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Tech companies are misusing creativity in their quest to change the world

• GrumpyNl 9y ago
  Greed and war has always been the best motivators.
• aloisdg 9y ago
  Capitalism is an economic system and an ideology based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. You want creativity? Leave capitalism.
  • demonshalo 9y ago
    I mean... say what you want about communism but it's full of creative people who know how to get things done. I am sure anyone reading this will find the list below very creative :D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
    • philippnagel 9y ago
      Communism is not the only alternative to Capitalism. Also it is worth to discuss whether a self-described communist system was truly communist.
      • pault 9y ago
        Also, pure communism, enlightened despotism and all other political ideologies that require top-down control, seem to all have the same failure mode. The violence is a side effect of the authoritarianism, not the economic model (I think). More democratic societies have fewer and less lethal political purges. I don't know what a fully democratic pure communist system would look like but I'd be very interested in seeing how it played out.
        • 24gttghh 9y ago
          Maybe it can't exist as long as there are those who seek the aggrandizement which leads to a consolidation of power. If you have a state that owns everything, there will be people that will abuse such authority. Could there be a communist economic model alongside a multi-party state model?
      • KekDemaga 9y ago
        Communism Light, all that great communism flavor with less murder (so far)
        • sctb 9y ago
          Please stop trolling.
    • sctb 9y ago
      We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • demonshalo 9y ago
        what guideline was violated? -___-
  • matt4077 9y ago
    > Capitalism is an economic system and an ideology That's the problem right there: Capitalism has proven to be excellent at organising an economy. It's excellent! It works with human nature. The largest problems automatically provide the largest reward for solving! It locates decisions at the lowest possible level! The problem is when people use it as an ideology, i. e. as an end to itself. Intellectual property, for example, with its zero marginal costs, isn't as good a fit for capitalism as wheat: When you're charging $10 for a movie, many people will not watch it because it's only worth $5 to them. That's an inefficiency as glaring as communism ever produced, because it is value lost as a tribute to keeping the structure intact, even though no work would be required for it at all. There are many more inefficiencies of capitalism that we conveniently ignore. The complete finance sector is nothing but the bureaucracy needed to organise capitalism. Competition is a great method to get better results, but it also involves a lot of duplicated efforts. Advertisement is–and this is the usual argument of people defending it-neccessary for the functioning of capitalism because it spreads information the market needs. The inequality needed to serve as motivation breeds unhappiness and crime. These aren't arguments to abandon capitalism, because it quite obviously is the best system we've found so far. But that shouldn't preclude us from trying alternatives, especially in niches that are so different that the outcomes may be different from the traditional production of physical goods.
    • PoachedSausage 9y ago
      Capitalism works well with, and propagates some aspects of human nature (whatever that is). Due to our evolutionary past, humans are more focused on the physically nearby, the present and very near future, so capitalism fails when we have longterm wide-scale problems to solve, like climate change.
    • pmontra 9y ago
      > The largest problems automatically provide the largest reward for solving! In principle yes, but there are ways to game the system. Marketing is very good at creating false problems and aim consumers at them. Many of the things we work at are pretty much useless.
    • wu-ikkyu 9y ago
• jezclaremurugan 9y ago
  Profit - rather the Willingness to Pay - indicates the true preferences of society/individuals. While we may claim otherwise, at the end of the day, we sometimes value pleasure over health. And if society truly cared about quality of life for the poorest/weakest, the market would re-align itself, and the direction of creativity would be self corrected. I feel capitalism and profits are working just fine, we just don't want to admit what our true preferences are.
  • Barraketh 9y ago
    That's not quite accurate. Willingness to Pay indicates the true preferences of people who have money. If you try to take it as a metric of the preferences of society you will get the preferences of individuals weighted by their net worth.
    • jjoonathan 9y ago
      It took me way too long to understand this. I blame the term "value," which in the common sense definition is not weighted according to wealth, but in the economic definition, is. Fudging the distinction is a fantastically pernicious way to sneak the "capitalism is enlightened altruism" assumption into your argument.
