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Nobel Prize Winner Argues Tech Companies Should Be Changing The World (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Tech companies are competing to serve the wealthy, argues the winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, complaining there's no "global vision," with big innovations instead "designed and dedicated mostly for commercial successes... while trillions of dollars are invested in developing robotics and artificial intelligence for military and commercial purposes, there is little interest in applying technology to overcome the massive human problems of the world." A genius in the tech industry "can dedicate his work to creating a medical breakthrough that will save thousands of lives -- or he can develop an app that will let people amuse themselves."
As an exception, he cites the low-cost Endless computer, which runs Linux and has 50,000 Wikipedia articles pre-installed to enable offline research -- plus more than 100 applications -- for a price of just $79. "One part of Endless's business is operated like a conventional, profit-seeking company, while the other part is a social business that provides underserved populations with educational, health, and creative services they were once denied. Endless is already being shipped around the globe by four of the five largest computer manufacturers. It has become the leading PC platform in Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia. It has also been selected as the standard operating system for the Brazilian Ministry of Education, and in coming months it will be adopted as the primary platform by a number of other Latin American countries."
The article is by Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concepts of microcredit and microfinance, and is taken from his new book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions.
As an exception, he cites the low-cost Endless computer, which runs Linux and has 50,000 Wikipedia articles pre-installed to enable offline research -- plus more than 100 applications -- for a price of just $79. "One part of Endless's business is operated like a conventional, profit-seeking company, while the other part is a social business that provides underserved populations with educational, health, and creative services they were once denied. Endless is already being shipped around the globe by four of the five largest computer manufacturers. It has become the leading PC platform in Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia. It has also been selected as the standard operating system for the Brazilian Ministry of Education, and in coming months it will be adopted as the primary platform by a number of other Latin American countries."
The article is by Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concepts of microcredit and microfinance, and is taken from his new book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions.
Pablo Escobar "[had] ...an estimated net worth of US $30 billion by the early 1990s (equivalent to about $55 billion as of 2016), making him one of the richest men in the world in his prime."
Blame those pouring trillions into military & commercial instead of real human problems and not tech geniuses.
I don't know what the research is on this, but my default assumption is that money, like religion, tends to amplify the sort of person you are.
If you're a good person, money makes you very good. If you're a bad person, money makes you very bad. If you're an ignorant person, money makes you very ignorant. And so on.
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Technology is too busy causing problems to be solving problems.
That's what a lot of people do not understand. A company cannot provide food, shelter, medicine, or whatever unless they make a profit. If there is no profit in it then they cannot pay their wages, pay back investors, and have money left over for when times are thin or to invest in expansion.
Profit is good. Greed is a natural instinct. People understand greed. It is with greed that businesses stay in business to feed another natural instinct, charity. When people have enough to see to their own needs they tend to see to the needs of others. Those that don't see charity as a virtue can be tolerated, and may in fact be necessary for human survival. People with unrestrained charity are also seen as not right in the head. Giving their food up to the point they starve themselves is not healthy, for themselves or society.
I keep seeing people claim we should increase taxed the wealthy because "they can afford it". What is that other than greed? These people see others with more so they send the government to take it from them. That's just theft by proxy.
I remember a history teacher in high school making fun of "trickle down economics". He said that the taxes on the wealthy was reduced on the theory that the wealthy would use that tax money to invest in more business but they instead bought expensive cars, went on vacations, and generally lived it up. I bought it, trickle down economics was bad. Then, years later, something made me think of this some more. These wealthy people put a lot of people to work building those cars they bought, making their lavish parties, carrying their clubs at golf courses, and so on. They still invested in the economy. Even if they stuffed all that money under a mattress it still helped the economy since that was a store of wealth that could be added back when they couldn't afford those big parties and golf trips. They'd still have to buy food. Even if it stayed there until they died that money ended up in the hands of their children where they'd spend it on food, housing, clothes, and of course luxuries like caviar, lobster, plane tickets, and tips to the golf caddies.
We cannot grow total wealth without getting wealth disparity. Taking money from the wealthy and giving it to the poor rewards poverty. That's not the signal we should be sending as a society. Punishing the wealthy only because they are wealthy is paving made of good intentions that leads us down a road to where we don't want to go.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Yep, fsck 'em, I say. I've made a bit of money, and I'm 'pulling up the draw bridge' to make sure my neighbours, and definitely that grubby looking guy I see on the way to the shops don't get any of it. I mean, I know I'll never get any further up the ladder, because of the millionaires and billionaires all keeping all their money to themselves, but hey, at least that grubby guy down the street won't get any of mine.
"Punishing" the wealthy to give up a little more than they currently do doesn't really punish them. Most of the super-rich (people with multiple billions in personal wealth) wouldn't notice if you took a million dollars off them each year. It wouldn't affect their buying power, it wouldn't affect the output of their investments, and they won't materially suffer for it. In other words, what looks like a large amount of money here, makes almost no difference at all.
Shockingly, there are people who just happen to live somewhere very poor. They were born because their parents are so poor that if they don't have some kids to help out with the work around the house, they won't earn the few cents they need to buy a decent meal, or to fix the hole in the roof. They have to have quite a few kids because there's a good chance a couple of them will die during childhood due to disease and malnutrition, so it's not like they can just produce kids 'to order' either. Such people can't work themselves out of poverty in anything like a reasonable timeframe because they have near-zero income. That means they don't have any spare money to buy an extra bag of seeds to grow more crops, or to keep the goat alive for another year. If someone gives them an extra bag of seeds today, they go from a daily income of $1 to $1.01. That extra one cent can be used to increase their output next time around, and so on. In other words, a tiny amount of money here helps to dramatically accelerate the rate of 'wealth creation' in a vast number of people.
As for stuffing money in the mattress - that's effectively what the super-rich are doing. Their personal spending is massively outstripped by their income, and so more and more money is being removed from the economy and into their hands. They're not spending it all, and so the flows of money around the economy are reduced. Do too much of that, and you get a recession - which absolutely won't affect the super-rich as they move off-shore, making the problem even worse.