Ask Slashdot: Why Aren't Techies Improving The World?

Slashdot reader marmot7 isn't impressed by "the latest app that solves some made up problem. I'm impressed by apps that solve real problems..." I don't feel that developers, sys admins, finance people, even policy wonks focus on the problems that we need to solve to have a healthy functioning society. It seems like it's mostly about short-term gain and not much about making the world better. That may be just the way the market works.

Is it that there's no profit to be made in solving the most important problems? I'm puzzled by that as I would think that a good solution to an important problem could find some funding from somewhere but maybe government, for example, won't take investment risks in that way?
Is there a systematic bias that channels technology workers into more profitable careers? (Or stunning counter-examples that show technology workers are making the world a better place?) Leave your answers in the comments. Why aren't geeks doing more to improve the world?

Comments

And..

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the important problems we are supposed to be solving that we aren't?

like what?

[Bite The Pillow]

What could be solved by tech? And would people use that tech?

If you don't have an answer, throwing money at it won't make it happen. If you do, you'll likely have an answer why it isn't being done.

Re:like what?

[Travis Mansbridge]

Capitalism. Venture capital firms are not seeking to solve problems, they're seeking a return on investment.

Re:like what?

[ranton]

Isn't Venture Capital throwing money at a problem with the hope of solving it and making money? Why is throwing money at BeerMe, DriveMe, FeedMe, etc., a reasonable idea but throwing money at a more important problem not acceptable or likely to work?

Solving a problem does not inherently make you money. Creating a solution customers are willing and able to spend money on will make you money. By giving $10 to a starving poor person I could solve that hunger (at least temporarily), but I am unlikely to see a return on that "investment". Finding a way to make a better tasting ketchup, on the other hand, could make a lot of money, regardless of whether tastier ketchup is a more important than feeding starving people.

Venture capital is not charity. Wealthy people can certainly choose to start a foundation (like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) instead of investing in a VC firm if solving "important" problems is their goal. If they choose investing, however, return on investment is likely the goal.

There are a lot of VC funded companies solving very important problems, but the reason they were funded almost certainly was because they could show a potential return on investment. Social good could have been a factor, but very few companies (or possibly no companies) are funded by VC's as a charity case.

Re:like what?

[Zontar The Mindless]

I think I realised that the world had really changed about 10 years ago when I was vacationing in the south of Thailand. Standing on the beach on Koh Lanta at sunrise, I used my mobile to ring my mom back in the States and let her know that I was fine and hadn't even been in Bangkok during the previous day's coup d'état.

It was my first mobile phone, and I'd only bought it about 2 months earlier. One of the early Samusung flip-phones. I still have it, and it still works just fine for voice, SMS, and very primitive (text-only) web browsing.

Re:like what?

[dgatwood]

Autonomous vehicles could solve a number of problems. They'd reduce the amount of space required for parking and would potentially greatly reduce the need for internal combustion engines.

And provide mobility for people with visual or physical impairment, eliminate drunk driving deaths and most of the deaths caused by driver error, too, dramatically reduce the delays caused by traffic lights, dramatically increase average road speed by reducing accidents and driving at faster speeds with shorter spacing between cars and speeding up more quickly when the car in front of you does, and dramatically increase fuel economy as a result of those other improvements.

Re:like what?

[ShanghaiBill]

Technology isin't that important.

You mean technology like vaccines that wiped out smallpox, and will soon wipe out polio?

Smallpox has killed more people than all the war in history combined, including more than 300 million during the 20th century. That is six WW2s. That is important.

The problem with tech, is that once it is part of our lives, we no longer consider it "tech", and we take it for granted.

How old are you?

Old enough to have a smallpox vaccine scar on my arm. Old enough to remember polio killing people in America.

Re:like what?

[AthanasiusKircher]

This is exactly how I would have answered. Capitalism creates way more problems then it solves.

This is debatable. I'd say the culture around capitalism (and perhaps more accurately, the "myths" capitalism tells about itself) are more problematic than capitalism itself.

