12 ms·

The Manhattan Project Fallacy

159 points by raghava 10y ago

gwbas1c 10y ago
Is there a tldr version?
- Animats 10y ago
  It's 90 seconds of reading. What's the problem?
  - michaje 10y ago
    If you had a 90s read, you clicked the wrong link.
    - dismantlethesun 10y ago
      Truthfully so, it's ~5800 words. Even at "top" skimming score of 1000 words per minute, that's still almost 360 seconds to read it.
- omginternets 10y ago
  No.
- jordanlev 10y ago
  tl;dr... > Do we really want tech companies to turn their attention away from beating board game players and producing business products to start 'solving' social problems? The answer to this question should be an emphatic "no."
- striking 10y ago
  Some snippets of the introduction: > When will tech solve the real problems, critics ask? > Assuming that this complaint is sincere, it nonetheless misses the point. What are "real" problems? > [...] the author wants to deputize Google, Facebook, Apple, and other tech companies to solve social problems. To rectify flawed systems. > Do we really want tech companies to turn their attention away from beating board game players and producing business products to start 'solving' social problems? The answer to this question should be an emphatic "no." The entire framing of the question is profoundly backward. The closest you'll get to a tl;dr are the author's two paragraphs summing things up: > This essay advances the following points: > 1. The clamoring for tech companies to solve social problems ignores the empirical record and empirically observed characteristics of top-down engineering efforts and is rooted in a naive belief in the power of technical rationality. Technical rationality not only has a long and fairly checkered history when applied to social problems, but also takes on pathological characteristics when it is embodied in bureaucratic organizations attempting to engineer their way out of policy problems. There is no concrete idea of how tech companies are going to work on these problems, just a vague belief that they should rooted in worship of technical rationality. > 2. Tech companies are neither instrinsically [sic] well-adapted for taking on quasi-governmental or governmental functions nor likely to be any more successful at escaping the problems of technical rationality than their government counterparts have been. While tech companies can make valuable policy contributions in certain functional areas and with certain mechanisms, the biggest benefit they provide is simply giving us more tools to solve our own problems. Why should we depend on tech companies to solve social problems when it is both better from a normative perspective and a practical one for them to simply give us the tools we need to empower ourselves?
Animats 10y ago
Is anybody seriously proposing heavy Government spending on any specific problem right now, other than a wall against Mexico? Some engineering problems have yielded to heavy spending. The Polaris submarine program. The Apollo program. RCA's color TV effort. AIDS treatment. Extreme ultraviolet photolithography. The H-bomb. Sometimes this works. With a narrow goal, a general idea of how to get there, and heavy funding, impressive results are possible.
- adrianN 10y ago
  Fusion power is a problem that needs more funding.
  - maxxxxx 10y ago
    Fusion would be a perfect candidate. We pretty much know that it will work, we know it would yield big benefits, we just need a lot of money to work out all problems.
    - epicureanideal 10y ago
      I would personally greatly prefer massive directed spending at hard science problems than quantitative easing dropping cheap money on Wall Street. Let the money trickle down from spending on science equipment and scientist and engineering salaries.
- manachar 10y ago
  You left out the interstate system, one of the largest public works projects of American history with lasting economic, social, and political impact. Big money does change stuff, it can just be really hard to determine what exactly it will change and if it will ultimately be good.
  - Animats 10y ago
    The Interstate highway system wasn't an attempt to solve a technology problem. It was just a big public works program. Expensive, but low-risk. The Pennsylvania Turnpike already existed, and its first section opened in 1940.
thro32 10y ago
Go and Chess AI are SERIOUS and REAL problem. It is something which goes back for thousands years and will be remembered for another thousands years. AIDS and other contemporary diseases will be soon forgotten after their extinction.
- civilian 10y ago
  I really enjoy Go (I'm an 8k) but I have to disagree with this. Curing diseases-- AIDS, smallpox, guinea worm, chicken pox-- are accomplishments have impact people lives and directly help humanity get more value out our citizens. Fun fact: did you know that kids don't get chicken pox these days? They all get immunized, so they don't go through the rite of passage that everyone who's 20+ plus has gone through. And it'll soon be forgotten. Which brings me to: Just because people forget about a disease we've cured doesn't invalidate that good that was done by the people solving that problem. The general public doesn't know about _most_ good things that were done to bring about the world we live in. There's still value in helping anyway. Doctors & researchers don't ask to be worshipped. Even if we strongman Go and Chess and say that they are great at sharpening & maintaining one's mental facilities, have been integral and beneficial to military thought, and are immensely enjoyable, I don't think that the value of solving the Go and Chess problems compares to curing diseases.
  - greendragon 10y ago
    It's more about status than utility. As long as Go and Chess can maintain some sort of high status (as games or as historical points of interest) among the intelligent or ruling classes, they'll be remembered. Diseases seem to get status a different way. Humanity will probably remember the Plague for a long time still. Or if a biologically engineered supervirus was unleashed that killed a significant fraction of humanity over a short period of time, that too would be remembered. Quick mass death is the status currency of disease. If we ever get around to ending aging, probably one of the lowest-status problems on the to-do list, death by aging will be forgotten too.
