"Augmenting the human condition" is admittedly a bit of a platitude (and a bit grandiose). However your question "under whose criteria does rethinkdb qualify fo

"Augmenting the human condition" is admittedly a bit of a platitude (and a bit grandiose). However your question "under whose criteria does rethinkdb qualify for this?" is exactly the right one and the actual lesson from this statement. No one who's running a business says to themselves "I bet I can get away with not augmenting the human condition." Partly because people's internal monologues don't normally use that sort of diction but also because everyone who's running a business knows that this is the whole point. Most people who fail to accomplish this do so because they don't know what will augment their customer's lives. Figuring out the criteria with which to judge augmentation is the hard part. I could go into details about how I think we're doing this at RethinkDB (although referring to it as "augmenting to human condition" is a bit of an over the top for my tastes) but I think this is the general answer to your question.