My fundamental hope for humanity is that someday, rather than having to confront social challenges around distribution of resources (who gets more water? who gets more land? who gets more oil? do we need to raise energy costs to capture the extrinsic costs of polluting the air?), we will just have enough and more of everything.
The Central Arizona Project and the Navajo Generating Station are my favorite examples of this. The Navajo Generating Station is a giant coal-fired power plant, which provides energy used primarily to pump water up into Arizona. The station substantially degrades air quality in the surrounding areas, and the water that is "stolen" from the Colorado is a part of the West's growing water concerns. Right now, there are two sides to the issue: those who think it is worth the cost to bring water to Arizona, and those who believe the environmental issues are too big. We could solve that like a social problem, using politics and ethics to try to make the decision... or we could just get on making energy cheap and clean, and suddenly a huge part of the cost disappears. If there was no fly ash issue, no NOx issue, no CO2 issue, then we're back to just worrying about the water flow. But if we have cheap energy, desalination suddenly looks a lot more palatable, which would reduce a lot of water pressures in the US. Los Angeles could switch to 100% desal water and the Colorado river would have a surplus of water again.
Cheap (and preferably clean) energy, solving climate change, and cheap access to space (this one is more dubious) would all broadly boost the quality of life for humanity.
Los Angeles could also recycle its water for a much lower cost than desalination, but due to campaigns that claim it is unsanitary (ass to glass, etc) it is not an option politically.
Another angle on this is why are we scrutinizing only where 10% of California's water usage is, while ignoring 90% (farms)? Why do California's farmers have the right to the majority of the water while paying next to nothing for that water as compared to the rates the other users of water pay?
There was a photo a while back of somebody urinating in a reservoir, and there was subsequent outrage and calls to put an enormously expensive cover over the reservoir (i.e. lake), etc.
Never mind that all the wildlife that urinates/defecates in it, the dead animals in it, etc., which nobody minds.
Urine is generally sterile, it's actually an accepted first aid practice to urinate on a bandage or create a urine paste to treat a wound in the field in emergency conditions.
What this really ignores is all the inland cities that use the same water source, one down-stream from the next, from the great lakes to the gulf of Mexico. I toured one of those sewage treatment plants in 1993 (1). It remains one of the most beautiful visions of my life: clear water flowing over algea-covered wooden beams, glowing in the natural sunlight, no odor whatsoever.
You can't make this stuff up. Civil engineers are amazing.
Edit: also, as per my other comment, urine, in the voided stream, is not sterile, and even if it were, certainly contains all the building blocks for bacterial growth.
it might be reasonable to start with that assumption, but actually do tests to determine what's more dangerous. then put processes in place to clean the water from the dangerous stuff (from both humans and animals)
I grew up in a town along the Mississippi River. It's "ass to glass" all the way from Minnesota to Louisiana. Basically every city, town, and village on both banks treats its drinking water and its wastewater, then releases its treated wastewater downstream.
Are the farmers paying so much less for treated, potable tap water delivered through municipal water mains? I think you'll find the cost of the water itself is pretty small. You may find that treating it, transporting it, and distributing it pretreated to all those people are the real economic costs even during most stages of a drought.
The farmers are consuming the majority of the water and there is no way to even get them to pay for their usage. Many have grandfathered old school water rights. Meanwhile, they pass idiotic laws like the ban on unsolicited table water in restaurants to pretend like they are doing something.
Funny thing is, most waste water treatment plants I've seen - the water coming out of the waste treatment plant is cleaner than the water removed from the river for drinking (which is then treated).
Wait until people learn that they air they breathe has likely already been breathed by someone else...
> Los Angeles could also recycle its water for a much lower cost than desalination, but due to campaigns that claim it is unsanitary (ass to glass, etc) it is not an option politically.
Unsanitary isn't really the problem. Laden with organically active toxins is the problem.
We don't have a good way of dealing with most toxins other than simply diluting them and letting nature break them down.
This is why treatment plants take water from rivers and pump treated water back into the river rather than immediately recycling outflow back to inflow.
The problem is that once you make it free (or underpriced relative to replacement cost) people find new uses for the water, and your previous assumptions about how much people need, become huge underestimates.
Without those prices, you're back in the commissars dilemma of either a) restricting people to a one-size-fits-all amount or b) maintaining a master list of acceptable uses, either of which have absurd consequences.
There's a similar fallacy in thinking that energy efficiency tech by itself is enough to reduce fossil fuel usage. In reality, people just keep finding
(It would be more correct to say that improved energy efficiency will make the required e.g. carbon taxes less painful to implement.)
