There's something that rubs me the wrong way about this article, and I think it's the false dichotomy. On the one hand we have safe conveniences like "another l

There's something that rubs me the wrong way about this article, and I think it's the false dichotomy. On the one hand we have safe conveniences like "another link shortener" and "Facebook for X" which do not involve any innovation. On the other, we have risky humanitarian projects which require huge innovation. So there are three differences here: safe vs. risky, easy vs. innovative, and luxury vs. necessity. I feel like the author is trying to bolster our valuations of each difference by associating them with our valuations of the others. So we start out with this true but completely obvious idea that it's not the best use of our time to build safe and easy luxuries, yet the alternatives we're pushed to are risky and difficult necessities. And I suppose if you want to point to that as an ideal, then that's one thing. But then we get to the quote about "faster aliens", and I start to wonder what universe we're talking about. Much of the research that went into making those aliens faster? Directly applicable to a ton of other fields! Is the author suggesting that we should take the engineers off of the teams that are working to build more powerful GPUs and CPUs, and instead get them working on a malaria vaccine? Should we send them back to school first, or just plop them in a bio lab and tell them to get crackin'? Or instead, we could let them just keep doing what they're good at, since faster computers will also help us find a vaccine for malaria. If you want to attack something out of the safe/easy/luxury group, attack "easy". Safe luxuries have proven to be absolutely amazing for driving innovation, and then we get to use that innovation for the really important stuff.