- sctb 10y ago
  It's hard to read this in a way that doesn't suggest that real, serious diseases aren't, at which point it becomes hardly distinct from a troll comment. Please post civilly and substantively on HN; we have to ban accounts that refuse.
sandworm101 10y ago
>> First, the Manhattan Project itself was sui generis. There is very little reason to believe that this model does, in fact, generalize widely outside of the basic and applied sciences. No. It was a basic question of practical physics. It was an effort to translate theoretical knowledge already proven in laboratories into a working product at scale. The innovations were definitely costly, but essentially rather incremental and straightforward. That was much of the reason it needed to be done in a hurry: eventually someone would do it. Fusion power is in the same place. The theory works in the lab, we need to translate that into a working model at practical scales. Eventually someone will crack the problem. A Manhattan-style push would accelerate that date, hopefully to within our lifetimes.
- knorby 10y ago
  The Manhattan Project had nearly unlimited resources at a time of scarcity, and it took enormous engineering risks. The risk component is something easy to overlook, but these were enormous infrastructure projects by any standard done at scale without much chance to prove them, and they were accomplished in incredibly short time-frames. Could you imagine someone building a full-scale, power generating fusion reactor off a new and untested design in a about a year? More to the point, could you imagine someone funding that?
Tossrock 10y ago
I think the author is strawmanning a bit here. The central premise they're attacking is that tech should not be called upon to solve social problems, and they assume this is what the pull quote at the top is implying. They then spend the body of the essay arguing that social problems are intractable to a top down approach, technological rationality is subject to the same problems as government bureaucracy, etc. However, one could more charitably interpret the quote as saying there are lots of TECHNOLOGIES that would produce social good, which are underfunded - alternative energy, carbon capture, distributed social networking, etc. Ycombinator seems to agree, given their recent focus on nuclear.
- mjb 10y ago
  I think the author is right that top-down technical solutions to social problems don't work. Their examples are compelling, and more come to mind. As you say, though, that doesn't extend to the argument that technology and social good are unrelated. Companies reasonably can (and, one could argue, should) choose their investments and priorities based on their social effects and other distant externalities. There are also problems, like the social effects of climate change, that can be effectively addressed, at least partially, with technical solutions. The much more interesting question for me is whether it's ethical to invest in technologies that will cause social change, even if those changes are highly likely to be negative in the short term. The default silicon valley answer to that would be yes, but a broad range of other people would say no. Both have rational arguments. If you look at the social effects of the industrial revolution (or the green revolution, or the enlightenment) there's a lot of short-term negative for a lot of people and some enduring problems for some groups of people.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - skybrian 10y ago
    Do anti-spam, anti-malware, anti-phishing, and https-everywhere campaigns count as social change? How about moderation policies for social networks?
davidgrenier 10y ago
Glad I had seen SlingShot, documentary on Dean Kamen, prior to reading this article.
aftbit 10y ago
My fundamental hope for humanity is that someday, rather than having to confront social challenges around distribution of resources (who gets more water? who gets more land? who gets more oil? do we need to raise energy costs to capture the extrinsic costs of polluting the air?), we will just have enough and more of everything. The Central Arizona Project and the Navajo Generating Station are my favorite examples of this. The Navajo Generating Station is a giant coal-fired power plant, which provides energy used primarily to pump water up into Arizona. The station substantially degrades air quality in the surrounding areas, and the water that is "stolen" from the Colorado is a part of the West's growing water concerns. Right now, there are two sides to the issue: those who think it is worth the cost to bring water to Arizona, and those who believe the environmental issues are too big. We could solve that like a social problem, using politics and ethics to try to make the decision... or we could just get on making energy cheap and clean, and suddenly a huge part of the cost disappears. If there was no fly ash issue, no NOx issue, no CO2 issue, then we're back to just worrying about the water flow. But if we have cheap energy, desalination suddenly looks a lot more palatable, which would reduce a lot of water pressures in the US. Los Angeles could switch to 100% desal water and the Colorado river would have a surplus of water again. Cheap (and preferably clean) energy, solving climate change, and cheap access to space (this one is more dubious) would all broadly boost the quality of life for humanity.
- nixos 10y ago
  > Cheap (and preferably clean) energy This is the difficulty. Right now, the only cheap and clean energy somewhat on the horizon is fusion, which is 50 years in the future for the past 50 years.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    You're talking about Arizona. Hello, solar...
  - atemerev 10y ago
    Nuclear is clean. Cleaner than solar, at least.
jwatte 10y ago
Let's reframe the question: Why does society today not attempt to maximize happiness among all citizens? Resources are expended to make those with more resources marginally more happy, rather than someone with less resources comparatively much more happy. Market economy says that this is the most "efficient" distribution of resources, but the assumption there is that the happiness of the rich is more important than the happiness of the poor. Is this what we want our societal values to be? And if so, how much more important? And if not, is a domestic happy person more valuable than a foreign happy person? The ethics and morals that come out of defining these answers are quite strikingly different.
