of course). Imagine if we'd held a plebiscite on whether universities should continue spending money on this "Internet" thing in friggin' 1973, 4 years after ARPANET began. Imagine if journalists were publishing articles in 1907 asking for the government to shut down research on these new-fangled planes because they're flimsy and dangerous and nobody they know has seen any benefits from them.
Experts have, well, expertise in the subject. They know the technology has a ridiculous number of use cases. But it takes time for it to percolate through society.
I don't think it would be good to have a social system where 'smart engineers' get to appropriate or make decisions about the use of public resources without the consent of the public who are most affected.
Arpanet or early aeronautics aren't affected by this principle because they didn't involve resources that same way. A university working on computer networks in 1973 was not building giant facilities in small towns against the expressed wishes of those towns' inhabitants.
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