from the Do-you-know-where-you-are-going-to? dept.
A technology genius always has two basic options. For example, he 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. In most cases, the technology genius will be pushed to focus on the product that has the potential to create millions of dollars in profits. Profit is the North Star of conventional economics. Lacking a collective destination, the only highway sign we follow is the North Star of profit. Nobody is putting up any highway signs that will lead the world toward a collectively desired destination.
It raises the question, does the world have a destination? If not, should it?
As I've explained, the UN's sustainable development goals (SDGs) are an attempt to define an immediate destination over a very short period. They represent a good beginning. The SDGs give us a destination over a 15-year stretch— just a moment in time out of the human journey of hundreds or thousands of years. Many people and institutions have made commitments to travel in the direction that the SDGs reveal—but, unfortunately, most for-profit companies are not redirecting themselves in meaningful ways to reach those goals because the market definition of success does not include them.
Toward what SDGs should tech people direct their work?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:11AM (3 children)
I want a Stargate.
And Samantha Carter.
;-p
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:21AM
SDGs, not SGCs.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @04:43AM (1 child)
T-E-A-L-apostrophe-C. Jack O'Neill made damn sure his superiors spelled the name of his new best friend correctly.
The stargates were invented by an Alteran scientist who was forced out of the Ori home galaxy for misusing his creativity in the pursuit of science. The Ori preferred to distribute apps to their priests and watch them play a game of Pokémon Go with the villagers: convert every villager to the Ori religion and keep them all in medieval stasis forever.
The "tech" companies ("tech" here really means "social media") are like the Ori: pure flaming evil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @02:11PM
Ok, so whatever
I still want the late 90s version of samantha carter. all of these details do nothing to detract from this
and so yeah tech equals social media. i cant think of facebook as a tech company any more than someone saying singer sewing machines became a tech company because of IoT integration. they already were a tech company. i guess they are even better because they let people make things, as opposed to facebook which just profits on what people made.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:13AM (5 children)
Regular video codec, storage capacity, monitor resolution, and bandwidth improvements. It's all about the porn after all.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Touché) by takyon on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:26AM (4 children)
AOMedia Video 1 Codec [soylentnews.org]
Western Digital to Use Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording to Produce 40 TB HDDs by 2025 [soylentnews.org]
Dell Announces First "Mass-Market" 8K Display [soylentnews.org]
Cable Labs Goes Full Duplex for DOCSIS 3.1 - But Can ISPs and Modems Keep Up? [soylentnews.org]
Pornhub Adopts Machine Learning to Tag Videos as Malvertising Looms [soylentnews.org]
Looking good so far. Now all that's left is to kill all the poor, ban universal basic income, and marginalize Muhammad Yunnus [wikipedia.org] and microcredit.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:47AM
Mondragon will be a bit harder. But... nothing separatist (Basque) movement, well encouraged to throw sand in the cogs as the first step (smear and sustained propaganda afterwards), can't deal with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:50AM
Yeah, can't let humans figure out that they can group together in powerful groups that aren't tied to a geographic border. Humanity's strength will be in diverse smaller groups tied together through a universal belief in human rights. Gotta make that bill of rights clear and more broad than specific, let groups figure out the details for themselves.
More freedom, more peace. Hammer out the rest.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 17 2017, @01:46PM (1 child)
One of these is not like the other. Killing all poor, aside from being the vile murder of many billions of people, would eliminate the need to do anything about UBI or microcredit, because you just killed the people who would have used those programs. You don't have to ban or marginalize anything. The first act of democide renders the rest irrelevant.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 17 2017, @04:50PM
Maybe reverse the order of the list.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday October 17 2017, @04:06AM (2 children)
So why should we deprioritize something that checks off seven (and depending on the app, possibly more) different UN sustainable development goals?
Let us also keep in mind that medical innovation is hellishly complex with enormous resources needed. You need a hell of a lot of domain knowledge just to code and then you need to spend gobs of money to test the medical software and make sure it's safe enough for use on humans. In the US, for example, those gobs of money tend to be in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars range and can involve several rounds of animal and human testing. Building an amusing app takes a computer and a few weeks to months, depending on the complexity of the app. In general, there's lower need for skill and capital.
