5 ms·

So you're asking people to stop wanting money? The people who want to solve life threatening problems will do so and the people who want to make "trivial" apps

So you're asking people to stop wanting money? The people who want to solve life threatening problems will do so and the people who want to make "trivial" apps to make lots of money will do so. Asking us to just do the former is pointless. Also what about people who aren't entrepreneurs and work at industries like finance, law, and first country problems? Shouldn't they be held under the same scrutiny? What's so special about tech entrepreneurs that they'll should be more responsible? Knowing how to code Ruby and deploy in Docker is not the same skill set needed to come up with climate change solutions.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
adventured 11y ago
You make an extremely good point. I had not considered that every time a person complains about duplication of apps, or developers that make trivial apps for money (instead of 'changing the world'), the same standard should be applied to the tens of millions of service and industrial jobs that are mostly clones of each other and could be considered trivial by the same standard. For example: we really need to do something about all of these people working at Costco, trying to make their car and rent payments. It's ridiculous, the duplication of labor going on, where people aren't doing anything original. That would be considered a cruel, borderline malevolent statement. And following through on it would result in a hundred million people being unemployed. Somehow the standard changes when a person is mostly seeking to earn a living off of an app however.
- blondie9x 11y ago
  I'm saying when apps are written to duplicate what is already free. The comparison to laborers is fallacious. I'm referring to innovators in computer science who say they innovate when they simply recreate. It's a waste of efforts
- losteric 11y ago
  Are you proposing that we should intentionally keep around duplicate labor? Duplication of work is a cardinal sin of technology and automation. Millions of jobs have already been destroyed by software, and the rate of obsoletion is only growing. A few thousand LoC and a couple racks of hardware can destroy tens of thousands of jobs. That's why software companies are highly valued. Aggregated across the entire industry and we've replaced millions of jobs already... Hopefully we'll see that number hit tens of millions within a couple decades. Apps... most apps are frivolous, bordering toys. They add value like a hot dog vendor adds value to a baseball game. Why would app creators be treated any differently?
zeemonkee3 11y ago
The problem is to get started we need more scientists. And academia and education right now right now is so horribly broken with perverse anti-incentives that no young person in their right mind will want to pursue a career in research - they'll go code Ruby instead because they have loans to pay and want a roof over their head. We also want more engineers and other specialists in government - but decades of bureaucratic creep and managerialism on the one hand and neoliberal-driven cost cutting and privatisation on the other have made government, like academia, very unattractive to young smart people. So it's not a question of people already in finance, law or tech startups switching over to fighting climate change - as you said, they aren't in the same skill set. We need to train the next generation to fight climate change across a number of fronts - climate study, geoengineering, energy, transport, flood defense, food production and so on. And right now all the incentives are pushing that generation in entirely the wrong direction.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

adventured 11y ago

You make an extremely good point. I had not considered that every time a person complains about duplication of apps, or developers that make trivial apps for money (instead of 'changing the world'), the same standard should be applied to the tens of millions of service and industrial jobs that are mostly clones of each other and could be considered trivial by the same standard. For example: we really need to do something about all of these people working at Costco, trying to make their car and rent payments. It's ridiculous, the duplication of labor going on, where people aren't doing anything original. That would be considered a cruel, borderline malevolent statement. And following through on it would result in a hundred million people being unemployed. Somehow the standard changes when a person is mostly seeking to earn a living off of an app however.

blondie9x 11y ago
I'm saying when apps are written to duplicate what is already free. The comparison to laborers is fallacious. I'm referring to innovators in computer science who say they innovate when they simply recreate. It's a waste of efforts
losteric 11y ago
Are you proposing that we should intentionally keep around duplicate labor? Duplication of work is a cardinal sin of technology and automation. Millions of jobs have already been destroyed by software, and the rate of obsoletion is only growing. A few thousand LoC and a couple racks of hardware can destroy tens of thousands of jobs. That's why software companies are highly valued. Aggregated across the entire industry and we've replaced millions of jobs already... Hopefully we'll see that number hit tens of millions within a couple decades. Apps... most apps are frivolous, bordering toys. They add value like a hot dog vendor adds value to a baseball game. Why would app creators be treated any differently?

zeemonkee3 11y ago

The problem is to get started we need more scientists. And academia and education right now right now is so horribly broken with perverse anti-incentives that no young person in their right mind will want to pursue a career in research - they'll go code Ruby instead because they have loans to pay and want a roof over their head. We also want more engineers and other specialists in government - but decades of bureaucratic creep and managerialism on the one hand and neoliberal-driven cost cutting and privatisation on the other have made government, like academia, very unattractive to young smart people. So it's not a question of people already in finance, law or tech startups switching over to fighting climate change - as you said, they aren't in the same skill set. We need to train the next generation to fight climate change across a number of fronts - climate study, geoengineering, energy, transport, flood defense, food production and so on. And right now all the incentives are pushing that generation in entirely the wrong direction.