    • KekDemaga 9y ago
      If that was true we would have tons of restaurants serving caviar and foie gras and very few serving fast food.
    • hueving 9y ago
      That's not quite accurate, otherwise there wouldn't be a wide variety of things to choose with lower incomes. You forget that the market responds to the total volume of buyers at various levels. There are a lot more people in the 0-150k bracket than the people in the 150k+ bracket and when you count the total spending in dollars by each category as a whole, the first group is significantly more powerful. The most successful companies sell to the masses (McDonald's, Walmart, Google, Facebook). The rich have a much smaller influence on the market than you would like to think.
• 0xCMP 9y ago
  Technology is already changing the world in the way he wants and profit is only part of the reason, but still an important part. Many people have, for non-profit and profit reasons, attempted to fix the issues of computers not being wide spread or fix connectivity problems in developing countries. The two groups that seem most likely to solve the connectivity problem(s) have profit incentives behind it: Facebook and Google. There are almost certainly others as well.
• empath75 9y ago
  This reminds me of one laptop per child and this is similarly misguided. Poor people don’t want this and can’t make much use of it. What poor people want is clean water, a stable source of food, security, health care, honest government, etc, etc. They’ll be happy to have a cell phone, but it’s not going to change their life. The problem of poverty isn’t the result of lack of access to information.
  • systemtest 9y ago
    Having access to information is vital if you want to do modern farming and need to know about the weather, droughts and seasonal patterns. And you need to know market prices for your products and be able to contact fair-trade organisations. Also if you have to walk 20 kilometers for the nearest doctor, you want to make sure that the doctor is in today. Same with water, supplies and food.
  • criddell 9y ago
    I thought the one laptop per child program was for people that have clean water, access to food, etc... It wasn't targeted towards to poorest people, was it?
  • chki 9y ago
    > They'll be happy to have a cell phone, but it's not going to change their life. I would like to disagree on that. Obviously a phone is less important than food and water but when it comes to everything else it is quite a basic component of modern life in all countries/social settings. A phone is essential to communication, gathering information and education. It is also not prohibitively expensive for the value that it brings.
    • hueving 9y ago
      It's interesting because I grew up without a phone and did very well. I think you're view is just warped by your own social circles.
      • noxToken 9y ago
• ThomPete 9y ago
  Creativity for its own sake isn't better as a model for society than profit. Furthermore having the richest pay for development of new technologies which are then later on distributed to the poorer is in my view the right direction it basically indirectly taxes the rich first. Tesla would never have been successful if they started with cars for everyone. The fact that they made it a desirable item, to begin with, worked to their advantage. A better place is an example of the wrong strategy. To me, this reads more like a PR piece than anything else.
• jondubois 9y ago
  >> One example is Endless, a computer company founded by a young Californian named Matt Dalio. I know his father, Ray Dalio, a successful businessman who became very interested in my ideas and my work This is the real root problem - People are helping their already rich friends too much. Companies shouldn't be about the CEO and their friends, it should be about the product and the customers. Promoting the children of your rich friends in your news articles doesn't help balance out wealth equality. There are thousands of other (poorer, more determined) entrepreneurs like 'Matt Dalio' who probably deserve the attention even more. >> Dalio did not give up. Yeah that totally deserves its own paragraph; not giving up is a huge achievement when daddy is a billionaire. It's almost like the author's subconscious is trying to tell us something.
  • TrinaryWorksToo 9y ago
    Rich people can take risks. Poor people can't.
    • SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
      > Rich people may take risks. Poor people must. This seems more accurate and realistic about the source of the discrepancy: Rich people have the luxury to choose which risks they take and make calculated endeavors, but are never forced to take a risk and have great ability to manage their total exposure to risk. Poor people are inundated with being forced to take bad risks and manage the danger between them constantly, such that they can't properly gather resources to take on additional voluntary risks (even when they have an expected reward) because it poses too much systemic danger with the additional risk. That said, once you count in drug sales, the poorest 10% of people I know have a higher per capita entrepreneurship rate than the richest 10%. So in practice, poor people are actually taking on business risk at a higher rate as well, though it's again motivated by necessity. The biggest discrepancy is, of course, access to capital and explain the vast majority of the discrepancy in outcome.