- jpttsn 10y ago
  Who are "we?" “The sooner we learn not to think or utter sentences such as “the United States should do . . . ”or “the American people want . . . ” or “China’s government ought to do . . . ,” the better we will understand government, business, and all other forms of organization. When addressing politics, we must accustom ourselves to think and speak about the actions and interests of specific, named leaders rather than thinking and talking about fuzzy ideas like the national interest, the common good, and the general welfare” Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. “The Dictator's Handbook.”
- dmix 10y ago
  > Market economy says that this is the most "efficient" distribution of resources. Focusing on the rich sounds like you're referring to "trickle down economics" which is not a real thing in economics and is largely a fabrication of the media and partisan politics: https://fee.org/articles/there-is-no-such-thing-as-trickle-down-economics/ https://fee.org/articles/there-is-no-such-thing-as-trickle-d... http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367682/trickle-down-lie-thomas-sowell http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367682/trickle-down-li... Saying that 'market economies' only favours or benefits the wealthy is a mischaracterization and/or a drastic over-simplification of supply-side economics. Also I'm with Arthur Schopenhauer in questioning the premise of happiness as the basic goal in life. Although you're probably just referring to maximizing the general 'quality of life' rather than the emotional state, which I do agree with.
- deleted 10y ago
sapphireblue 10y ago
DeepMind looks like a hilariously wrong project to criticize because it is a true moonshot, something very different from the majority of other SV projects. If hiring hundreds of PhDs to create a general purpose learning agent, all while publishing all the intermediate results in freely available papers isn't a moonshot with socially beneficial outcome, then I don't know what is. Also note that DeepMind went even further than that, there is DeepMind health division aiming at using this technology to help doctors and patients directly. If I were the author I'd choose some social media unicorn or an ad network as an example of inherent misallocation of human talent.
- rl3 10y ago
  >If I were the author I'd choose some social media unicorn or an ad network as an example of inherent misallocation of human talent. Google acquired DeepMind using money that was ultimately the result of ad revenue.
- ckozlowski 10y ago
  I think part of the issue is that the results of DeepMind, while enormously impactful, do not have the sort of tangible quantity that the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program did. It's easy for critics to dismiss them when the most relatable thing to the layperson is "This thing plays Go". It's a common lament in the scientific community, especially in the theoretical space. I don't see an easy answer for it, other than "Wait for it." To me, the more apt comparison isn't say, DeepMind to the Manhattan Project, it's DeepMind to the early physics experiments, or Chicago Pile 1. You can imagine in the future, a letter being written much like Einstein's to FDR, pointing to an early and modest project saying "because of this, we can now create <X>". (I'm ignoring the wartime necessities and issues surrounding that letter in this example as they're outside of the discussion.)
- xg15 10y ago
  > If hiring hundreds of PhDs to create a general purpose learning agent, all while publishing all the intermediate results in freely available papers isn't a moonshot with socially beneficial outcome, then I don't know what is. I'm sorry, I don't buy it. What exactly are the social benefits of general purpose learning agent? It's an impressive technical and scientific challange, agreed, but most applications that I can immediately think of are harmful to society (reduction of white-collar jobs, increased potential for surveillance and profiling, etc) - so how would such an agent be used to actually improve society?
rl3 10y ago
>If the problem of producing the atomic bomb occupied the attention and resources of the scientific establishment during World War II, it is sadly unsurprising that this very same establishment immediately moved on to the problem of adapting to the political, military, and intelligence consequences of such an disruptive innovation. We live today with the legacy of those consequences, and cannot imagine a world without them. Nuclear weapons may have been a positive development. The doctrine of mutually-assured destruction has a lot to do with why World War III hasn't happened yet.
blater 10y ago
I honestly couldn't finish this. Who exactly is comparing today's startups to the manhattan project? Yes many projects are aiming for more ad clicks, but so what? In the 30's movies and radio were doing the same thing and what? Why are they being compared to the manhattan project, or to apollo, or to the search for the Higgs boson, or world peace, or whatever?. Is there anything to this beyond the obvious strawmab cllckbait?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jameslk 10y ago
"Change the world," they say. As if changing the world implies that change will be better for everyone. Some would love to change the world and bring slavery back. How about we focus on changing ourselves to adapt to the world we have? I'm glad this essay touches upon this since nobody else seems to be talking about it.
ckozlowski 10y ago
I'd question how much of a necessity it is to refute the need for a "Manhattan Project" for various things is. But having heard the same call myself, I'll add my two cents to what I think is a rather good essay. There's a perception among those calls I gather that the Manhattan Project was pulled together as this massive undertaking at the stroke of a pen. The reality however, was that it started off as overlooked, modest, and aimless at times. Overtime, as the goals and necessities became more clear, it grew and matured into the massive, focused effort we all know. But it was because of the direction and need that developed that resulted in the Project, not the other way around. And I think that's a very important distinction. I think great projects tend to owe a good amount of their growth to organic factors. The reason why we haven't seen a "Manhattan Project" to solve a societal issue is because the conditions are not necessary right for one, and perhaps more importantly, the "project" needed to tackle one might not necessarily be recognizable to us as such.