It's silly to even compare the two.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 17 2017, @11:44AM (1 child)
Yo [wikipedia.org] khallow! This app was valued "at between $5 and $10 million in July 2014 and received a further $1.5 million in funding."
Meanwhile, is not unusual for researchers to spend 40% [johndcook.com] of their time applying for grants, wasting 550 men*years [theconversation.com] in a grant round.
I won't believe you if you'll tell me Yo brings a greater benefit too humanity than 5-7 reasonable-sized research grants of the same value.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 17 2017, @01:19PM
But that's not what we're considering. Instead, we're considering net benefit. Yo cost 8 man-hours of work to put together (that's 0.004 of a man-year using 2000 man-hours per man-year) - the additional funding is for support infrastructure for a working product (and that in turn will create additional jobs and additional entertainment of those who use the app). 5 reasonable-sized research grants waste on average 2750 man-years of skilled researcher labor (in other words, well over one man-year) before anything happens. It's very easy for 5 reasonable-sized research grants to fail to result in research worth their initial cost (particularly, if they're all p-hacking for results in order to justify future rounds of funding). In which case, you are behind Yo in net benefit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheLink on Tuesday October 17 2017, @04:40AM (7 children)
Our world's long term destination is to be burnt by our star as it ages.
The human species destination on the other hand may be different if we become a space faring species. The odds are low that we could achieve that in a meaningful way (e.g. travel to other star systems or at least far enough to survive our star's aging process). But if we don't try we won't.
That said we do not actually need that many technological geniuses to develop the necessary technologies to achieve such goals.
The real issue is somehow we are willing to allocate lots of resources towards "trips to Mars" but none towards developing technologies for space stations with better radiation shielding and artificial gravity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module [wikipedia.org]
Don't blame the people who are developing phone apps for money. Blame those who are using wasteful missions to Mars for money or other goals ( https://futurism.com/us-government-issues-nasa-demand-get-humans-to-mars-by-2033/ [futurism.com] ).
They're working in that field and they're wasting resources or creating wasteful distractions.
From a scientific and technological perspective our next step should NOT be sending humans to Mars but to build stuff in orbit near Earth so that we can test humans and our other favorite animals at various gravity levels. Once we have real scientific data we can better decide how much of our finite resources should be spent on the Moon or Mars.
For example if the data turns out that humans are OK with Mars gravity but not Moon gravity then:
1) Mars becomes a possible place to stay for humans (it's still a big gravity well with hardly any atmosphere though, so it's actually worse than a space station or even an asteroid)
2) Standard artificial gravity levels for some space stations could be reduced to reduce the costs.
But if it turns out humans still don't do well at Mars gravity and say need more than half G then spending so much on Mars would be a big waste of our resources and time.
As for SDGs for our planet. We should be figuring out ways of improving cities so their environment impact is lower and we can accommodate more humans in better conditions (zoning, rent restrictions etc). Because the fact is if we are going to still have billions of humans on this planet it's best to have most of us and our crap concentrated in cities where it can be better controlled and cleaned up. Ignore the delusional hippies who think humans should live in forests with nature - there are only 4 billion hectares of forest in the world. If there are 8 billion of us that's half a hectare (about 1 football field) of forest for each of us - then what undisturbed forest would be left for those tigers, orangutans, tapirs etc so beloved by those treehuggers? Many of those animals really don't like being disturbed by humans.
Thus if we really cared about "Nature" most humans should be living in dense cities and not disturbing nature[1]. And we need geniuses to think of ways to improve them - e.g. require most buildings and houses to collect rain-water (reduce urban run-off and flooding, use the rainwater to help keep cities cool etc). The water collection stuff needs to not breed mosquitoes etc...
We also need to phase out commercial fishing ASAP and move to farming in oceans and figuring out better ways of doing it[2] . The fishing industry is terribly broken - it's the equivalent of getting pork by roaming about destroying entire forests just for the pigs (and discarding the other dead animals caught in the pig-traps, including cows!) then you have another bunch getting beef by destroying forests for the cows (and discarding other animals in their cow traps, including pigs!). Yeah farms are evil but they are the lesser evil.
