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Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#391
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"making the world a better place by selling $service" is usually hypocrisy rather than a matter of methodology. Same goes for making a service cheaper at the expense of the workers and the list goes on...

>"making the world a better place by selling $service" is usually hypocrisy rather than a matter of methodology. You can't be binary about this. In many situations, selling a service has made the world (or at least a city/country) a better place. Private cell phone service in many developing countries, for example. I know countries where, before they came in, people would have to wait years to get a landline (some in…

...and that's why I wrote "usually".

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#392
We think about how to do this from the MIT Media Lab as well. In that vein, we recently launched Cortico (www.cortico.ai), a non-profit with a strong software engineering focus working on issues of the public sphere.

Oftentimes, research code that has clear social good potential ends up never getting deployed. We're trying a new form of creating social good opportunities from within the academic setting and through a non-profit vehicle managed like a Bay Area tech startup. I think we'll start to see more entities like this emerge.

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#393

Humans are executed data. The blueprint of life has never been more like computer code. Ben Horrowitz believes where data touches biology is where there's ton of profit waiting. Pick a SENS initiative and see where you can attack it with software. Human Longevity Inc is using machine learning I think to figure out what genes actually cause what pathologies. It would be interesting to point at the genes for the herita…

72hrs later: "In ‘Enormous Success,’ Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/science/52-genes-human-in...

So I guess that suggestion is less exciting.

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