michaelmrose 10y ago
When someone bemoans the fact that a significant chunk of the our generations intellectual and monetary capital is invested in trivial matters it isn't necessarily that they wish google and Microsoft ought to save the world instead of make phone operating systems and ads. If they have any sense what they want is for we as a species to put our money, our labor, our hearts and our lives into matters of importance to the human race.
- RushAndAPush 10y ago
  To say that Google and Microsoft only make operating systems and sell adds is a bit misleading. Both company's are constributing significantly to the development of Artificial Intelligence and quantum computers. These technologies are fundamental and pivotal to the success of humanity.
- bigger_cheese 10y ago
  I agree. The part that bugged me about the article was it took a quote: 'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.' Then immediately launched into saying 'Tech critics should be very careful what they wish for when they say that they wish that tech companies would tackle the "real" problems'. I think this misses the point. I don't think critics are clamoring for tech companies to "solve" real problems. They want people, smart people, to focus on solving these problems. A company doesn't solve anything people solve things not organisations. He could have just as easily talked about all those PHD physicists working on High frequency trading and used that to launch into a tangent about how Wall Street is not suited to solving difficult problems. The original quote is a serious issue publicly funded R&D outfits cannot offer the financial incentives large banks, tech outfits and other private organisations can offer. Whether you think this is a good thing or not depends on how cynical you are I suppose. Personally I'm skeptical that private research interests will ever align with anything other than creating value for shareholders - which for google means selling more Ads...
  - epicureanideal 10y ago
    I'm hopeful that we'll exhaust the low-hanging fruit of social networks and advertising sometime soon, and the best returns will need to come from solving some other problems.
grondilu 10y ago
I have a pet theory that the level of concern towards social issues for an individual, as a function of wealth and well being, is convex[1]. That is, it is highest at the extremes : for the poorest and the wealthiest. The former are concerned because of the tacit idea that solving social problems would directly solve theirs. The latter are concerned because as people who don't have direct problems themselves, solving other people's ones would alleviate a repressed guilt feeling, satisfy their ego, or help with the minor annoyance of having to listen to people's whinning. Then I'm guessing most people working in tech industry are right in the middle of this curve, and consequently give the least possible F. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_function
- epicureanideal 10y ago
  The people in the middle might just be busy working for a living, or working harder to get ahead or stay where they are.
- MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
  Funny, I'm inclined to think it's actually concave. The poorest don't actually have time to worry about this stuff, they're way too busy just surviving. The wealthiest don't have time to worry about this stuff, they're way too busy trying to increase the growth rate of their wealth. The people who do actually care the most end up in the middle - they're smart and resourceful enough to not be in extreme poverty, but also too kind and selfless to have gained extreme wealth. Though I think the fact that we can have exactly opposite hypotheses about this metric points to the reality that there isn't really any neat curve to this, or likely most other sorts of hypotheses about complex human beliefs/behaviors projected on a two dimensional space.
coldtea 10y ago
>One representative example of this argument, applied more generally, can be found in this lament about why Silicon Valley isn't solving the "big" problems. Assuming that this complaint is sincere, it nonetheless misses the point. What are "real" problems? Well, I could name 10 real problems off of the top of my head, and most people would agree that they are important too. So I don't really understand the question. It seems to me to imply that people are unique snowflakes and because of that it's difficult to determine what's important, but that's not really the case. >1. The clamoring for tech companies to solve social problems ignores the empirical record and empirically observed characteristics of top-down engineering efforts Like this internet thing, on which the very article is posted on? >Unfortunately, Manhattan Project-like ventures are not translatable to social and political problems. Maybe, but then again there are tons of serious problems that are not "social and political" in nature, and are not "social video sharing for cat lovers" either. And, yes, people might enjoy and derive some value from the latter too. But they'd derive a lot more value from, e.g. not dying from certain diseases due to a better focus on such problems, or sustainable energy. What I think the people the author mentions ask for is not stopping Google and co from doing their stuff and conscripting SV engineers to basic research, but more and better funded and coordinated national (and international) efforts on stuff that matters in a large scale for our societies and our survival. Kind of like the internet was developed, we went to the moon, nuclear energy, and also applications of such stuff to current problems (from environment to health, education, democracy, privacy, etc).
maverick_iceman 10y ago
>“What would make Mom proud?” I can say from first hand experience that most Silicon Valley engineers' moms are plenty proud of them.
- shadytrees 10y ago
  maverick_iceman has talked to many moms