But are people willing to endure the pain and suffering involved for the transition?
Personally I don't care that much, from time to time I'll do my duty to to tell you bunch but that's it. I don't have much skin in the game. I don't plan on having any children, so my environmental footprint ends when I end, I could drive an SUV for the rest of my life and still cause less damage than someone who has kids who have kids who have kids etc even if they all drive electric cars.
If someone rich/well-funded thinks my bullshit is worth paying me for then maybe I'll show more interest. But till then I'm not going to quit my day job. I'll follow the North Star of profit, because who else is going to feed me? There's never going to be decent Basic Income in my country within my lifetime.
[1] We'd have cities, farms and "less disturbed nature".
[2] http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/06/10/188431577/how-to-clean-up-fish-farms-and-raise-more-seafood-at-the-same-time [npr.org]
http://e360.yale.edu/features/new_breed_of_ocean_farmer_aims_to_revive_global_seas [yale.edu]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 17 2017, @11:25AM (3 children)
To me it seems all of that is an outgrowth of the 19th century, slash-and-burn economic mentality. Changing that to a zero-waste, closed loop mentality would cascade across all spheres of human endeavor. Every output becomes an input to another process until the loop is closed, eg., food waste is composted to soil and returned to agriculture to grow more food.
Everybody wins. Lots of new industries and jobs will be created that way.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Wednesday October 18 2017, @07:07AM (2 children)
It's the same mentality of most animals. Most never have to worry about such stuff. They eat, poop and the poop is someone else's problem. Same for discarded fruit peels etc. Only a few animals have stuff like birth/reproductive control that doesn't involve infanticide.
It took quite a while before fungi etc could eat wood (breakdown lignin). Some think that's why those coal deposits formed- wood didn't decay as fast back then: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mushroom-evolution-breaks-down-lignin-slows-coal-formation/ [scientificamerican.com]
http://feedthedatamonster.com/home/2014/7/11/how-fungi-saved-the-world [feedthedatamonster.com]
But others disagree: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442.abstract [pnas.org]
I wonder what would happen if fungi, bacteria, termite/zooplankton gut microbes etc developed the ability to breakdown and eat plastics fairly efficiently (developed naturally[1] or someone gave them a helping hand ;) ). Probably wouldn't be a major disaster, after all even untreated wood doesn't rot that easily or rapidly when it's kept dry.
The real difference is there are 7+ billion of us and billions more of our livestock. So if we don't speed up the waste processing maybe in the future instead of coal deposits/seams there'd be plastic deposits and similar... ;)
Reducing waste is important but it may also help if we developed better methods to mine landfills: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_mining [wikipedia.org]
Imagine billions of phones failing within a decade every decade how do we get back some of the materials like gold?
[1] There are already some with that ability:
http://www.nature.com/news/2001/010627/full/news010628-11.html [nature.com]
https://phys.org/news/2016-03-newly-bacteria-plastic-bottles.html [phys.org]
http://english.cas.cn/newsroom/research_news/201703/t20170330_175543.shtml [english.cas.cn]
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/wax-worms-eat-plastic-polyethylene-trash-pollution-cleanup/ [nationalgeographic.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 18 2017, @12:52PM (1 child)
That's interesting about coal. Thanks for mentioning it. I hadn't heard that before.
There was another Soylentil a while back (was it you?) who predicted that landfill mining will become a thing. I think that's likely. And if we figure out good, profitable ways to recycle all the waste plastic out there, then even the Pacific trash gyre will be cleaned up.
That in turn got me to thinking about how our descendants might wind up mining the atmosphere for all that carbon we dumped into it and spinning it into graphene and carbon nanotubes. So much of our material culture can be built from those feedstocks.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Wednesday October 18 2017, @06:48PM
You're welcome but do see the other link which claims that's not true. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between... :)
Landfill mining is already happening. It may get more widespread.
