Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For? • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by intended » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:52 PM UTC

hasbroslasher wrote: post #230

acdanger wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exceedingly depressing and it's one of the reasons I can't stomach the Bay Area. It doesn't take long to notice serious manifestations of societal rot. And yet some of the brightest minds of our generation spend their best years trying to get people to spend more of their cognitive surplus on mindlessly staring at their device screen. I'm not at all saying this is tech's fault. I think the problem is much more s…

I completely agree. It's not tech's fault at all - tech companies prey on our basic neural hardware as much as fast-food companies do, as much as predatory banks do, and all for the same reason: to generate capital. Luckily, I think I'm starting to see more people waking up to smell the societal rot that tech has helped foster, and people are becoming more motivated to fight it. I'm just waiting to see if tech folks…

I read a line from a book review by Krugman where he says “free trade is not as important as saving the planet.”

The context was the unlikely event of the WTO calling fouls if America and a few other regions levied carbon tariffs on imported goods.

Of course, The article was written in 2013, and it’s cyncisim would be considered wildly optimistic in today’s climate.

But perhaps his point is wrong.

Perhaps for humans, it is free trade that is more important than the planet.

Free trade is effectively our distributed human brain. Our ability to make choices and distributing those choices down information trees encompassed by entire industries.

Society is one big exercise in managing complexity - obfuscating or dispersing away decisions and information.

And maybe for human beings, that is just more important than saving the coral reefs or the elephants.

The insects may die, so we lose almonds and other flowering trees. That just means almonds and other precious species disappear.

But most human beings don’t even get almonds, Or meat, or fruit, as part of their diet anyways.

It would be nice to save other species, but if the whole planet was just covered in bio crop species 1-299, and a few aesthetics, humanity would be alive and ok.

Perhaps the awful truth is that for humanity as a species, free trade and economic growth is more important than saving the planet.

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

#262

Post by Kalium » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:53 PM UTC

coolaliasbro wrote: post #255

Kalium wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know! You're incredibly right! It's seems impossible that so many smart, educated, talented, passionate, hard-working people could fail to solve any problem they put their minds to! Yet, might it be worth considering that any individual human brain could potentially be less than infinitely malleable in all possible aspects? I have known blindingly brilliant artists who are utterly repulsed by basic arithmetic, and…

What do you believe to be the cause of that abject poverty?

A common response is "Capitalism". It's an easy, glib response. Unfortunately, it's not a good one, because abject poverty predates capitalism and exists without it.

Another response is "deprivation". Unfortunately, this response is effectively an appeal to the definition of poverty.

Since you asked what I believe, I don't believe there is a well-defined single cause of poverty.

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

#263

Post by ucaetano » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:54 PM UTC

coolaliasbro wrote: post #255

Kalium wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know! You're incredibly right! It's seems impossible that so many smart, educated, talented, passionate, hard-working people could fail to solve any problem they put their minds to! Yet, might it be worth considering that any individual human brain could potentially be less than infinitely malleable in all possible aspects? I have known blindingly brilliant artists who are utterly repulsed by basic arithmetic, and…

What do you believe to be the cause of that abject poverty?

Let me guess, well, maybe the fact that we're born poor?

Poverty is the absence of a lot of things. If you're born in a small isolated tribe in the middle of the Amazon, you're poor. Nobody took anything from you, there is almost no inequality, but you're still poor.

But I think I know where you're trying to get: "They're only poor because X took whatever from them". Probably where X is capitalism, Western countries, or whoever is the fashionable enemy.

Nope.

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

#264

Post by Kalium » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:59 PM UTC

coolaliasbro wrote: post #257

Kalium wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. It's incredibly easy to ignore things that aren't immediately in front of me. Like the human rights abuses ongoing in China, which aren't really part of my immediate daily life and I don't generally think about much. With that said, is it possible that this passage could be interpreted more charitably? Perhaps some might read it as a comment on how demanding perfection can cause more negative effects wh…

But how would our species conceive of the idea of emissions and the effects thereof without first creating emissions and observing their effects? I think the issue has more to do with the Cassandra effect and the tendencies of some to not consider or want to act on potentially catastrophic situations if they believe it imperils their own more immediate well-being or status.

It's true. It's impossible to take seriously every warning. Every potentially catastrophic situation has to be evaluated on the risks and benefits.

And, well, sometimes the people making those choices are wrong. Or shortsighted. Or egotistical. Or afraid for their own comfort, power, and privilege.