In a balanced society and economy which mixes various economic elements more freely, capitalism can be a useful element. It's when we put capitalism up on a pedestal as the "best" system or the "only" one that is an appropriate component in a free society that we run into trouble.

There are many cases where capitalism can address problems that a more "managed" approach through government or whatever would be difficult, and there are plenty of cases where the creativity of capitalist enterprises can solve "problems" that people didn't even think were "problems" until capitalism generated a better way.

It's the side effects, though, that are more worrisome. Capitalism breeds a "game" mentality where everything in life is about money, profit, eternal growth, etc. It creates illusions like our modern commercial economy based on "newness" and disposable goods. Contrary to what capitalism claims, these are not necessarily just "human nature," as there were lots of historical societies with different organizations and different values.

It's not so much that capitalism is fundamentally flawed as that modern society's embrace of capitalism (to the exclusion of other values or possible economic components) hasn't yet found the most productive (and more ethical?) balance.

Huh?

[aldousd666]

This problem sounds like a made-up problem. Nobody's cell phone app is going to cure cancer yet... but they ARE very useful for using cameras to deposit checks and file expense reports without any paperwork... I don't see what you're getting at... there is useless crap all over the place, everyone tries their hand if they are willing to do it, and if it's something that people want, they pay for it. If it's not, then they don't. The OP is clearly focused on one or two, or twelve apps or tech that are 'useless' but I wonder if they would stop a second and think just how fast the ENTIRE WORLD is changing right now... All the time.

You may be looking in the wrong place

[macklin01]

Most of us who entered science and academia did so to make the world a better place, and many of us are techies. You'd be amazed at home much coding and tech is required for pretty much every area of science today.

We're writing open source software to solve real problems in science and engineering. We're spending the last of our startups on open access for our papers because it's the right thing to do. We're contributing to open data repositories because sharing data makes all our work better. We're writing free content on blogs, code tutorials, and MOOCs for public outreach, because we view our roles as educators seriously.

Most people in academic endure years of low pay and job uncertainty as postdocs and entry-level faculty--and defer or postpone indefinitely having children and buying that starter home--rather than faster and better-paying paths in industry, IP law, and mathematical finance because we do want to make the world a better place, and we're actively working on it.

So, while I agree with your general feeling, take a look around, and you'll see more techies trying make a difference that you might have realized.

Pretty simple actually....

[beheaderaswp]

The problem is cultural. We do not champion the production of things that enrich society in general, especially if they have no, or little, profit attached.

Speaking for myself, my whole resume as a Systems Engineer contains nothing organizations who either were directly involved in education, or served that market.. Those have been my sole employers. I've always been paid below market as an employee.

And I've always been looked at as an anomaly. Sometimes even derided. One time there was an offer that was $60,000 above what I was making. It was for a Fortune 10 company- which I turned down. Boy did I earn a high level of scorn from my friends and family who valued the paycheck over the work.

Am I the only one? I highly doubt it.

If you tally up the number of children that were educated by systems I designed- the number is conservatively above 7 million.

Was it worth it? You're goddamned right it was.

I solve the problems I'm PAID to solve.

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

I have no obligation to sacrifice my unpaid free time simply because I have a set of skills.

What do we need?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

Your question implies the following:

• The we know what a functioning and healthy society looks like and, thus, know what next step we're missing to get there.
• That there is anything like a consensus on what the "most" important problems are or what their approaches should be.
• That these are problems with direct solutions in "technology," without cutting-edge domain-specific knowledge.

I'm not sure that any of these is strictly true, and I'm nearly positive that we'll only know most of those answers in hindsight.

How about race relations? There's no app for that. War? You can't solder-up a PCB that convinces governments to stop murdering each other's citizens over differences of opinion.

Speaking of governments, what would a "techie" solution to government oppression look like? We have Tor, cryptocurrencies, steganographic filesystems, and mobile devices that would destroy the data on them before giving it up to an intrusive search, and look at how governments react.

That said, how about some of the areas where technology absolutely has worked on big problems?