As our ability to extract resources has risen, over time, so has our perceived "requirements" of consuming those resources, i.e. America's current rate of consumption (of electricity, fossil fuels, etc), is required by nothing else other than a series of collective choices.
TL;DR - Technology will never eliminate Politics, People are inherently Political.
The waste is not simply the spent nuclear fuel, but much of the machinery and systems around it, plus the discarded items used daily in the management of a plant (clothes etc).
This low level nuclear waste while 'only' dangerous for 100 to 500 years, is huge - vastly bigger than the 76000 metric tons of spent fuel:
http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Si....
I don't have the tonnage of the low level waste to hand, but it is certainly much larger than the high level waste.
It normally is! But. It has catastrophic failure modes. (Yes, pebble beds. Let's talk about realities, not if-onlys.)
Because of those catastrophic failure modes, nobody except governments want to assume the risk. And governments only do it because they have sovereign immunity from those whose interests they're supposedly representing.
I firmly believe that any interested parties who want to go nuclear, should, and reap those rewards. If you can't find an insurer, go find wealthy people who believe in your design to indemnify you.
Just don't pick my pocket to build it and then poison me.
> Because of those catastrophic failure modes, nobody except governments want to assume the risk.
That would be a fine if it was a level playing field.
Lots of things have catastrophic failure modes. Dams[1], supertankers[2], chemical plants[3], oil drilling rigs[4], coal mines[5], etc. To say nothing of climate change.
The reason those things have no trouble being built anyway is that they aren't required to carry billions of dollars in insurance coverage to begin with.
And maybe they should, but you can't single out nuclear for a requirement to carry that much insurance and then fault it for not being able to satisfy that requirement when its competitors don't.
>Yet that's exactly what we're doing with coal and petroleum.
Only coal and petroleum is mined thousands of miles aways from me, and even if e.g. there's an oil spill, it won't kill thousands in hundreds miles radius.
Coal is mined where I grew up and they rip entire mountains apart, throw the dross back, and leak sulfur into the streams for the next 50 years.
In addition, in California, the radioactive sulfur in pollution from the coal burning plants in China SWAMPS the radiation release from Fukushima by several orders of magnitude.
I'm going to stop here, because any relevant adjective I would use to describe people like you would just get me banned.
>I'm going to stop here, because any relevant adjective I would use to describe people like you would just get me banned.
The main word I'd use to describe "people like you", given the above, is rude.
The ad-hominem doesn't add anything to the case. And who would "people like me" be? Anybody that has concerns or might be against nuclear power? Because they are necessarily ignorant luddites, and only those for it are the level-headed ones, right?
Well, nuclear reactors and energy production is not science (the science part is done at the academic level), it is applied technology. And technology mingles with private interests, politics and bad actors all the time (e.g. constructors who don't install enough safety measures, governments who don't give a shit about global environmental treaties, loonies who might want to blow up reactors or get their hands to the by products, human errors, political ass-saving, tons of money to be made, higher profit margins by not properly taking care of by products, etc.),
Now to answer the specific points:
"Leak[ing] sulfur into the streams for the next 50 years" doesn't even compare to having to take care of radioactive materials for the next millennia, neither in the extend of time, nor to the potential impact.
Your answer also seems to imply that e.g. uranium mining doesn't have an environmental impact, and it's only coal that "rips entire mountains apart"...
>In addition, in California, the radioactive sulfur in pollution from the coal burning plants in China SWAMPS the radiation release from Fukushima by several orders of magnitude.
All caps "swamps" aside, this would be only relevant if Fukushima was the epitome of nuclear disaster and the "radiation release from Fukushima" was the highest level of tradition release possible (or close).
> this would be only relevant if Fukushima was the epitome of nuclear disaster
Isn't it? I thought what happened at Fukushima was the worst case scenario for a nuclear power plant of its type. What is the worst that could have happened?
Nuclear is very clean. What most people came to hate is the waste, which is surprisingly little (per kW). Also the danger in case of failure, which is massive.
We have no practical way to clean CO2 from the atmosphere and we don't need catastrophe for it to be a problem. We're poisoning the planet with real carbon dioxide while we fret about the hypothetical risks of hypothetical nuclear waste.
We could replace coal with nuclear yesterday if the anti-nuclear activists would stand down. Instead, they have fought to continue a status quo whose death toll we start couting at 25,000 people per year lost to black lung [0]. No serial killer or terrorist could dream of effecting mass casualites as efficiently as the proponents of this viewpoint do when they take action that results in the continued and expanding operation of coal power generation, despite an alternative which is actually viable in every respect but their opposition.