The gyre might stay at a certain size if plankton and similar start being able to digest plastic. Plastic has only been around for a few decades. Given there already exist quite different types of microbes that digest plastic I wouldn't be so confident of claims that plastic will last a long time in the oceans. Doesn't mean we should keep letting our trash enter the oceans - especially since many other creatures don't cope well with it. Doubt we have the tech to modify sea turtles to be able to eat and digest plastic bags yet, and not even sure if we should...
There probably wouldn't be that much point recycling plastic in the middle of oceans (which is what the gyre is mostly - water with higher concentration of tiny plastic particles[1]). There would be far richer sources elsewhere for us to use. Similar for carbon. It may make sense to use "tech" based CO2 conversion for incinerator or power station exhausts where the CO2 concentrations are much higher. But from the general atmosphere it's probably better to use living plants or algae which grow themselves and convert CO2 from the atmosphere to more convenient chemicals. It'll be some time before our tech gets much more efficient and we'd probably still want plants like trees around anyway.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/05/great-pacific-garbage-patch-is-a-myth-warn-experts-as-survey-sho/ [telegraph.co.uk]
https://searchengineland.com/great-pacific-garbage-patch-on-google-earth-21333 [searchengineland.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 17 2017, @01:40PM
(Score: 2) by slap on Tuesday October 17 2017, @04:16PM (1 child)
The amount of money spent on sports teams worldwide makes the amount of money spent on space exploration and missions look like a drop in the bucket.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @05:41PM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday October 17 2017, @04:52AM (4 children)
Yeah, people are working on lots of useless stuff. Like for example, 3D games. Completely useless, right? Well, it spurred the development of powerful 3D graphics cards. Ah, but that's yet another useless technology, right? Well, except that scientists found that you can put those very graphics cards also into useful stuff, like fighting cancer. Oops, seems those 3D games in the end were useful, after all!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday October 17 2017, @05:03AM (1 child)
Don't forget searching for aliens [berkeley.edu].
Perhaps one day when we actually find them, they can also provide us with their advanced technology for diagnosing and treating cancer [nature.com] as well.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @05:06AM
The aliens will implant us with their larval young. Immunity from cancer will be a side effect. You're welcome, Jaffa.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @05:04AM
SoylentNews ...is useless stuff!
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday October 17 2017, @12:54PM
Well there was this commercial [youtube.com] from 3dfx years ago.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday October 17 2017, @05:04AM
"Please, heed my call and stop working on silly technology products."
-- Sent from my iPhone
(Score: 4, Interesting) by anubi on Tuesday October 17 2017, @05:39AM (1 child)
I feel we waste a lot of our most creative people, mostly because they aren't "people people".
We call them things like "introverts", and mentally handicapped "asperger's".
In the natural world, we also have elements that aren't reactive with other elements either.
We call them the "noble" gases and precious metals... like gold and platinum. Quite non-reactive. But useful. And we found uses for them.
However, we have quite a few creative artist types that, well, don't react a lot. So far, we have not seemed to find a use for them.
From what I see, most of our technical and scientific talent simply ages out and ends up in the graveyard, never used. Worms and ants seem to be the main beneficiary of highly trained grey matter.
Our primary need seems to be entertainment, not stuff like advancement of the arts ( I consider science, technology, engineering, and math an art ).
A jobless engineer is a terrible waste.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 17 2017, @11:33AM
It's also the cultural status of people like that. With the rise of Google and Amazon and Apple geeks have acquired a little mystique, but in face-to-face interactions they're still terribly mistreated. Their skills are discounted and they're constantly snubbed in myriad ways. Plumbers and sanitation workers are treated better. (In fact, the only place I've heard where it is different is at Google, where the social hierarchy is flipped and geeks rule the roost.)
That's why communities like Soylent are important. They give the misshapen, odd weirdos we are a way to commune with others who are like us in their oddity.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday October 17 2017, @06:38AM
Problem with this thinking is that it lays blame on people who actually have historically been blamed - the people doing tech. There are multiple people trying to workout a way to help their fellow human beings get out of any kind of trouble. But people want to spend 1$ everyday on custom skins for their imaginary guns in CS or a dollar to buy "life" on candy crush; but they don't want to pay into experimental solutions proposed by techies because they don't trust techies.