Do you think climate change is a big problem? Do you think that the amount of power consumed by information technology globally is a terrifying figure in the face of anthropogenic climate change? This is a problem we know how to fix in "tech," and we're working on it.

Deaths due to traffic accidents? Computer vision and distributed coordination algorithms are at the core of self-driving automobiles.

How about 3D-printed prosthetics, or the medical industry in general? Data processing revolutionized drug research and genome work. Sure, there are more people doing silly apps than designing new systems for doing drug interaction simulation because one requires connections to established research labs, years of work, very expensive studies of efficacy, a decade of postsecondary education to have the domain-specific knowledge, and a hardware budget that runs into the millions; the other requires a crappy $300 laptop and some free software.

If there's a big problem out there that you want solved, either put up, pay up, or shut up.

Um...

[Shoten]

So, marmot7...why aren't you working to make the world a much better place, if it's so easy? What makes all the other techies responsible for improving your world in the manner you think is most correct?

Hard problems have no simple answers. Being a techie is not like being Gandalf the fucking Magician...the reason that there's so much discussion around hard problems is that, despite the efforts of many, a solution has not yet been found, and being a techie doesn't grant some mystical ability to solve any problem on command.

This is not a moral failing of others, it's just the fact that these are hard problems. And the fact that you don't live in a perfect utopia is not because everyone else is greedy, lazy, selfish or short-sighted. Get over yourself, kid.

I believe in working to make things better.

[ITRambo]

As a coatings chemist, then Technical Director, I developed the first low VOC waterborne coating for computers that lowered the bake from 30 minsutes at 350F to 30 minutes at 150F. I knew the otherwise thermoplastic resin self-condensed (crosslinked) at 140F, so no hazardous melamine or urea were needed to develop the office chimerical resistance (cleaners, foods) that was specified, either. This was around 1978. It was developed originally for Digital. Customers took forever to approve it even though it met their specs. How could a low polluting. energy saving waterborne acrylic be as good as a high temperature bake polyester coating with 6 pounds of hydrocarbons per gallons? Give the younger techies an opportunity to try new ideas. Let them make a little dent. All the little improvements add up to less energy use and cleaner air.

oh fuck you

[phantomfive]

Yeah, if only there techies who spent a bunch of time writing free software. If only there were people who dedicated their lives to making free software. They could start a foundation.

But no, everyone knows open source is about the money.

you mean...

[ooloorie]

I don't feel that developers, sys admins, finance people, even policy wonks focus on the problems that we need to solve to have a healthy functioning society.

You mean why don't techies work on things like giving everybody on the globe to access all the books ever written, listen to lectures from the best minds on the planet, communicate with anybody anywhere, access financial services across the globe, learn how to grow food better, get highly accurate and detailed maps and satellite photos for free (e.g., for improving agriculture), buy and sell pretty much anything from anywhere, create software that allows anybody anywhere to analyze scientific data and write software?

Is there a systematic bias that channels technology workers into more profitable careers?

Indeed there is. In a free society with free citizens, we let individuals decide, and vote for, what they find useful. That kind of "voting" is carried out using money: if you produce something that I find useful, I give you money for it; if you produce crap that I don't want, I don't give you money for it. That way, people who produce useful stuff get rewarded and get the resources to produce more useful stuff, while the people who produce crap get fewer resources allocated to them. Does that answer your question? How else would you like things to work?

Hackaday Prize

[Okian Warrior]

Check out the Hackaday prize, over at Hackaday.io.

For three years running, Hackaday has hosted the contest with a $100,000 first prize and a handful of $10,000 prizes.

Several of the prize categories would be appropriate for solving world problems, such as "citizen scientist", "automation", and "assistive technologies". (The other two categories are catch-alls which could also contain world-bearing solutions.

Many of the projects are high-concept. There are about 1000 entries this year, so you will get a wide range of possible project including some risible ones.

But there are definitely some strong entries this year.

I follow the Automatic Digital Microscope project, which hopes to automate (and speed up) the detection of tuberculosis in 3rd world countries.

The Electrospinning machine looks really interesting, could possibly become the next "3d printer" appliance for hackers.