Yes, nuclear power has problems. But even if it killed 24,000 people per year, blocking the replacement of coal by nuclear would still be a willful choice to cause the deaths of 1,000 people (it's getting really hard not to say murder).
The total volume of which would fit in an apartment block. That block could be dropped into the marina trench if you really are that paranoid, total cost a few million dollars.
There is no conceivable way of removing even daily worldwide human carbon waste from the atmosphere for that kind of money.
Sure the physical size of a spent fuel might be 'small' but this is not the only issue.
And the low level waste - of which there is approx 360000 tons? Would the Mariana Trench would be a good/safe place to place this? Based on what reckoning?
No you can dump low level waste under 1m of topsoil, and build a hospital or school or kindergarten on top of it. That's why its called low-level waste.
>> And the low level waste - of which there is approx 360000 tons? Would the Mariana Trench would be a good/safe place to place this? Based on what reckoning?
Solar panels production. Currently, they are mostly produced from scraps of semiconductor industry, and it's already close to capacity. This process is energy inefficient and environmentally unfriendly (silicon tetrachloride is an intermediate stage).
Pushing for more silicon solar panels beyond what's possible as semiconductor industry byproduct is unsustainable, both economically and environmentally.
"In 2006, for the first time, more than half the world's polysilicon was used to produce solar PV cells."
It's true that the intermediates in silicon refining like are quite hazardous, but in a well-run production facility those intermediates don't get released to the biosphere. They affect the toxicity of the end product no more than the intermediate use of acetic anhydride in aspirin production, or the intermediate use of uranium hexafluoride in nuclear fuel rod production. There was a famous story in 2008 about a Chinese silicon production facility that was illegally dumping SiCl4, but if you're going to pick the most horrifying Chinese examples you'd think that nothing at all can be made safely.
It is not that it is impossible to run photovoltaic panels production de novo (and it is done in large scale these days, as you have correctly stated). The problem is that it is economically unsustainable and have to be financed by government subsidies (or, alternatively, moved to cheap Chinese factories disregarding environmental costs completely).
There was a famous story in 2008 about a Chinese silicon production facility that was illegally dumping SiCl4, but if you're going to pick the most horrifying Chinese examples you'd think that nothing at all can be made safely.
There are some interesting moral gymnastics required there, no? The Chinese lead the world in PV manufacturing right now. Is this PV-revolution necessarily built on dirty manufacturing? Would we still have a PV-revolution if we weren't so accepting of an environmental disaster that takes place in a distant country?
My guess is that there would still be a PV revolution even without the Chinese factories, though the cost drops might have a come a bit slower. Costs were dropping at about the same year-over-year rate for decades before China leapt to the top of the PV manufacturing ranks.
Silicon refiners in the US actually had lower production costs than Chinese refiners even with the extra labor and environmental costs in the US. Unfortunately, a few years ago China imposed punitive trade barriers against silicon imported from the US. It was in retaliation for trade barriers the US put up against imports of Chinese solar modules. Until both sides erected their dueling trade barriers, the value of US-to-China silicon exports just about balanced the value of China-to-US modules. It was like a textbook example of comparative advantage. Now Chinese manufacturers get higher priced silicon made with fewer environmental protections, and US buyers get higher priced modules :-/
My impression is that most large-scale clean energy projects go for wind power, indirect solar energy (use sunlight to heat up some medium which then drives turbines or rotors) or bio fuel - with more exotic stuff like geothermic energy where it's applicable.
Solar panels seem to be one of the most inefficient clean energy solutions - so are they actually relevant here?
We've done it with food thanks to the Green Revolution in the 70's. The need to "not waste food" is an artifact from before food was abundant. I'm hopeful like you that we can do it for energy as well.
The ingredients of food are nearly free, the US average income per capita buys 700+ kg of wheat per day. The distribution/availability problem is political.
Wheat doesn't have proteins and fats - those are more expensive. And processing wheat is fairly laborious, you'd have been better off comparing it to flour (about 12kg of flour a day for the median US income after taxes). And there is also the other costs of living - like shelter (more costly if you want shelter with access to jobs).
Food costs can be quite cheap and still be nutritious with the right choices, but not 700kg of wheat a day cheap.
DeepMind looks like a hilariously wrong project to criticize because it is a true moonshot, something very different from the majority of other SV projects.
If hiring hundreds of PhDs to create a general purpose learning agent, all while publishing all the intermediate results in freely available papers isn't a moonshot with socially beneficial outcome, then I don't know what is.
Also note that DeepMind went even further than that, there is DeepMind health division aiming at using this technology to help doctors and patients directly.