A large part of the problem lies with people themselves. Most people are quick to take credit of their luck, oversell or hide their real talent of manipulation. I am of the firm belief that any solution requires a complete tear-down of the current system. But since I can't achieve that, I am content to provide some empowerment to honest people. How is this my problem, if people would rather fund Snapchat?
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday October 17 2017, @12:46PM (2 children)
There's nothing wrong with being idealistic, but there must be some contact with reality. Individuals need motivation. Money is a great motivator. That's why capitalism works.
Telling someone "don't work on things that make you rich - work to end world hunger" is just stupid. Overall, capitalism has done more to end world hunger (and solve all of the other SDGs) than the UN has accomplished in all of its history.
"A rising tide floats all boats". Living standards today are - worldwide - massively higher. Poverty has been massively reduced. And this is almost entirely due to capitalism, and the individual motivation that it provides: you get to keep the fruit of your labors. Sure, the results are uneven, but the countries lagging farthest behind are - on average - the ones that have done the most to squash capitalism, be it through corruption, or through tyranny.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:45PM (1 child)
"Capitalism" is but an euphemism for "selfishness".
It is a blind force which neither can be assigned any credit, nor blame.
It exists because it is intrinsic to us as sentient beings under command of our instincts and inner urges.
It produces world hunger and it could also decrease world hunger, it all just depends on "But what is in it for ... (me, you, him, her, ...) ?"
Whoever sits on the top of the global food chain could probably influence where other people's selfishness drives them to.
The point is, when you are firmly on top, you lose some of your fears, and your selfishness blunts a fair bit.
Some of those people may freely feel a little bit of compassion for the not so well off, without getting punished for that compassion.
So they give some. They motivate other selfish people to do things to help hungry and poor by giving to those selfish people something in exchange.
But you can't give credit for that to Capitalism (selfishness).
The way it helps is the longer road around.
It creates too few able helpers, even though their ability to help is somewhat enhanced from ordinary.
The rest down bellow them are still afraid that their luck may run out eventually, so they stick to selfishness.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 17 2017, @10:51PM
The obvious rebuttal is no, it's not. Let's head over to the dictionary for the actual definition [oxforddictionaries.com] of capitalism.
"Selfishness" is a emotion or state of mind. Capitalism is a economic and political system - very different things right there. As a system - no matter how blind, capitalism thus has functionality which we can evaluate to see how well or poorly it is doing. Here, a key thing is being ignored. Selfishness exists in all economic and political systems, not just in capitalism. Capitalism just handles it better.
A great example of this is in the pathologies of the Communism ideology. Selfishness and other deviations from the Communist moral ideals are dealt with poorly as "counterrevolutionary" behavior and thought via ostracization, imprisonment, and worse. This devolves into deeply hypocritical behavior when the people making the decisions on who is a counterrevolutionary are the selfish ones.
Capitalism turns this vice of selfishness into a neutral emotion about which the system doesn't have to care. It's a superior approach both from a moral and economic efficiency point of view.
But there's no point to criticizing capitalism, if you don't understand it and don't have any suggestions for improving it. For example, this complaint of "selfishness" is a classic display of ignorance. You then double down with a complaint about hierarchical class structure - which is present in all real world economic and political systems ("sits on the top of the global food chain").
What is the shorter road?
The key missing part here is that the rest down below feed themselves. That's what makes capitalism the best approach for today. It's feeding a lot more people than a system that has the necessary levels of feelgood, but higher population growth and an inability to properly feed its citizens due to a less adequate food distribution system.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:41PM
Well, if you, like me, had to read Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy written in a country churchyard" [wikipedia.org] in school, something that maybe anubi [soylentnews.org] was also thinking about,
then it should be # 4 quality education, I think.
http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/education/ [un.org]
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:57PM
A few of these goals are attainable. Clean water and sanitation should be attainable, for instance. Some of them are not because they have already long been politicized. The moment you politicize an issue you lose all hope in solving it. A couple of them are mathematically impossible goals (depending on how you define the goal).
(Score: 2) by pgc on Tuesday October 17 2017, @05:37PM
Which Nobel prize winner? And which prize did he win?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @07:04PM (2 children)
It doesn't raise that question at all, but whatever... I guess after you've won a Nobel prize, you get to ask dumb questions with idiots hanging on your every utterance because surely expertise in one field, confers expertise in all fields.