The very high accuracy tilt sensor is possibly a new technology (I hadn't seen or heard of it before).

If you want to find techies improving the world, you might include Hackaday.io (specifically: the prize entries) in your search.

If you want to improve the world yourself, you might consider coming up with a project and entering the prize next year.

If you want to *help* improve the world, you might consider joining a Hackaday.io team that's entered for the prize.

Techies ARE improving the world

[ShanghaiBill]

The headline asks a question that is based on a false premise. Techies are doing more than anyone to improve the world. We have gone 70 years without a major war. Why? Two reasons, better communications and nuclear weapons. Both of these are because the techies that built the Internet, launched the comsats, and split the atom. Today, the Internet is bringing literacy and prosperity to the third world. Better solar cells and windmills are bringing us clean energy. Wikipedia is compiling the world's knowledge, and Google is giving us a way to search it instantly.

All of this is being done by us nerds. Who else is doing as much to create a better world? Lawyers? Journalists? Politicians? I don't think so.

Re:Techies ARE improving the world

[Pseudonym]

We have gone 70 years without a major war. Why?

Because politicians managed to avoid nuclear exchange a few times through the careful use of diplomacy. That, and global trade.

Why, just since the end of the Cold War, techies have supplied us with smarter weapons and drones so we can kill lots more people while pretending that we're not actually engaging in warfare, the ability to perform wholesale surveillance on our own populace (both in the public and private sector!), and a whole lot of snake-oil security theatre machines to remind us all to be scared.

Thanks, techies!

Re: Techies ARE improving the world

[khallow]

Please count the number of casulaties that have fallen in those 'minor' wars for the resources that make our financial elite even more rich than they already are, and then tell me again it's only 'minor'.

It's worth doing that exercise. The author of the linked webpage claims about 22 million war deaths including genocide and non state-based warfare from after the end of the Second World War through to 2007. That's about what the First World War killed in four years (not counting the 1918 influenza epidemic which was greatly expedited by the war). And of course, the Second World War killed at least three times as many people in an eight year period.

If we look at per capita, war deaths in the current period of peace are even more pronounced. The Second World War is thought to have killed at least 3% of the people alive at the time. That would be well over 200 million people now. We are nowhere near that.

Do the numbers. See for yourself.

Re:Techies ARE improving the world

[naubol]

I don't think you're trying to grok in good faith.

You addressed his comments about nuclear weapons in a dismissive way without overwhelming evidence on your side.

You ignored the comments about google, wikipedia, literacy, prosperity, solar cells, and wind mills.

You straw manned him by suggesting his position was that technology has already saved the world, which you followed up by using to paint him as an extremist (the anti-luddite).

So not only do you begin from questionable premises, but you don't really read to understand.

Re:Which problems?

[phantomfive]

But other than all that......what have the Romans^W Programmers ever given us?

Re:What do you want us to do?

[pthisis]

Not that guy, but one company which springs to mind immediately is HGSI. They cured AIDS, were bought out by Glaxo-Kline-Smith and all their research was shelved because GKS has a treatment-for-life product which a cure would have made obsolete.

Yeah, except that's not true at all. HGSI had a ccr5 monoclonal antibody in clinical trials, but it hadn't shown itself to be as effective as other existing medications let alone constituting having "cured AIDS". And Glaxo has been working on ccr5 agonists of their own (e.g aplavoric), with similarly mixed results.

There's a ton of money and prestige in an AIDS cure, there's no way a pharmaceutical company would submarine it.

And Glaxo and HGSI were beaten to the punch on CCR5 agonists by Pfizer, who got FDA approval for maraviroc (brand: Selzentry) and are making millions off of it.

This headline can fuck right off

[wonkey_monkey]

Ask Slashdot: Why Aren't Techies Improving The World?

Slashdot reader marmot7 isn't impressed by "the latest app that solves some made up problem. I'm impressed by apps that solve real problems..."

Jesus Christ. If the first thing you think of when talking about solving the world's most problems is apps, I don't want you on the funding committee.