If I were the author I'd choose some social media unicorn or an ad network as an example of inherent misallocation of human talent.
I think part of the issue is that the results of DeepMind, while enormously impactful, do not have the sort of tangible quantity that the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program did. It's easy for critics to dismiss them when the most relatable thing to the layperson is "This thing plays Go". It's a common lament in the scientific community, especially in the theoretical space. I don't see an easy answer for it, other than "Wait for it."
To me, the more apt comparison isn't say, DeepMind to the Manhattan Project, it's DeepMind to the early physics experiments, or Chicago Pile 1. You can imagine in the future, a letter being written much like Einstein's to FDR, pointing to an early and modest project saying "because of this, we can now create <X>".
(I'm ignoring the wartime necessities and issues surrounding that letter in this example as they're outside of the discussion.)
> If hiring hundreds of PhDs to create a general purpose learning agent, all while publishing all the intermediate results in freely available papers isn't a moonshot with socially beneficial outcome, then I don't know what is.
I'm sorry, I don't buy it. What exactly are the social benefits of general purpose learning agent?
It's an impressive technical and scientific challange, agreed, but most applications that I can immediately think of are harmful to society (reduction of white-collar jobs, increased potential for surveillance and profiling, etc) - so how would such an agent be used to actually improve society?
A general purpose reinforcement learning (RL) agent is a machine that can be taught to perform any task from a very wide range of tasks via sparse rewards given by a human or software trainer.
The agent can, like any software, be snapshotted, saved, loaded and copied, creating as many identical agents as needed (given hardware, of course). Agents can and will be trained to perform various tasks, and their snapshots will be sold or made available for download over the Internet.
By saying that your main concerns are technological unemployment of white-collar demographic and increased state surveillance you make it clear that your views reflect that of an upper-middle class western person. On the global scale affluent westerners are a minority.
So, How would such an agent be used to actually improve society?
Consider universally valued, life-critical services: healthcare and education. Only the western people have access to high-quality medicine and education due to a whole lot of reasons (global economical inequality, a very long and hard path to become a doctor or a professor, a very long time needed to establish the necessary social institutions, lack of social stability outside the west, ...).
If we had a general RL agent we could train several variants of it to perform high-quality work in the fields of Diagnosis, Radiology, Paediatry etc. We could also train artificial education agents for many subjects.
The training needs to only be done once. Given sufficiently powerful mass-produced hardware (smartphone SoCs with Nervana-like NN accelerators?) these agents could be given almost for free to billions of people that wouldn't be able to afford such services in any point of their lives otherwise.
How could one be against giving essential high quality services to every human with a smartphone?
And if even that is not enough to justify the utility of RL agents, then consider how much progress in molecular biology and medicine could be done if thousands of agents trained to do life science research worked around the clock to push the state of art further. How many people with debilitating diseases could be cured by such an effort?
And then consider how we could make our currently-crumbling cities and infrastructure permanently well-attended by RL agents inside simple robots. The world certainly could use more smart attention everywhere. I guess the quality of life in such a world would be remarkably different.
An example was already given. Medical professionals screw up all the time. Having a highly intelligent entity capable of providing advice and even oversight could greatly speed diagnosis and reduce mistakes in treatment.
Asking how a general purpose learning agent could be useful seems kind of like asking how an intelligent person could be useful. The ways are countless.
The social benefits are that our knowledge develops. You can argue that that is not a good thing because of the social upheaval it causes, but everyone who has argued that since we were cavement have been proved wrong.
For example, humanity's current best attempt at sustainable society is an unstable mix of democracy and capitalism, and in many countries that isn't working out too well - particularly for blue collar workers, but increasingly for your white collar workers too.
It isn't inconceivable that deep mind could design a better political system for the US, for instance, that resulted in broad consensus instead of virtual civil war. Or design a fairer tax system that meant more people could have fulfilling and enjoyable lives.
Whether deep mind's masters would apply it to those questions is moot, but the parent's point is that the huge resources being poured into Facebook makes it a much better example of the squandering of the efforts of our brightest and best.
Note that Facebook also has a formidable AI research group called FAIR and they are pursuing goals close to DeepMind's, while openly publishing their results and tools.
There is a lot of social media unicorns that don't contribute much to research which are not Facebook.
Who knows, maybe there is no real need for a dozen of global social media companies that provide roughly similar features to the same users?
> but most applications that I can immediately think of are harmful to society (reduction of white-collar jobs, increased potential for surveillance and profiling, etc)
Those are not applications, those are side-effects to _some_ applications.
Also note that DeepMind went even further than that, there is DeepMind health division aiming at using this technology to help doctors and patients directly.
