I am working on restarting tech from the ground up in rural places.
It always amazes me on how phones get so easily addictive but hardly have much utility values.Like recording the environmental changes or just simple information dissipation to their peers would do wonders to help them. Something i have been very interested in the use of local languages in developing areas in spreading of their rights and information
Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
371–380 of 394 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#372This is going to sound pessimistic at first but hear me out: Unless you're extremely gifted in many ways and super resourceful, you're not likely to make any noticeable impact on the species. However, you can still make a big difference for groups much smaller than the whole species (and I think that's actually preferable from a human point of view because it's more tangible). The world is full of problems that could…
I wouldn't be so pesimistic. We started an organisation that builds open source cloud data systems used among other things to track drinking water infrastructure and sustainable food production in Africa and Asia. We started from scratch and we now work with 20+ governments, 200+ NGOs and several UN organisations. We are probably not extremely gifted, but more like middle of the road startup geeks. Still we make an impact.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#373As a programmer you have knowledge which can guide you to make a donation to organization that does something important for many people. They just don't realize that, but you do. Donate to EFF that fights for net neutrality, or some other organization of your choice. And just do your normal work, to have money for that. Thats the way I prefer personally, yesterday I have made my first donation, ever. And kind of proud of it.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#374We, as species, are invasive parasites. If you want to do some good for the future of the human kind, environment and this planet, invest your time in research about reducing human population by at least 2/3 without compromising future scientific discoveries and advances.
Sexual education, especially about birth control. Make birth control affordable. Make adoption mainstream/ preferred to having your own kids. I agree that we have an overpopulation issue, we don't have the resources to support this many people currently. But calling people parasites is probably getting you downvoted.
Most likely that is the reson for down votes. I don't mean that in a bad way. We are what we are - invasive parasites. Homo sapiens wiped every(thing|one) out: deus, erectus, habilis etc. Overpopulation is the real cause of most of serious problems and future endangerment of our species. The king is naked.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#375Warning - strong opinions ahead: Provide services and tools without the strings attached. That is to say, provide email services that don't mine data for profit. Provide a social interaction space that doesn't attempt to manipulate moods, opinions, or sell its user's eyeballs. Provide an aggregation service with strong filtering tools in place of strong moderation. Provide a code repository with great tooling that do…
Is "Facebook without advertisements" really the bar for social good now?
My idea was that Google+ should have run ads from the beginning, but donated all profits to some large but approachable goal like eliminating polio. This could have undermined Facebook's drive to create an alternative advertising ecosystem, while giving G+ some hook to encourage people to switch.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#376Join or start a tech worker co-op! First, one of the best ways to do social good is to fight capitalism. Just by working at a worker co-op, you're doing this. Many tech co-ops are also built around resisting other oppressions like racism, patriarchy, etc. Second, many co-ops (e.g. http://sassafras.coop , the one I work for) work on lots of social good projects.
a co-op is a business venture, and so is a form of capitalist organization. But I think your point is that some forms of capitalism are more aligned with societal good than others, and that we can make different choices.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It's comforting to think that just going to work and doing your job is actually contributing to something, but I just don't see how that can be generally true..." I can't imagine how it would NOT be true. Say you buy something from the store. Presumably you're getting more value from it than it costs, if you weren't, you wouldn't buy it. Same with a company. If an employee provides more value than their salary, it m…
> I can't imagine how it would NOT be true. You can make money while damaging society. Some (possible) examples are employees working at: - a tobacco company - company that supplies oppressive regimes with tools (software and military hardware) to stay in power - company peddling some kind false medical treatment - tax lawyer helping people find loopholes - lobbyist working to increase regulatory capture in favor of…
>> the majority of people are adding value to society: plumbers, mechanics, pilots, engineers, most lawyers, some politicians
I agree with the rest of your comment, except for the above quote. The jobs you listed do not make up the majority. It's interesting that you only list trades and educated workers who earn above-average wages. A plumber can earn in one day of overcharged labour what it takes a worker in the service industry a week or longer. Pilots, engineers, lawyers, and politicians certainly do not belong as part of any definition of "majority".
