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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 17 2017, @02:55AM   Printer-friendly
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?


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 17 2017, @11:44AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 17 2017, @11:44AM (#583407) Journal

    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
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 17 2017, @01:19PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 17 2017, @01:19PM (#583446) Journal

    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.

    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.