Thing is, there is plenty of existing AI research that could hypothetically revolutionize medicine. Even in the eighties there were expert systems that outperformed doctors in certain areas. The issue with it all isn't that the algorithms are not fancy enough or accurate enough yet, it's the practical application.
I believe the biggest challenge of today's AI research is making AI and ML accessible. Not just for consumption, but for actual training and open ended use.
I don't see Deep Mind doing much in *that" regard.
I think the author is strawmanning a bit here. The central premise they're attacking is that tech should not be called upon to solve social problems, and they assume this is what the pull quote at the top is implying. They then spend the body of the essay arguing that social problems are intractable to a top down approach, technological rationality is subject to the same problems as government bureaucracy, etc.
However, one could more charitably interpret the quote as saying there are lots of TECHNOLOGIES that would produce social good, which are underfunded - alternative energy, carbon capture, distributed social networking, etc. Ycombinator seems to agree, given their recent focus on nuclear.
I think the author is right that top-down technical solutions to social problems don't work. Their examples are compelling, and more come to mind. As you say, though, that doesn't extend to the argument that technology and social good are unrelated. Companies reasonably can (and, one could argue, should) choose their investments and priorities based on their social effects and other distant externalities. There are also problems, like the social effects of climate change, that can be effectively addressed, at least partially, with technical solutions.
The much more interesting question for me is whether it's ethical to invest in technologies that will cause social change, even if those changes are highly likely to be negative in the short term. The default silicon valley answer to that would be yes, but a broad range of other people would say no. Both have rational arguments. If you look at the social effects of the industrial revolution (or the green revolution, or the enlightenment) there's a lot of short-term negative for a lot of people and some enduring problems for some groups of people.
Is anybody seriously proposing heavy Government spending on any specific problem right now, other than a wall against Mexico?
Some engineering problems have yielded to heavy spending. The Polaris submarine program. The Apollo program. RCA's color TV effort. AIDS treatment. Extreme ultraviolet photolithography. The H-bomb. Sometimes this works. With a narrow goal, a general idea of how to get there, and heavy funding, impressive results are possible.
The Interstate highway system wasn't an attempt to solve a technology problem. It was just a big public works program. Expensive, but low-risk. The Pennsylvania Turnpike already existed, and its first section opened in 1940.
There were military reasons too. Several leaders during WWII noted how difficult it was to move between the coasts. Railroads were too easy to block and didn't have the capacity in an emergency. If you are worried about the Russians invading, you want big fast/wide roads between large cities.
In particular, during WWI (not WWII), the government took over the railroads, which nearly melted down. (To what degree the meltdown was the result of the government takeover, I don't know.)
In 1919 (I think, plus or minus maybe one year), the Army sent a convoy by road from coast to coast. I forget how long it took, but it was at least 45 days, and maybe more like 90. And the Army said, moving stuff by road is hopeless with the current roads.
One of the people on that convoy was a Lieutenant Eisenhower. When he became president, the Interstate Highway System happened.
Plus the fact that, by design, they have to support planes being able to land on them. Thus we not only have a great network to move goods, but also built-in landing strips across the nation.
I doubt they are in compliance with the latest heaviest planes the military fields, but still, pretty forward thinking and synergy of infrastructure spending for both economical and military needs.
What does it mean when you look at that article and get upset that the illustration of the runway includes an upside-down 19? (It's supposed to be readable as 19 from the plane travelling at a compass heading of 190 degrees, south-southwest.)
Small planes on some small stretches of open highway. They look like runways but highways aren't. From the perspective of a landing pilot they are rough, uneven and nowhere near flat enough. Many are also built with slants in various directions to facilitate water runoff, which would scare the heck out of any pilot attempting to land any jet.
Fusion would be a perfect candidate. We pretty much know that it will work, we know it would yield big benefits, we just need a lot of money to work out all problems.
I would personally greatly prefer massive directed spending at hard science problems than quantitative easing dropping cheap money on Wall Street. Let the money trickle down from spending on science equipment and scientist and engineering salaries.
I don't know about ironic. It's actually fairly supportive of his point: it's a technical solution to a technical problem with a narrow scope, but which has evolved into a useful tool for social change.
I'd question how much of a necessity it is to refute the need for a "Manhattan Project" for various things is. But having heard the same call myself, I'll add my two cents to what I think is a rather good essay.
There's a perception among those calls I gather that the Manhattan Project was pulled together as this massive undertaking at the stroke of a pen. The reality however, was that it started off as overlooked, modest, and aimless at times. Overtime, as the goals and necessities became more clear, it grew and matured into the massive, focused effort we all know. But it was because of the direction and need that developed that resulted in the Project, not the other way around. And I think that's a very important distinction.
