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> I've always felt that this sentiment is pretty privileged. We, the elite, get to cherry pick our work and do what we like. But I bet 9/10 people will never fe

> I've always felt that this sentiment is pretty privileged. We, the elite, get to cherry pick our work and do what we like. But I bet 9/10 people will never feel they have this luxury, and 8/10 will be right. We (humanity) are fixing this. Never before in human history has learning the state of the art in any field been freely accessible to anyone. The tools to create a new world have never been this cheap, and there have never been so many helpful people giving away so much knowledge. There has never been so much money available for investment, and investment has never been this founder friendly. There has never been a market of this size this freely reachable, if you have good ideas that are sticky and sharable. So yes, 8/10 are right now, but we can get that number down. I think custom fabrication using all the new tools, FDM 3D printing being just the start, is a serious contender for making a huge dent in the alienated work problem. I'm not feeling cynical, not yet. This isn't the end of the story, this is just the beginning, we are alive during the greatest renaissance humanity has ever known, how awesome can we make the world? I think we can make it pretty awesome.

bandrami 11y ago
Never before in human history has learning the state of the art in any field been freely accessible to anyone. Really? I'm working in Mumbai right now (outsourcing has apparently gone dyslexic, as Russel Peters said). I'll be in rural Karnataka this week, and I'm pretty sure they'd disagree that learning the state of the art in any field is freely accessible to them. And there's 65 million people in that (relatively small) Indian state. there have never been so many helpful people giving away so much knowledge. I definitely agree with that, which is why it's hard for people who used to make a living transmitting knowledge. Oh, and a lot of the knowledge being given away so readily includes "how to violently undermine the global capital system that made this information dissemination possible". There has never been so much money available for investment, and investment has never been this founder friendly. Were you working in 1998? I remember those days... There has never been a market of this size this freely reachable, if you have good ideas that are sticky and sharable. I'm very lucky in that I get to use my talents for low-level programming to work on water purification systems. Mumbai has 10,000 deaths per annum (yes, 10,000) from waterborne illnesses, and it's probably the most developed city in India. But this isn't a problem that needs cleverness; it just needs a whole lot of people to do a very lot of hard, low-paid work. Water in particular gets loaded into the "entrepreneur" model all the time, but it doesn't really fit. You need a lot of people to build a lot of public pipes and faucets, and you need a social contract. Gates has been asked why he doesn't work on the global digital divide and usually just says "Maslow", and I think he's got a point.
- sdoering 11y ago
  Thanks. Seeing my thought put into words by another person, some thousand miles away really is a gift. Our privileged perspectives so often cloud our ability to relate to people not that fortunate.
  - willholloway 11y ago
    Let's be aware of privilege and work to extend privilege at all deliberate speed. I disagree with the privilege narrative that's become dominant. It's completely zero-sum, when the history of privilege is one of it's extension to more groups and bigger portions of those groups. In the future all humans will be as privileged as the humans of the west, and much more so. I'm concerned with how we can reach that place faster. Right now I think open source hardware on the reprap model is a fertile hunting ground for game changing solutions.
- willholloway 11y ago
  You are right on all those points except for 1998 in my opinion. Investment was not as founder friendly and not as available to ordinary people with a smaller idea, as it was pre crowd funding. But I think I am right as well in that we (humans) have never been this able to solve problems like this. Ballon based Internet and mobile devices will let developing countries leap frog the networking model of the west. For the problem of clean water in places without public water utilities we need open source hardware projects that design cheap and easy for ordinary people/communities to make from available materials, raw and finished. Something like a solar still that's so cheap and easy to construct it changes the entire equation. And I know that sounds hand wavey and politics are still important. But I believe all politics get easier when there is less scarcity, and technology can reduce scarcity. And I can't fix politics, so I'm focusing on all the power I do have to make things better.

bandrami 11y ago

Never before in human history has learning the state of the art in any field been freely accessible to anyone. Really? I'm working in Mumbai right now (outsourcing has apparently gone dyslexic, as Russel Peters said). I'll be in rural Karnataka this week, and I'm pretty sure they'd disagree that learning the state of the art in any field is freely accessible to them. And there's 65 million people in that (relatively small) Indian state. there have never been so many helpful people giving away so much knowledge. I definitely agree with that, which is why it's hard for people who used to make a living transmitting knowledge. Oh, and a lot of the knowledge being given away so readily includes "how to violently undermine the global capital system that made this information dissemination possible". There has never been so much money available for investment, and investment has never been this founder friendly. Were you working in 1998? I remember those days... There has never been a market of this size this freely reachable, if you have good ideas that are sticky and sharable. I'm very lucky in that I get to use my talents for low-level programming to work on water purification systems. Mumbai has 10,000 deaths per annum (yes, 10,000) from waterborne illnesses, and it's probably the most developed city in India. But this isn't a problem that needs cleverness; it just needs a whole lot of people to do a very lot of hard, low-paid work. Water in particular gets loaded into the "entrepreneur" model all the time, but it doesn't really fit. You need a lot of people to build a lot of public pipes and faucets, and you need a social contract. Gates has been asked why he doesn't work on the global digital divide and usually just says "Maslow", and I think he's got a point.

sdoering 11y ago
Thanks. Seeing my thought put into words by another person, some thousand miles away really is a gift. Our privileged perspectives so often cloud our ability to relate to people not that fortunate.
- willholloway 11y ago
  Let's be aware of privilege and work to extend privilege at all deliberate speed. I disagree with the privilege narrative that's become dominant. It's completely zero-sum, when the history of privilege is one of it's extension to more groups and bigger portions of those groups. In the future all humans will be as privileged as the humans of the west, and much more so. I'm concerned with how we can reach that place faster. Right now I think open source hardware on the reprap model is a fertile hunting ground for game changing solutions.
willholloway 11y ago
You are right on all those points except for 1998 in my opinion. Investment was not as founder friendly and not as available to ordinary people with a smaller idea, as it was pre crowd funding. But I think I am right as well in that we (humans) have never been this able to solve problems like this. Ballon based Internet and mobile devices will let developing countries leap frog the networking model of the west. For the problem of clean water in places without public water utilities we need open source hardware projects that design cheap and easy for ordinary people/communities to make from available materials, raw and finished. Something like a solar still that's so cheap and easy to construct it changes the entire equation. And I know that sounds hand wavey and politics are still important. But I believe all politics get easier when there is less scarcity, and technology can reduce scarcity. And I can't fix politics, so I'm focusing on all the power I do have to make things better.