159 points by raghava 10y ago

gwbas1c 10y ago

Is there a tldr version?

Animats 10y ago
It's 90 seconds of reading. What's the problem?
- michaje 10y ago
  If you had a 90s read, you clicked the wrong link.
  - dismantlethesun 10y ago
    Truthfully so, it's ~5800 words. Even at "top" skimming score of 1000 words per minute, that's still almost 360 seconds to read it.
omginternets 10y ago
No.
jordanlev 10y ago
tl;dr... > Do we really want tech companies to turn their attention away from beating board game players and producing business products to start 'solving' social problems? The answer to this question should be an emphatic "no."
striking 10y ago
Some snippets of the introduction: > When will tech solve the real problems, critics ask? > Assuming that this complaint is sincere, it nonetheless misses the point. What are "real" problems? > [...] the author wants to deputize Google, Facebook, Apple, and other tech companies to solve social problems. To rectify flawed systems. > Do we really want tech companies to turn their attention away from beating board game players and producing business products to start 'solving' social problems? The answer to this question should be an emphatic "no." The entire framing of the question is profoundly backward. The closest you'll get to a tl;dr are the author's two paragraphs summing things up: > This essay advances the following points: > 1. The clamoring for tech companies to solve social problems ignores the empirical record and empirically observed characteristics of top-down engineering efforts and is rooted in a naive belief in the power of technical rationality. Technical rationality not only has a long and fairly checkered history when applied to social problems, but also takes on pathological characteristics when it is embodied in bureaucratic organizations attempting to engineer their way out of policy problems. There is no concrete idea of how tech companies are going to work on these problems, just a vague belief that they should rooted in worship of technical rationality. > 2. Tech companies are neither instrinsically [sic] well-adapted for taking on quasi-governmental or governmental functions nor likely to be any more successful at escaping the problems of technical rationality than their government counterparts have been. While tech companies can make valuable policy contributions in certain functional areas and with certain mechanisms, the biggest benefit they provide is simply giving us more tools to solve our own problems. Why should we depend on tech companies to solve social problems when it is both better from a normative perspective and a practical one for them to simply give us the tools we need to empower ourselves?

Animats 10y ago

Is anybody seriously proposing heavy Government spending on any specific problem right now, other than a wall against Mexico? Some engineering problems have yielded to heavy spending. The Polaris submarine program. The Apollo program. RCA's color TV effort. AIDS treatment. Extreme ultraviolet photolithography. The H-bomb. Sometimes this works. With a narrow goal, a general idea of how to get there, and heavy funding, impressive results are possible.

adrianN 10y ago
Fusion power is a problem that needs more funding.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  Fusion would be a perfect candidate. We pretty much know that it will work, we know it would yield big benefits, we just need a lot of money to work out all problems.
  - epicureanideal 10y ago
    I would personally greatly prefer massive directed spending at hard science problems than quantitative easing dropping cheap money on Wall Street. Let the money trickle down from spending on science equipment and scientist and engineering salaries.
manachar 10y ago
You left out the interstate system, one of the largest public works projects of American history with lasting economic, social, and political impact. Big money does change stuff, it can just be really hard to determine what exactly it will change and if it will ultimately be good.
- Animats 10y ago
  The Interstate highway system wasn't an attempt to solve a technology problem. It was just a big public works program. Expensive, but low-risk. The Pennsylvania Turnpike already existed, and its first section opened in 1940.

thro32 10y ago

Go and Chess AI are SERIOUS and REAL problem. It is something which goes back for thousands years and will be remembered for another thousands years. AIDS and other contemporary diseases will be soon forgotten after their extinction.

civilian 10y ago
I really enjoy Go (I'm an 8k) but I have to disagree with this. Curing diseases-- AIDS, smallpox, guinea worm, chicken pox-- are accomplishments have impact people lives and directly help humanity get more value out our citizens. Fun fact: did you know that kids don't get chicken pox these days? They all get immunized, so they don't go through the rite of passage that everyone who's 20+ plus has gone through. And it'll soon be forgotten. Which brings me to: Just because people forget about a disease we've cured doesn't invalidate that good that was done by the people solving that problem. The general public doesn't know about _most_ good things that were done to bring about the world we live in. There's still value in helping anyway. Doctors & researchers don't ask to be worshipped. Even if we strongman Go and Chess and say that they are great at sharpening & maintaining one's mental facilities, have been integral and beneficial to military thought, and are immensely enjoyable, I don't think that the value of solving the Go and Chess problems compares to curing diseases.
- greendragon 10y ago
  It's more about status than utility. As long as Go and Chess can maintain some sort of high status (as games or as historical points of interest) among the intelligent or ruling classes, they'll be remembered. Diseases seem to get status a different way. Humanity will probably remember the Plague for a long time still. Or if a biologically engineered supervirus was unleashed that killed a significant fraction of humanity over a short period of time, that too would be remembered. Quick mass death is the status currency of disease. If we ever get around to ending aging, probably one of the lowest-status problems on the to-do list, death by aging will be forgotten too.
sctb 10y ago
It's hard to read this in a way that doesn't suggest that real, serious diseases aren't, at which point it becomes hardly distinct from a troll comment. Please post civilly and substantively on HN; we have to ban accounts that refuse.