I think great projects tend to owe a good amount of their growth to organic factors. The reason why we haven't seen a "Manhattan Project" to solve a societal issue is because the conditions are not necessary right for one, and perhaps more importantly, the "project" needed to tackle one might not necessarily be recognizable to us as such.
>> First, the Manhattan Project itself was sui generis. There is very little reason to believe that this model does, in fact, generalize widely outside of the basic and applied sciences.
No. It was a basic question of practical physics. It was an effort to translate theoretical knowledge already proven in laboratories into a working product at scale. The innovations were definitely costly, but essentially rather incremental and straightforward. That was much of the reason it needed to be done in a hurry: eventually someone would do it.
Fusion power is in the same place. The theory works in the lab, we need to translate that into a working model at practical scales. Eventually someone will crack the problem. A Manhattan-style push would accelerate that date, hopefully to within our lifetimes.
The Manhattan Project had nearly unlimited resources at a time of scarcity, and it took enormous engineering risks. The risk component is something easy to overlook, but these were enormous infrastructure projects by any standard done at scale without much chance to prove them, and they were accomplished in incredibly short time-frames.
Could you imagine someone building a full-scale, power generating fusion reactor off a new and untested design in a about a year? More to the point, could you imagine someone funding that?
>One representative example of this argument, applied more generally, can be found in this lament about why Silicon Valley isn't solving the "big" problems. Assuming that this complaint is sincere, it nonetheless misses the point. What are "real" problems?
Well, I could name 10 real problems off of the top of my head, and most people would agree that they are important too. So I don't really understand the question. It seems to me to imply that people are unique snowflakes and because of that it's difficult to determine what's important, but that's not really the case.
>1. The clamoring for tech companies to solve social problems ignores the empirical record and empirically observed characteristics of top-down engineering efforts
Like this internet thing, on which the very article is posted on?
>Unfortunately, Manhattan Project-like ventures are not translatable to social and political problems.
Maybe, but then again there are tons of serious problems that are not "social and political" in nature, and are not "social video sharing for cat lovers" either.
And, yes, people might enjoy and derive some value from the latter too. But they'd derive a lot more value from, e.g. not dying from certain diseases due to a better focus on such problems, or sustainable energy.
What I think the people the author mentions ask for is not stopping Google and co from doing their stuff and conscripting SV engineers to basic research, but more and better funded and coordinated national (and international) efforts on stuff that matters in a large scale for our societies and our survival. Kind of like the internet was developed, we went to the moon, nuclear energy, and also applications of such stuff to current problems (from environment to health, education, democracy, privacy, etc).
I have a pet theory that the level of concern towards social issues for an individual, as a function of wealth and well being, is convex[1].
That is, it is highest at the extremes : for the poorest and the wealthiest. The former are concerned because of the tacit idea that solving social problems would directly solve theirs. The latter are concerned because as people who don't have direct problems themselves, solving other people's ones would alleviate a repressed guilt feeling, satisfy their ego, or help with the minor annoyance of having to listen to people's whinning.
Then I'm guessing most people working in tech industry are right in the middle of this curve, and consequently give the least possible F.
Funny, I'm inclined to think it's actually concave. The poorest don't actually have time to worry about this stuff, they're way too busy just surviving. The wealthiest don't have time to worry about this stuff, they're way too busy trying to increase the growth rate of their wealth. The people who do actually care the most end up in the middle - they're smart and resourceful enough to not be in extreme poverty, but also too kind and selfless to have gained extreme wealth.
Though I think the fact that we can have exactly opposite hypotheses about this metric points to the reality that there isn't really any neat curve to this, or likely most other sorts of hypotheses about complex human beliefs/behaviors projected on a two dimensional space.
When someone bemoans the fact that a significant chunk of the our generations intellectual and monetary capital is invested in trivial matters it isn't necessarily that they wish google and Microsoft ought to save the world instead of make phone operating systems and ads.
If they have any sense what they want is for we as a species to put our money, our labor, our hearts and our lives into matters of importance to the human race.
I agree. The part that bugged me about the article was it took a quote:
'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.'
Then immediately launched into saying
'Tech critics should be very careful what they wish for when they say that they wish that tech companies would tackle the "real" problems'.
I think this misses the point. I don't think critics are clamoring for tech companies to "solve" real problems. They want people, smart people, to focus on solving these problems.
A company doesn't solve anything people solve things not organisations.
He could have just as easily talked about all those PHD physicists working on High frequency trading and used that to launch into a tangent about how Wall Street is not suited to solving difficult problems.