The majority of jobs are in the service industry: fast food joints, real restaurants, retailers, etc. More than half of service industry jobs could vanish overnight, and consumers would get along just fine. These companies and jobs don't exist out of a necessity to serve society; they exist only because employees can be paid a tiny percentage of what they are worth (and in some cases being forced to live off food stamps), while the corporations rake in billions. These companies aim to make the easiest dollar possible, with no effort put into providing a service anyone actually needs. A job does not benefit society simply because a company manages to sustain itself by maximizing its own profits at the cost of taking advantage of employees.
If we could shut down every fast food joint (ex: McDonald's) and bottom-feeding retailers (ex: Walmart), and find positions for all those employees doing something more beneficial to society, that alone would make a huge difference. Those two companies are the tip of an enormous iceberg. These companies are not a "necessary evil", as if without them there would be no jobs. These corporations perpetuate the status quo to benefit themselves - society is an externality.
The capitalism we practice today will never improve upon this situation. The only incentive is for corporations to take the entire cake, offering services people think they want (they don't even really want them), rather than services people need. Things will never change without a major shift in the way we view economics. Perhaps if the next major plague takes out 50% of the population, we'll be forced to return to basics.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can't imagine how it would NOT be true. You can make money while damaging society. Some (possible) examples are employees working at: - a tobacco company - company that supplies oppressive regimes with tools (software and military hardware) to stay in power - company peddling some kind false medical treatment - tax lawyer helping people find loopholes - lobbyist working to increase regulatory capture in favor of…
I honestly think it is very difficult, if not impossible, to assess the individual value of rank-and-file work to society as a whole. It is easy to build something and say "this helped family X, or this powered Y homes", but there are so many externalities that are simply hidden. What if family X is part of Nation Z, who is about to start thermonuclear war W? It's just a guessing game at that point. It seems that mos…
Sure, it may be an educated guess, but we have to try.
It's better than the alternative, which is to assume that any job that pays (and thus is from a company that earns profit) has equal impact or externalities with all other companies.
A lack of clarity shouldn't be an excuse for not trying.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#379Kick start the singularity by writing the first recursively-optimizing generic AI? Probably with some new kind of neural network that is fast and versatile enough for all problem domains.
An neural network that can extract features of its own design and improve on it with some external metric, test improved copies of itself to solve other problems.
AIs that have human-level of intellect would advance science and technology, without any human-level limits.
Though such AI would have to be pro-human by design:
e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/frozenvoid/wiki/ai/super-intelligen...
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#380My opinion: take whatever idea you have for a great company, but make it a non-profit. Other than maybe e-mail, wikipedia is the best thing to come out of the internet. And its creator may not be a billionaire oligarch, but he has a GREAT life. If you can set aside a need to be filthy, needlessly, pointlessly rich, then maybe turn your next idea for a social network or a communication platform or whatever into a non-…
There is absolutely nothing inherently morally superior in making it a not-for-profit. Lots of not-for-profits have serious problems. I wish making life better were as simple as "well, just make your business X format and you are suddenly on the moral high ground!" You should not make your business idea a not-for-profit out of the idea that this is somehow inherently morally superior. That is a bad reason to do so. S…
Insomuch as I never proved using a not-for-profit is best for many of the use cases that we are currently using the business model for, you also didn't in any way demonstrate that we are doing it correctly. I think Wikipedia alone offers great evidence that we are underutilizing the nonprofit model. What evidence to you see for companies remaining moral in the face of shareholder pressure for profits?
These structures are not inherently moral as you said, but they do offer distinct incentive structures for their owners and employees. And there are plenty of ideas today that get called business ideas that could easily be better crafted outside of a corporation.