sandworm101 10y ago

>> First, the Manhattan Project itself was sui generis. There is very little reason to believe that this model does, in fact, generalize widely outside of the basic and applied sciences. No. It was a basic question of practical physics. It was an effort to translate theoretical knowledge already proven in laboratories into a working product at scale. The innovations were definitely costly, but essentially rather incremental and straightforward. That was much of the reason it needed to be done in a hurry: eventually someone would do it. Fusion power is in the same place. The theory works in the lab, we need to translate that into a working model at practical scales. Eventually someone will crack the problem. A Manhattan-style push would accelerate that date, hopefully to within our lifetimes.

knorby 10y ago
The Manhattan Project had nearly unlimited resources at a time of scarcity, and it took enormous engineering risks. The risk component is something easy to overlook, but these were enormous infrastructure projects by any standard done at scale without much chance to prove them, and they were accomplished in incredibly short time-frames. Could you imagine someone building a full-scale, power generating fusion reactor off a new and untested design in a about a year? More to the point, could you imagine someone funding that?

Tossrock 10y ago

I think the author is strawmanning a bit here. The central premise they're attacking is that tech should not be called upon to solve social problems, and they assume this is what the pull quote at the top is implying. They then spend the body of the essay arguing that social problems are intractable to a top down approach, technological rationality is subject to the same problems as government bureaucracy, etc. However, one could more charitably interpret the quote as saying there are lots of TECHNOLOGIES that would produce social good, which are underfunded - alternative energy, carbon capture, distributed social networking, etc. Ycombinator seems to agree, given their recent focus on nuclear.

mjb 10y ago
I think the author is right that top-down technical solutions to social problems don't work. Their examples are compelling, and more come to mind. As you say, though, that doesn't extend to the argument that technology and social good are unrelated. Companies reasonably can (and, one could argue, should) choose their investments and priorities based on their social effects and other distant externalities. There are also problems, like the social effects of climate change, that can be effectively addressed, at least partially, with technical solutions. The much more interesting question for me is whether it's ethical to invest in technologies that will cause social change, even if those changes are highly likely to be negative in the short term. The default silicon valley answer to that would be yes, but a broad range of other people would say no. Both have rational arguments. If you look at the social effects of the industrial revolution (or the green revolution, or the enlightenment) there's a lot of short-term negative for a lot of people and some enduring problems for some groups of people.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- skybrian 10y ago
  Do anti-spam, anti-malware, anti-phishing, and https-everywhere campaigns count as social change? How about moderation policies for social networks?

davidgrenier 10y ago

Glad I had seen SlingShot, documentary on Dean Kamen, prior to reading this article.

aftbit 10y ago

My fundamental hope for humanity is that someday, rather than having to confront social challenges around distribution of resources (who gets more water? who gets more land? who gets more oil? do we need to raise energy costs to capture the extrinsic costs of polluting the air?), we will just have enough and more of everything. The Central Arizona Project and the Navajo Generating Station are my favorite examples of this. The Navajo Generating Station is a giant coal-fired power plant, which provides energy used primarily to pump water up into Arizona. The station substantially degrades air quality in the surrounding areas, and the water that is "stolen" from the Colorado is a part of the West's growing water concerns. Right now, there are two sides to the issue: those who think it is worth the cost to bring water to Arizona, and those who believe the environmental issues are too big. We could solve that like a social problem, using politics and ethics to try to make the decision... or we could just get on making energy cheap and clean, and suddenly a huge part of the cost disappears. If there was no fly ash issue, no NOx issue, no CO2 issue, then we're back to just worrying about the water flow. But if we have cheap energy, desalination suddenly looks a lot more palatable, which would reduce a lot of water pressures in the US. Los Angeles could switch to 100% desal water and the Colorado river would have a surplus of water again. Cheap (and preferably clean) energy, solving climate change, and cheap access to space (this one is more dubious) would all broadly boost the quality of life for humanity.

nixos 10y ago
> Cheap (and preferably clean) energy This is the difficulty. Right now, the only cheap and clean energy somewhat on the horizon is fusion, which is 50 years in the future for the past 50 years.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  You're talking about Arizona. Hello, solar...
- atemerev 10y ago
  Nuclear is clean. Cleaner than solar, at least.