To answer that 'raised question': It has a destination, it's just that it doesn't care about you in specific or us in general. And because of that, it's not important to figure out what this destination is. It'll go its merry way and keep going long after we've made ourselves obsolete or extinct (roughly for another 2.5 to 3 billion years at which point it will be engulfed by Sol). In fact, as I look around, more and more, I think that the sooner this happens, the better!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @08:39PM (1 child)
Does a Nobel prize even mean anything?
Like having a Noble for Economics?
Like Obama getting a peace prize?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @08:58PM
Or a "No-balls" for Engineering!
(Score: 1) by cpghost on Tuesday October 17 2017, @09:51PM (4 children)
Let's face it: in a world where bureaucrats, administrators, entertainers, sports icons, businessmen, etc. are being paid a lot more than genius researchers; where geniuses aren't even hired due to their lack of self-promoting talent; where geniuses won't find adequate funding to try their ideas while all this fiat money is a plenty out there... why deplore the state of humanity? Let'em regular folks and kids all waste precious time staring at little rectangular gadgets. At the end, all of us will disintegrate and our atoms may recombine anyway. Like all previous Civilisations, our's will fall to pieces too. It's an inevitable cyclic process.
Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 17 2017, @11:07PM (3 children)
Classic cognitive dissonance. Genius researchers aren't trying for that level of pay, don't even want that level of pay, but should be paid that much for reasons.
And of course, we have the emo declaration that humanity doesn't deserve any better. Perhaps, you ought to consider what's being delivered now? The best period of humanity ever is at hand. By 2060, more than half the world's population will be developed world with the rest of the world, aside possibly from a few messed up pieces (like North Korea or ISIS today), on track to be developed world status by the end of the century (2100). Perhaps, we don't deserve this golden age, but we're on track to get it.
(Score: 1) by cpghost on Tuesday October 17 2017, @11:29PM (2 children)
Indeed. However, let's not forget that we are literally sitting on top of giants here, while the well of really revolutionary and disrupting contributions is literally drying out. Most of current's inventions are basically 19th and especially 20th century inventions, a time where we made (slighlty, granted) better use of genius potential. Now, that potential is literally being wasted for irrelevant stuff, or not even identified. If we keep traveling along this trajectory for some time, I even doubt that we'll be able to catch up with old tech some day. Looking very closely at research in most fields: it's all incremental baby steps... a kind of routine in what I'll call "research mills" by at best mildly genius people.. good solid researchers but far from genius. It's been a long time since real genius-level creativity had a chance to show up there modulo extreme rare exceptions. In the current academic climate, the likes of Einstein, Planck, etc. wouldn't have stood a chance even to get a foot in the door. Sorry.
Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 18 2017, @01:09PM (1 child)
I don't agree with khallow's sanguine take on the course of the world; it strikes me as triumphalism from a guy who's got his. But neither am I quite sure you've got it nailed, either.
It's easy to look at the tech giants of today and forget their humble origins. Few of them grew out of official channels for innovation. Few of them ran the gauntlet of academic approval or government programs or that sort of thing. They didn't even start with a big fat check from a schmuck on Wall Street. They started with people who stepped outside all that and did what they thought would be cool and useful.
You can see that same spark, the same energy today but you have to know where to look. I see it in the maker/DIY movement. Not the scores of "me too" 3D printer companies but in the small tables that individuals and tiny group of friends rent at maker faires. The guys who are doing really cool, innovative, and wacky things. Even more exciting is the people who've already assimilated the earlier waves of the maker movement like 3D printing and arduinos and the like and are finding new synergies between them.
I'm convinced that if those currents can survive the messy collapse of the current paradigm, then we won't recognize the amazing world we're gonna find ourselves in in 5 years.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 18 2017, @03:03PM
All I can say is that predicting economic doom has been as productive as predicting the end of the world. Someone is bound to get it right eventually, but you probably shouldn't hold your breath. And why do you think it's about "got mine" when many billions of people have "got theirs"?