The original quote is a serious issue publicly funded R&D outfits cannot offer the financial incentives large banks, tech outfits and other private organisations can offer.
Whether you think this is a good thing or not depends on how cynical you are I suppose. Personally I'm skeptical that private research interests will ever align with anything other than creating value for shareholders - which for google means selling more Ads...
I'm hopeful that we'll exhaust the low-hanging fruit of social networks and advertising sometime soon, and the best returns will need to come from solving some other problems.
I agree. While I found the article compelling, on reflection, the issue is that it doesn't at any point reflect on the fact of ever increasing rate of corporate capture of people's productivity (and wealth, though that's a separate if related issue).
The sentiment that it's responding to isn't addressed to the tech companies doing tech company things, it's addressed to the system that lionizes and entrenches the creation of wealth for wealth's sake.
To say that Google and Microsoft only make operating systems and sell adds is a bit misleading. Both company's are constributing significantly to the development of Artificial Intelligence and quantum computers. These technologies are fundamental and pivotal to the success of humanity.
Why does society today not attempt to maximize happiness among all citizens?
Resources are expended to make those with more resources marginally more happy, rather than someone with less resources comparatively much more happy.
Market economy says that this is the most "efficient" distribution of resources, but the assumption there is that the happiness of the rich is more important than the happiness of the poor.
Is this what we want our societal values to be?
And if so, how much more important?
And if not, is a domestic happy person more valuable than a foreign happy person?
The ethics and morals that come out of defining these answers are quite strikingly different.
> Market economy says that this is the most "efficient" distribution of resources.
Focusing on the rich sounds like you're referring to "trickle down economics" which is not a real thing in economics and is largely a fabrication of the media and partisan politics:
Saying that 'market economies' only favours or benefits the wealthy is a mischaracterization and/or a drastic over-simplification of supply-side economics.
Also I'm with Arthur Schopenhauer in questioning the premise of happiness as the basic goal in life. Although you're probably just referring to maximizing the general 'quality of life' rather than the emotional state, which I do agree with.
“The sooner we learn not to think or utter sentences such as “the United States should do . . . ”or “the American people want . . . ” or “China’s government ought to do . . . ,” the better we will understand government, business, and all other forms of organization. When addressing politics, we must accustom ourselves to think and speak about the actions and interests of specific, named leaders rather than thinking and talking about fuzzy ideas like the national interest, the common good, and the general welfare”
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. “The Dictator's Handbook.”
I honestly couldn't finish this. Who exactly is comparing today's startups to the manhattan project? Yes many projects are aiming for more ad clicks, but so what? In the 30's movies and radio were doing the same thing and what? Why are they being compared to the manhattan project, or to apollo, or to the search for the Higgs boson, or world peace, or whatever?.
Is there anything to this beyond the obvious strawmab cllckbait?
>If the problem of producing the atomic bomb occupied the attention and resources of the scientific establishment during World War II, it is sadly unsurprising that this very same establishment immediately moved on to the problem of adapting to the political, military, and intelligence consequences of such an disruptive innovation. We live today with the legacy of those consequences, and cannot imagine a world without them.
Nuclear weapons may have been a positive development. The doctrine of mutually-assured destruction has a lot to do with why World War III hasn't happened yet.
"Change the world," they say. As if changing the world implies that change will be better for everyone. Some would love to change the world and bring slavery back. How about we focus on changing ourselves to adapt to the world we have? I'm glad this essay touches upon this since nobody else seems to be talking about it.
It's hard to read this in a way that doesn't suggest that real, serious diseases aren't, at which point it becomes hardly distinct from a troll comment. Please post civilly and substantively on HN; we have to ban accounts that refuse.
Did the author edit his comment? This is what I see:
> Go and Chess AI are SERIOUS and REAL problem. It is something which goes back for thousands years and will be remembered for another thousands years.
> AIDS and other contemporary diseases will be soon forgotten after their extinction.
That is both civil and makes a substantive point. There is nothing trolling about it. Nor does it suggest that AIDS is either fake or unserious: it suggests that someday AIDS will not be a problem (I think that's very likely, in the sense that bubonic plague is no longer a problem).
I can only imagine two possibilities: the author's original post was trolling, uncivil or unsubstantive; or sctb had a knee-jerk reaction.
Yeah. I think sctb is overreacting. thro32 just has a cynical view on what the public values, and has a long view of history.