jwatte 10y ago

Let's reframe the question: Why does society today not attempt to maximize happiness among all citizens? Resources are expended to make those with more resources marginally more happy, rather than someone with less resources comparatively much more happy. Market economy says that this is the most "efficient" distribution of resources, but the assumption there is that the happiness of the rich is more important than the happiness of the poor. Is this what we want our societal values to be? And if so, how much more important? And if not, is a domestic happy person more valuable than a foreign happy person? The ethics and morals that come out of defining these answers are quite strikingly different.

jpttsn 10y ago
Who are "we?" “The sooner we learn not to think or utter sentences such as “the United States should do . . . ”or “the American people want . . . ” or “China’s government ought to do . . . ,” the better we will understand government, business, and all other forms of organization. When addressing politics, we must accustom ourselves to think and speak about the actions and interests of specific, named leaders rather than thinking and talking about fuzzy ideas like the national interest, the common good, and the general welfare” Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. “The Dictator's Handbook.”
dmix 10y ago
> Market economy says that this is the most "efficient" distribution of resources. Focusing on the rich sounds like you're referring to "trickle down economics" which is not a real thing in economics and is largely a fabrication of the media and partisan politics: https://fee.org/articles/there-is-no-such-thing-as-trickle-down-economics/ https://fee.org/articles/there-is-no-such-thing-as-trickle-d... http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367682/trickle-down-lie-thomas-sowell http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367682/trickle-down-li... Saying that 'market economies' only favours or benefits the wealthy is a mischaracterization and/or a drastic over-simplification of supply-side economics. Also I'm with Arthur Schopenhauer in questioning the premise of happiness as the basic goal in life. Although you're probably just referring to maximizing the general 'quality of life' rather than the emotional state, which I do agree with.
deleted 10y ago

sapphireblue 10y ago

DeepMind looks like a hilariously wrong project to criticize because it is a true moonshot, something very different from the majority of other SV projects. If hiring hundreds of PhDs to create a general purpose learning agent, all while publishing all the intermediate results in freely available papers isn't a moonshot with socially beneficial outcome, then I don't know what is. Also note that DeepMind went even further than that, there is DeepMind health division aiming at using this technology to help doctors and patients directly. If I were the author I'd choose some social media unicorn or an ad network as an example of inherent misallocation of human talent.

rl3 10y ago
>If I were the author I'd choose some social media unicorn or an ad network as an example of inherent misallocation of human talent. Google acquired DeepMind using money that was ultimately the result of ad revenue.
ckozlowski 10y ago
I think part of the issue is that the results of DeepMind, while enormously impactful, do not have the sort of tangible quantity that the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program did. It's easy for critics to dismiss them when the most relatable thing to the layperson is "This thing plays Go". It's a common lament in the scientific community, especially in the theoretical space. I don't see an easy answer for it, other than "Wait for it." To me, the more apt comparison isn't say, DeepMind to the Manhattan Project, it's DeepMind to the early physics experiments, or Chicago Pile 1. You can imagine in the future, a letter being written much like Einstein's to FDR, pointing to an early and modest project saying "because of this, we can now create <X>". (I'm ignoring the wartime necessities and issues surrounding that letter in this example as they're outside of the discussion.)
xg15 10y ago
> If hiring hundreds of PhDs to create a general purpose learning agent, all while publishing all the intermediate results in freely available papers isn't a moonshot with socially beneficial outcome, then I don't know what is. I'm sorry, I don't buy it. What exactly are the social benefits of general purpose learning agent? It's an impressive technical and scientific challange, agreed, but most applications that I can immediately think of are harmful to society (reduction of white-collar jobs, increased potential for surveillance and profiling, etc) - so how would such an agent be used to actually improve society?

rl3 10y ago

>If the problem of producing the atomic bomb occupied the attention and resources of the scientific establishment during World War II, it is sadly unsurprising that this very same establishment immediately moved on to the problem of adapting to the political, military, and intelligence consequences of such an disruptive innovation. We live today with the legacy of those consequences, and cannot imagine a world without them. Nuclear weapons may have been a positive development. The doctrine of mutually-assured destruction has a lot to do with why World War III hasn't happened yet.

blater 10y ago

I honestly couldn't finish this. Who exactly is comparing today's startups to the manhattan project? Yes many projects are aiming for more ad clicks, but so what? In the 30's movies and radio were doing the same thing and what? Why are they being compared to the manhattan project, or to apollo, or to the search for the Higgs boson, or world peace, or whatever?. Is there anything to this beyond the obvious strawmab cllckbait?

deleted 10y ago

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jameslk 10y ago

"Change the world," they say. As if changing the world implies that change will be better for everyone. Some would love to change the world and bring slavery back. How about we focus on changing ourselves to adapt to the world we have? I'm glad this essay touches upon this since nobody else seems to be talking about it.

