Should a useful invention be restricted if its harmful consequences cannot be reliably controlled?

Lastly, we have three that raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms. These we call Interpreters of Nature. "We have also, as you must think, novices and apprentices, that the succession of the former employed men do not fail; besides, a great number of servants and attendants, men and women. And this we do also: we have consultations, which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not: and take all an oath of secrecy, for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret: though some of those we do reveal sometimes to the state and some not.

There he saw an old man engaged in making a ditch to connect his vegetable garden with a well. He had a pitcher in his hand, with which he was bringing up water and pouring it into the ditch,--great labour with very little result. "If you had a machine here," cried Tzŭ Kung, "in a day you could irrigate a hundred times your present area. The labour required is trifling as compared with the work done. Would you not like to have one?" "It is a contrivance made of wood," replied Tzŭ Kung, "heavy behind and light in front. It draws up water as you do with your hands, but in a constantly overflowing stream. It is called a well-sweep." Thereupon the gardener flushed up and said, "I have heard from my teacher that those who have cunning implements are cunning in their dealings, and that those who are cunning in their dealings have cunning in their hearts, and that those who have cunning in their hearts cannot be pure and incorrupt, and that those who are not pure and incorrupt are restless in spirit, and that those who are restless in spirit are not fit vehicles for TAO. It is not that I do not know of these things. I should be ashamed to use them.

The introduction of new machines into any manufacture, with the effect of superseding hand labour, is tempered by the system of patents, which maintains them for a certain time at a monopoly price, and thereby obstructs their rapid multiplication. Did we admit the principles on which the use of particular self-acting mechanisms is objected to by workmen, we should not be able, in any case, to define the limits of their application. Had parliament acted on such principles sixty years ago, none of our manufactures could have attained to their present state of profitable employment to either masters or men. The immediate causes of their vast augmentation may be ascribed, under the blessing of Providence, to the general spirit of industry and enterprize among a free and an enlightened people, left to the unrestrained exercise of their talents in the employment of a vast capital, pushing to the utmost the principle of the analysis of labour, summoning to their service all the resources of scientific research and mechanical ingenuity ;

Chemical warfare had been so far foreseen by statesmen that in 1907 the signatories of the Hague Conference agreed to renounce the use of projectiles the sole object of which was the diffusion of asphyxiating or harmful gases. They were thus debarred from using lachrymatory gas, the most humane weapon ever invented ; but permitted to discharge gas from cylinders on the ground, an exceedingly cruel practice. This regulation was well meant, but the path to August, 1914, was paved with good intentions. In 1914 none of the great powers had made any preparation for poison-gas warfare, and it was not till April 22nd, 1915, more than eight months after the beginning of the war, that the Germans began its use.