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Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

nytimes.com

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Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#201

Post by gersh »

saosebastiao wrote: post #151

Lately I've been experiencing some depression (under treatment), so maybe this is just the state of my mind right now, but is anyone else growing more and more cynical about the potential for changing the world, and adjusting their moral philosophy to compensate? I could barely impact how my former employer ran the company, and even though I had the company's best interests at heart the whole time, I faced resistance…

I've felt similarly. I'd be interested in discussing solutions with anyone, who is interested. Please email me (email in profile) if you want to discuss this stuff.

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#202

Post by gersh »

mempko wrote: post #160
saosebastiao wrote: post #151

Lately I've been experiencing some depression (under treatment), so maybe this is just the state of my mind right now, but is anyone else growing more and more cynical about the potential for changing the world, and adjusting their moral philosophy to compensate? I could barely impact how my former employer ran the company, and even though I had the company's best interests at heart the whole time, I faced resistance…

Where the world needs changing is it's suicidal path towards extreme climate change.

I think we need to convince people to stop studying petroleum engineering and prepare for a different economy instead. If you'd like to work with me on this, please email me.

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#203

Post by amanaplanacanal »

Unfortunately, the core business of Facebook, Twitter, and Google (driving engagement) is probably contributing to tearing the US apart politically. It's not just individual projects, it's at the very core of what they are. I don't see a happy ending here. I assume that the same thing is happening in other countries.

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#204

Post by jackpirate »

roenxi wrote: post #39
swiley wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that pre 20th century companies just existed as a legal and organizational convenience in order to help collect a number of people with similar goals rather than to solely make a profit.

If anyone knows what I'm trying to say and can put it in clearer words that'd be lovely, I think I'm missing an important linking idea here. Anyway... Imagine there are two paths from A to B (the left and right path). 100 people walk from A to B. Half take the left and half the right, and none of them have any information not in this paragraph. There are wolves on the left path. Everyone who travels it gets eaten. No…

This is something like "survivorship bias", but that term is usually applied to extreme outliers like CEOs rather that average case people like you're doing.

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#205

Post by anigbrowl »

bilbo0s wrote: post #83
netcan wrote: post #36

At least to some extent, this is a "Hegelian pendulum." In the beginning there where black suited corporate drones. They coded black and white "calculation solutions" for the enterprising enterprise. Then came colour. Gates wanted cheap computers on every desk. Jobs wanted colour computers for every artist. Mission. Meaning. This worked better, especially if you needed employees to invent things. Can't invent the iPh…

> Google (and "SV") have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open and selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google instead of a bank... Let's inject a little honesty into this discussion. People didn't flock to google et al in droves because of google's selfless ideology. That was coincidental. People flocked to google because they wanted to get rich. Especially in the early days when…

People flocked to google because they wanted to get rich.

I'm pretty skeptical of objective-sounding claims about people's motivations.

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#206

Post by carapace »

Computers are war machines.

They have other uses but their primary use has always been war. (Specifically code-cracking and modeling nuclear physics for weapon design.)

As a thought experiment, try to imagine an alternate reality where WWII never happened and Alan Turing is just an obscure British queer mathematician. Would he have spawned the systems we have today? Or perhaps Konrad Zuse?

War drives the information revolution. We're in the middle of WWIII now.

If you don't want to contribute to the war machine you have to leave computer industry and take up gardening, specifically applied ecology such as "Permaculture".

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#207

Post by s73v3r_ »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #184
s73v3r_ wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is begging any question. The answer is that it is for YOU to decide. I'm sorry if that's not a simple, yes/no answer for you, but the world isn't like that.

I'm really at a loss to understand your reply. My original question was "How would you like people to square [being accountable for the actions of their employer] with providing for their families?" You've yet to say anything except implying that there is a single, black-and-white moral compass that everyone is capable of following in its entirety. There are no employers that have no moral shortcomings. Telling peopl…

"My original question was "How would you like people to square [being accountable for the actions of their employer] with providing for their families?""

And the answer to that is, "It is up to those people to decide that. No one else can do it for them."

"You've yet to say anything except implying that there is a single, black-and-white moral compass that everyone is capable of following in its entirety. "

Wrong. Nobody but you has done that. You are the one demanding answers for how people square these things."

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#208

Post by prewett »

xor1 wrote: post #75
taneq wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem here to be asserting that "not feeling/being inferior to the people around you" is some kind of intrinsic human right?

Technically there are no intrinsic human rights and it's up to us as a society to define them.

I don't think you really want to go down that road... Historically, most societies have "chosen" a set of expansive "rights" for the top and limited rights for the bottom. I say "chosen" because most societies had it chosen for them by whoever conquered them, or at best, the lower classes had it chosen for them by those with power.

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#210

Post by hasbroslasher »

It's true that ultimately there aren't a whole lot of morally "good" things you can do with your compsci degree at the moment. You can work in adtech or building corporate software, ecommerce, etc. to sell plastic trinkets to people and raise your company's stock price. Or you can do ML, which will probably hurt poor people in the near to mid term and probably contribute somewhat to the more Orwellian aspects of modern life. Or you can do some third thing: some kind of applied tech a more physical engineering discipline (energy, spaceships, robots, etc.) that might or might not do anything for the common man.

I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the US education system who go to work for Wall Street or in adtech/ecommerce roles. We have the brains and energy and passion to solve alternative energy, vertical farming, asteroid mining, carbon sequestration, and social democracy overnight but our system deliberately misallocates resources to projects that generate capital for the already wealthy instead of promoting one iota of social good. Here's to hoping this is a start of that bigger, necessary change.

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