ckozlowski 10y ago

I'd question how much of a necessity it is to refute the need for a "Manhattan Project" for various things is. But having heard the same call myself, I'll add my two cents to what I think is a rather good essay. There's a perception among those calls I gather that the Manhattan Project was pulled together as this massive undertaking at the stroke of a pen. The reality however, was that it started off as overlooked, modest, and aimless at times. Overtime, as the goals and necessities became more clear, it grew and matured into the massive, focused effort we all know. But it was because of the direction and need that developed that resulted in the Project, not the other way around. And I think that's a very important distinction. I think great projects tend to owe a good amount of their growth to organic factors. The reason why we haven't seen a "Manhattan Project" to solve a societal issue is because the conditions are not necessary right for one, and perhaps more importantly, the "project" needed to tackle one might not necessarily be recognizable to us as such.

michaelmrose 10y ago

When someone bemoans the fact that a significant chunk of the our generations intellectual and monetary capital is invested in trivial matters it isn't necessarily that they wish google and Microsoft ought to save the world instead of make phone operating systems and ads. If they have any sense what they want is for we as a species to put our money, our labor, our hearts and our lives into matters of importance to the human race.

RushAndAPush 10y ago
To say that Google and Microsoft only make operating systems and sell adds is a bit misleading. Both company's are constributing significantly to the development of Artificial Intelligence and quantum computers. These technologies are fundamental and pivotal to the success of humanity.
bigger_cheese 10y ago
I agree. The part that bugged me about the article was it took a quote: 'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.' Then immediately launched into saying 'Tech critics should be very careful what they wish for when they say that they wish that tech companies would tackle the "real" problems'. I think this misses the point. I don't think critics are clamoring for tech companies to "solve" real problems. They want people, smart people, to focus on solving these problems. A company doesn't solve anything people solve things not organisations. He could have just as easily talked about all those PHD physicists working on High frequency trading and used that to launch into a tangent about how Wall Street is not suited to solving difficult problems. The original quote is a serious issue publicly funded R&D outfits cannot offer the financial incentives large banks, tech outfits and other private organisations can offer. Whether you think this is a good thing or not depends on how cynical you are I suppose. Personally I'm skeptical that private research interests will ever align with anything other than creating value for shareholders - which for google means selling more Ads...
- epicureanideal 10y ago
  I'm hopeful that we'll exhaust the low-hanging fruit of social networks and advertising sometime soon, and the best returns will need to come from solving some other problems.

grondilu 10y ago

I have a pet theory that the level of concern towards social issues for an individual, as a function of wealth and well being, is convex[1]. That is, it is highest at the extremes : for the poorest and the wealthiest. The former are concerned because of the tacit idea that solving social problems would directly solve theirs. The latter are concerned because as people who don't have direct problems themselves, solving other people's ones would alleviate a repressed guilt feeling, satisfy their ego, or help with the minor annoyance of having to listen to people's whinning. Then I'm guessing most people working in tech industry are right in the middle of this curve, and consequently give the least possible F. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_function

epicureanideal 10y ago
The people in the middle might just be busy working for a living, or working harder to get ahead or stay where they are.
MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
Funny, I'm inclined to think it's actually concave. The poorest don't actually have time to worry about this stuff, they're way too busy just surviving. The wealthiest don't have time to worry about this stuff, they're way too busy trying to increase the growth rate of their wealth. The people who do actually care the most end up in the middle - they're smart and resourceful enough to not be in extreme poverty, but also too kind and selfless to have gained extreme wealth. Though I think the fact that we can have exactly opposite hypotheses about this metric points to the reality that there isn't really any neat curve to this, or likely most other sorts of hypotheses about complex human beliefs/behaviors projected on a two dimensional space.

coldtea 10y ago

>One representative example of this argument, applied more generally, can be found in this lament about why Silicon Valley isn't solving the "big" problems. Assuming that this complaint is sincere, it nonetheless misses the point. What are "real" problems? Well, I could name 10 real problems off of the top of my head, and most people would agree that they are important too. So I don't really understand the question. It seems to me to imply that people are unique snowflakes and because of that it's difficult to determine what's important, but that's not really the case. >1. The clamoring for tech companies to solve social problems ignores the empirical record and empirically observed characteristics of top-down engineering efforts Like this internet thing, on which the very article is posted on? >Unfortunately, Manhattan Project-like ventures are not translatable to social and political problems. Maybe, but then again there are tons of serious problems that are not "social and political" in nature, and are not "social video sharing for cat lovers" either. And, yes, people might enjoy and derive some value from the latter too. But they'd derive a lot more value from, e.g. not dying from certain diseases due to a better focus on such problems, or sustainable energy. What I think the people the author mentions ask for is not stopping Google and co from doing their stuff and conscripting SV engineers to basic research, but more and better funded and coordinated national (and international) efforts on stuff that matters in a large scale for our societies and our survival. Kind of like the internet was developed, we went to the moon, nuclear energy, and also applications of such stuff to current problems (from environment to health, education, democracy, privacy, etc).

maverick_iceman 10y ago

>“What would make Mom proud?” I can say from first hand experience that most Silicon Valley engineers' moms are plenty proud of them.

shadytrees 10y ago
maverick_iceman has talked to many moms