Slashdot Mirror
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.
There's been a lot of controversy over the Peace prize of late.
Note that Muhammad Yunus started the Grameen Bank which has reduced worldwide poverty by some insane amount - something like 40% of all poverty in the world has been eliminated by this one idea(*).
This guy deserves his medal, and perhaps his stature and accomplishments should be taken into account before people start dissing his opinions.
He's not just a random blogger that got an article in BuzzFeed.
(*) With significant follow-on benefits, such as increasing childrens' dietary protein, leading to better health.
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."
Nah very rarely does it make you free. Look at Mark Z with his estimated $70bn+ net value. It's not like he opens up his netbank and sees the $70bn bank balance is it? In fact he jumped from $10bn to $70bn without really doing much. He could of gone on a long holiday and it would of made little difference.
So, the definition of rich is what? The value of the stock you have? the line of credit the bank gives you? Rich gives you plenty of options, weather or not rich people choose the right options is few and far between. Otherwise, things like world hunger wouldn't exist. Usually any options they do pick will be ones that serve their interests first. I.E donating to charity is a great way to save on Tax. Especially if you "own" said charity.
As for useful. I've met people who have are worth into the $100's of millions in personal wealth. I can tell you they are far from this word "useful" if anything they expect everyone to kiss their ass and prove their usefulness to the them. Not the other way around.
Blame those pouring trillions into military & commercial instead of real human problems and not tech geniuses.
I don't know what the research is on this, but my default assumption is that money, like religion, tends to amplify the sort of person you are.
If you're a good person, money makes you very good. If you're a bad person, money makes you very bad. If you're an ignorant person, money makes you very ignorant. And so on.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
there is little interest in applying technology to overcome the massive human problems of the world.
Completely false, even says so in the summary. Throughout history, if the general population was upset with the ruling class they overthrew them. With automated factories and armies, total control will soon be put in the hands of a few people, unlike all of history. Heck, with all the automation there won't be a need for the plebes to create the luxurious life they are accustomed to. I'm pretty sure Oligarchs agree, this will overcome a massive human problem.
Inevitably, zero freedom.
No. Hell no. Grameen Bank is a wonderful program to allow small businesses access to capital. To become capitalists.
The 40% reduction in poverty was due to third-world countries embracing globalization. China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Belarus, etc.
No. Hell no. Grameen Bank is a wonderful program to allow small businesses access to capital. To become capitalists.
The 40% reduction in poverty was due to third-world countries embracing globalization. China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Belarus, etc.
The Grameen Bank was written up in the November 1999 issue of Scientific American.
NAFTA came into force in 1994, so most of the benefits from Grameen happened *before* the push towards globalization.
And for the record, bringing people out of poverty through globalism is temporary, because the root cause of poverty is corruption and globalism doesn't change that.
Most of the wealth to China went first to the people, then to the government. The government now has all the money, and the people would return to poverty in a heartbeat if the global demand dried up.
Not so much with the Grameen bank.
China is throwing tons of money at worthless projects: cities with no residents, massive investment in research with no accountability for quality, and huge state-sponsored projects that regularly fail - such as bridges and dams.
All that wealth coming from the US has gone to waste.
What's worse is that globalism is pulling us down into poverty. Highly trained Chinese can come to this country and get jobs, but highly trained Americans can't similarly go to China. You can't become a Chinese citizen even if you marry a Chinese citizen.
Globalism is one-sided, and makes our country weaker in every possible way. The wealth flows from the richer country to the poorer, where it is wasted.
At any rate, the Grameen bank was an idea that actually worked.
Even if you are philosophically opposed to capitalism, you have to admit that the Grameen Bank, as an idea, works.
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.
The key figures (Mark Z and Bill G) along with the key corps (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM) I mentioned above, unfortunately, have decided to cramp their little brains with "Social Justice" mantra that takes them further and further away from true enlightenment, and thus, have lost their 'purpose of being'
Don't put them all in the same bucket. All those companies will profess their love of "diversity" because it's trendy, but Google and Facebook stand apart from the others in your list as they actively try to shove their social agenda down the throat of people.
As for Bill Gates, his philantropy is basically a scam. His foundation is a steamroller that crushes existing NGOs and promotes a very narrow vision of charity, which happens to profit him and his cronies immensely. That's hardly a social agenda like the one at Google, it's just more typical Microsoft (embrace extend extinguish).
lucm, indeed.
As much as I enjoy using linux as a daily driver, aside from a flurry of publication on popular tech sites between July to August 2017 for their launch in Indonesia, I haven't heard a single thing about Endless being a leading PC platform on any field of computing.
1.) Trying to explain to idiots how they're doing things wrong and trying to correct them? ... Very difficult. As soon as they're overwelmed they'll start voting for Trump and Co. and things will go downhill from there.
2.) Exploiting idiots and getting obscenely rich whilst giving them PHP doodads / toy apps or virutal swords? ... Very easy. You just once need to fathom how truely unbelievably stupid most people are and what stupid shit they will spend money on, then you're good.
Bottom line:
While I get that we need to save the world (Elon Musk is showing us how it can be done) I also get the enticing proposition of simply manipulating the masses and enjoying yourself while doing it. If you get bored, then you can go about saving the world. Which is basically what Bill Gates and the likes are doing.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
Even nobel prize winners are trying to make a quick buck from publishing their books, instead of spreading their ideas to a bigger audience free of charge. Definition of irony?
Obama won a Nobel prize for peace, then went on to spend the most money on the military in the history of the USA, on top of vastly expanding NSA spying programs and establishing a formal kill list.
Think I'm kidding?
Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.
Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05... ^ yes, NY times, not breitbart or fox news
It's more hypocrisy than irony, though.
It's a difficult job to be president. The alternative to your narrative is that there are very bad people in the world who wish to kill lots of innocent people. The decision to eliminate such people is one that should not be taken lightly. Escalating this decision to the top executive shows that these decisions are taken very seriously.
Giving Obama the Nobel Peace prize was a huge mistake in both timing (too early) and merit (undeserved). But the President should be involved directly in drone strike targets. Otherwise these decisions would be made by unelected military officials, and that sounds very troubling to me.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.