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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: 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"?