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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: 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!