      • mc32 9y ago
        Anecdotally, I knew drug dealers in high school. It was not out of necessity, but greed. I'm sure some are out of necessity, but not all.
• chasedehan 9y ago
  The title of the article should really get rid of "tech". This is an inherent feature(or bug depending on perspective) of a capitalistic system wherein companies are designed for profit and will target markets where there is more potential profit. This is true of many other industries, not just tech, although tech has been capturing much of the interest and ire of not being different. Any time a company accepts outside money, they have a fiduciary duty to build their business in a manner that will lead to the highest return - "maximizing shareholder value." Now, this is not inherently bad to maximize value as we have seen the largest growth the world has ever seen (not just at the top end, but for the poor as well) because of the innovation and creativity that has occurred due to chasing profits. Maybe I'm cynical, but I really don't think tech companies truly are in a "quest to change the world" unless you believe every word spoken at demo day. Should be retitled: "Companies are using creativity to chase profits" because that is what they are doing and is what they should be doing in the current economic system. I completely agree that incentives and structures should be changed to dramatically reduce the income and wealth disparities. The struggle is the will to voluntarily forego profits.
• jamesrcole 9y ago
  > The more we advance in technology, improve our infrastructure, spread globalization, and bring efficiency to the economic system, the more intensely global corporations focus their strategies on competing to serve the wealthiest and the middle class A question: is it actually true that these things are correlated? I don't know, but on the surface of it, it's not clear to me that they are.
• nestorherre 9y ago
  GREAT article. It definitely reflects the current state of society, and most important, people. Selfishness is the standard, money is our god. We need to open our eyes and start acting, otherwise the results will keep being the same and nothing will change. Capitalism should be reformed and a new economic system - based on sharing economy, but in the real sense - should arise.
• nebabyte 9y ago
  > It is interesting to note that new technology products are never launched in the poor segment of the market and then gradually adapted to higher-level markets Inclined to disagree. Plenty of wealthy people see the "market potential" of starting in poorer places (cough Africa) and 'locking up' marketshare. hell, zuckerberg and others tried pushing through the precedent of zero-rated internet for proprietary services in india and other countries as a way to lock up precedent for when they'd bring the same tech to america. (Not that the latter has needed any help being complacent with zero rating - apparently india beat us on that front)
• feelin_googley 9y ago
  "But statistics show that we only consume a fraction of what is actually available online." "In practical terms, it is actually possible to take all of the images and data from every website the average person visits in a lifetime, compress them, and fit them onto a single 2-terabyte (TB) hard drive inside a computer." These are among the many "unspoken truths" of the web, viz. that right now on your person or nearby you have enough storage space to hold every bit of information you will ever need in your lifetime. I would like to see the statistics. Obviously, companies like Google are not going to embrace truths like these. When a user can search a database of downloaded data ("data dump") locally, even without a connection, how would a search engine track the user's queries? Right now, public information, from academic research to user-generated content, is being hoarded by a few companies and used to collect information about those who wish to access it, which is then used to sell ads. This is a relatively recent phenomenon and is not necessary. This is supposed to be the Information Age. We can all access public information in large quantities at high speeds without constant monitoring in the name of pillaging advertising budgets. While it may not be possible to save every piece of information one needs in advance, certainly much of the piecemeal access to static data that we do today could be averted. (Personally I have been doing this with DNS data for many years, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.) Why is piecemeal access something anyone would want to avert? Matters of cost, reliablity and inefficiency aside, it is piecemeal access, one query at a time, each and every one traveling over a insecure network, logged and analyzed 24/7 by myriad third parties all desperate for cash, that gives rise to memes like "You are the product". It is the gratuitous use of an insecure, invasively monitored network to query information which could be stored locally that is the root cause for many of the complaints that internet users have today. This type of use enables the practices by third parties that users complain about.