At the same time, I still don't take the warnings of the flat-earthers particularly seriously, so perhaps not all warnings of potentially catastrophic situations are equally credible. As opposed to how seriously I take the warnings of climate scientists.

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

#265

Post by alleyshack » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:59 PM UTC

clubm8 wrote: post #260

hasbroslasher wrote: post #210

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 mode…

I think there's a lot of good, moral work out there. I have a friend who's a security engineer at a bank. I was surprised when he took the job - he'd always been pretty to the left politically. But he takes pride in making sure the grandmas of the world don't get their accounts drained. He realizes he's not saving the world, but he's not swapping around debt vouchers until the economy crashes. It's counter intuitive,…

My understanding is that the anti-fraud vacation thing is related to being able to correlate a decrease in fraud with a specific person going on vacation. If you have money that mysteriously goes missing on the regular and 10 employees who touch it along the way, it's hard to determine which of those employees is responsible. If one of them goes away on vacation for a week and no money goes missing that entire week, you suddenly have a much better idea who might have been involved.

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

#266

Post by intended » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:00 PM UTC

ryderm wrote: post #231

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about. In part that is because survival and solvency are quite difficult in the details; and in part that is because doing “good” requires a much richer concept of what you are doing than is required by being profitable and placating shareholders. It’s easier to get it wrong, harder to say when you’re done and can move resources…

> Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about. If only society / the global economic system wasn't set up to incentive profit over all else....

It’s not.

Profit is achieved primarily by selling people goods.

people want cheap meat, coffee and toys.

We found ways to give people that.

There are other effects where corporations cheat the laws, corrupt government, and pillage the environment - true.

But the system has always been about you and me getting more choice and more options at better prices.

Your toothpastes offer different flavors, and come in a magic immortal material called plastic which costs nearly nothing to make and is better for our environment than using tin tubes.

Profit has many ills, as single numbers often do - they reduce complex decisions down to a simple number.

That’s the magic of it all. We don’t have to examine the calculus of our morality when buying a pixel or an iPhone.

We just have to Examine the price.

I think we have to come to terms with the fact that humanity as a distributed entity, is not a moral organism.

Profit is just a way to reduce complexity. We have a society that reflects this because our reality is such.

Which is why many of the popular solutions today are prices which reflect carbon costs.

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

#267

Post by slimshady94 » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:04 PM UTC

annabellish wrote: post #248

illumin8 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can work on blockchain projects that might have the potential to bring financial services to the unbanked and poor in 3rd world countries, but, oh wait a minute, the technology will probably just be used to create predatory financial products for payday lenders to expand their market... The best way to make sure you are working on ethical projects is to start and run your own company. Any technology can be used f…

I have yet to see even a concept, never mind a product, that actually uses a blockchain in a net-positive way, especially for "the unbanked". Universally high transaction fees and slow confirmation times on anything that sees leitimate amounts of use with no clear path towards mitigating this situation, if it's even possible to mitigate at all, combined with several choices of security system each with devastating co…

Ironically, it seems the 'banked' have become 'unbanked' after the recent speculative highs and subsequent crash of bitcoin prices.

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

#268

Post by djohnston » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:08 PM UTC

hasbroslasher wrote: post #210

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 mode…

applied tech to a physical engineering degree could wreak far more havoc on humanity than ad tech

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

#269

Post by slimshady94 » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

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…

Well expressed. I look forward to the next world-changing movement/technology/culture that'll make google/facebook look like the IBM/Microsoft of old. Hope it'll be soon, so that I'm still young enough to enjoy the next counter-culture.

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

#270

Post by CM30 » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #70

TeMPOraL wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you probably won't get a raise (rather, a huge pay cut) is one thing; another problem is, when you start looking for positive impact in the world, the list of companies to work for starts to rapidly diminish. I tried that, and for now I had to settle for companies that are not actively trying to make the world a worse place.

In my experience, there's loads of businesses that aren't doing ethically questionable stuff. No doubt it depends on the range of things you could take pride in doing, which varies from person to person!

Honestly, I'd say it could well be a majority of businesses that aren't doing unethical things. Yes, it's easy to be cynical about the world and think how the likes of Google/Facebook/whoever manipulate people or abuse data collection or about the actions of Monsanto/casino companies/oil companies/diamond miners etc, but is that really how most companies act? Not really, most are just selling a product or service. At worst, most companies seem to be morally 'neutral', neither inclined towards underhanded/world ruining tactics nor charitable ones.

So yeah, you could find a job doing something that isn't morally questionable pretty easily, even in most fields.