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I'm so tired of the thoughtless repetition of this talking-point. Yes, some technologies developed serendipitously for luxury products. But when you take a broa
by timr 11y ago
I'm so tired of the thoughtless repetition of this talking-point. Yes, some technologies developed serendipitously for luxury products. But when you take a broader view than the latter half of the 20th century, most of the technological progress that actually made our lives better were the results of targeted effort: wastewater treatment, antibiotics, essentially all medications. We didn't get to these things accidentally.
Maybe those technologies were expensive at first and came down in price with adoption, but that's different than making the claim that if we just work on whatever rich people want today, we'll automatically get to places that are beneficial for society. Want to help the third-world feed itself? Perhaps you should invest your resources in that, not in a silicon valley nutri-shake startup.
Hell, most of your examples are cases where the military did something to solve a known problem that was too expensive (or too speculative) to be left to private industry. How you turn that into an argument that our best-and-brightest should be working on ad-optimization eludes me.
This industry, I swear: we whine about the loss of space exploration, and wonder what happened to our flying cars, but we brush off criticisms when someone invests millions of dollars in the sixty-seventh niche food-delivery service for the SF bay area. Perhaps the two things are related?
- afarrell 11y agoAn example of a startup doing work for the developing world is Wave, focusing on helping people send remittances to family in west Africa. http://www.sendwave.com/ http://www.sendwave.com/
- silverthorn 11y agoThat's great! And it's not even an exceptional case. There are lots of tech-related companies with an explicit social and developing-world focus, including many in SF---such as our company, Angaza, which makes it possible for emerging-market consumers to get much more energy for much less money through decentralized solar http://www.angazadesign.com/watch-video/ http://www.angazadesign.com/watch-video/ (obligatory: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/company/angaza/ http://careers.stackoverflow.com/company/angaza/) and many, many others, e.g. https://welldone.org/ https://welldone.org/ http://saner.gy/ http://saner.gy/ http://wecyclers.com/ http://wecyclers.com/ http://www.allpowerlabs.com/ http://www.allpowerlabs.com/ ... not to mention areas of "SF tech proper" with a direct positive impact, such as medtech or cleantech.
- timr 11y agoI'm glad to hear about these sorts of things. The world seems like a slightly less shallow place!
- jchrisa 11y agoI've been working on p2p sync since 2008 or so. Now we have a real deployed base. I feel lucky because I chose the tech for it's political possibilities. This keeps me on track on the days when it'd be hard to focus otherwise.
- simoncion 11y agoWhat's the p2p sync software that you've been working on for the past seven years? (This is a part/spare-time project, yes?)
- angersock 11y agoPenicillin was discovered by complete accident, actually. Also, the jury is still rather out on the long-term impact of medications...it sure made a bunch of rich folks richer, though! EDIT: Also, most of those solutions came through private industry working on .gov contracts. A better example you might want to use is the innovations out of Bell Labs, all done basically to further solidify the telephone monopoly. That in turn could be argued to be a monopoly granted by a state to solve the communications problem, but still.
- simoncion 11y ago> Also, the jury is still rather out on the long-term impact of medications. I can't speak to your experience, but I would have died as an infant without modern medications and modern medical procedures. I speak to you today as a healthy, relatively happy, productive member of society. Moreover, I think we can point to the innumerable treated cases of snakebite, lockjaw, rabies, polio, cancer, syphilis, etc. as strong evidence for the positive long-term impact of medication and medical care.
- timr 11y agoFleming discovered Penicillin accidentally, but he was a bacteriologist, and he was doing research into antiseptics. It was a discovery that was entirely related to his work.
- nostrademons 11y agoAnd he was researching antiseptics because he had served in the Royal Army and had watched numerous colleagues die from infections following their wounds.
- woodman 11y agoSince we're complaining - I'm so tired of the (hopefully) thoughtless use of "we". It is incredibly presumptuous. Every time I hear it I'm reminded of the artificially simplified narrative portrayed by WWII propaganda posters - where if you do your part, Rosie the riveter, then we'll save the world†! †Saving the world means unwittingly working to further the military industrial complex, undermining your long term interests, terms and conditions may apply, see reverse side of poster for eligibility and placement in the new power superstructure.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- serge2k 11y agoyeah, fighting that nazi's was all about furthering the military industrial complex. That whole pearl harbor thing wasn't really the japanese attacking, it was obviously lockheed.
- woodman 11y agoyeah, taking advantage of a crisis is impossible and never happens.