The namespace collision between Go and Golang infuriated me before I realized that--- Go has lasted thousands of years, and could very well outlast Golang. :D
Probably 11 times out of 12 when I see that one of the admins has marked something as off-topic, I disagree. Probably a quarter of those times I _strenuously_ disagree; the rest I can kinda see their point, but still think it was on-topic. It's rare that I think, 'thanks admin team, that was garbage and deserved to be detached!'
From what I've seen, the admin team does more harm than good. I think that their hearts are in the right place, and I completely appreciate that they don't want HN to devolve into chaos — but I think that instead they risk turning HN into an echo chamber in which only views considered mainstream in San Francisco & Boston are permitted (even when those views are considered extreme elsewhere), while those which are considered mainstream elsewhere are silenced.
I really enjoy Go (I'm an 8k) but I have to disagree with this. Curing diseases-- AIDS, smallpox, guinea worm, chicken pox-- are accomplishments have impact people lives and directly help humanity get more value out our citizens.
Fun fact: did you know that kids don't get chicken pox these days? They all get immunized, so they don't go through the rite of passage that everyone who's 20+ plus has gone through. And it'll soon be forgotten. Which brings me to: Just because people forget about a disease we've cured doesn't invalidate that good that was done by the people solving that problem. The general public doesn't know about _most_ good things that were done to bring about the world we live in. There's still value in helping anyway. Doctors & researchers don't ask to be worshipped.
Even if we strongman Go and Chess and say that they are great at sharpening & maintaining one's mental facilities, have been integral and beneficial to military thought, and are immensely enjoyable, I don't think that the value of solving the Go and Chess problems compares to curing diseases.
It's more about status than utility. As long as Go and Chess can maintain some sort of high status (as games or as historical points of interest) among the intelligent or ruling classes, they'll be remembered. Diseases seem to get status a different way. Humanity will probably remember the Plague for a long time still. Or if a biologically engineered supervirus was unleashed that killed a significant fraction of humanity over a short period of time, that too would be remembered. Quick mass death is the status currency of disease. If we ever get around to ending aging, probably one of the lowest-status problems on the to-do list, death by aging will be forgotten too.
> When will tech solve the real problems, critics ask?
> Assuming that this complaint is sincere, it nonetheless misses the point. What are "real" problems?
> [...] the author wants to deputize Google, Facebook, Apple, and other tech companies to solve social problems. To rectify flawed systems.
> Do we really want tech companies to turn their attention away from beating board game players and producing business products to start 'solving' social problems? The answer to this question should be an emphatic "no." The entire framing of the question is profoundly backward.
The closest you'll get to a tl;dr are the author's two paragraphs summing things up:
> This essay advances the following points:
> 1. The clamoring for tech companies to solve social problems ignores the empirical record and empirically observed characteristics of top-down engineering efforts and is rooted in a naive belief in the power of technical rationality. Technical rationality not only has a long and fairly checkered history when applied to social problems, but also takes on pathological characteristics when it is embodied in bureaucratic organizations attempting to engineer their way out of policy problems. There is no concrete idea of how tech companies are going to work on these problems, just a vague belief that they should rooted in worship of technical rationality.
> 2. Tech companies are neither instrinsically [sic] well-adapted for taking on quasi-governmental or governmental functions nor likely to be any more successful at escaping the problems of technical rationality than their government counterparts have been. While tech companies can make valuable policy contributions in certain functional areas and with certain mechanisms, the biggest benefit they provide is simply giving us more tools to solve our own problems. Why should we depend on tech companies to solve social problems when it is both better from a normative perspective and a practical one for them to simply give us the tools we need to empower ourselves?
> Do we really want tech companies to turn their attention away from beating board game players and producing business products to start 'solving' social problems? The answer to this question should be an emphatic "no."
The Central Arizona Project and the Navajo Generating Station are my favorite examples of this. The Navajo Generating Station is a giant coal-fired power plant, which provides energy used primarily to pump water up into Arizona. The station substantially degrades air quality in the surrounding areas, and the water that is "stolen" from the Colorado is a part of the West's growing water concerns. Right now, there are two sides to the issue: those who think it is worth the cost to bring water to Arizona, and those who believe the environmental issues are too big. We could solve that like a social problem, using politics and ethics to try to make the decision... or we could just get on making energy cheap and clean, and suddenly a huge part of the cost disappears. If there was no fly ash issue, no NOx issue, no CO2 issue, then we're back to just worrying about the water flow. But if we have cheap energy, desalination suddenly looks a lot more palatable, which would reduce a lot of water pressures in the US. Los Angeles could switch to 100% desal water and the Colorado river would have a surplus of water again.
Cheap (and preferably clean) energy, solving climate change, and cheap access to space (this one is more dubious) would all broadly boost the quality of life for humanity.