Earlier quoted context omitted.
Begging the question would be something like you disagreeing that any choice exists at all.
You know, for some reason I had it in my head that "begging" meant avoiding. Off to reëducate myself!
Common mistake!
Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
301–310 of 354 posts
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#302It'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…
We have the brains and energy and passion to solve alternative energy, vertical farming, asteroid mining, carbon sequestration, and social democracy overnight 1) Alternative Energy has a lot of minds working on it already. Success is dependent on the establishment of large scale infrastructure and changing societal expectations. One "Ah-Ha!" moment isn't going to cut it. 2) Vertical Farming is a world-saving problem…
Social Democracy Overnight: Why is this desirable, outside of theory? The whole of history indicates to us that collectivism works either on small scales, or as a disguised totalitarianism.
Here we observe the not-so-subtle attempt to shift the debate from "social democracy" to "collectivism", as if the two terms are synonyms.
We also see a denial that mixed economies with strong social safety nets can ever work on, say, the scale of a nation. Despite plenty of evidence available, in the real world, that they can.
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm a petroleum engineer and I think this is a really interesting idea. What effect do you think this might have on the O&G industry? I'm guessing it would force companies to raise wages to attract employees, hurting their bottom-line. This might, in a roundabout way, increase the cost of gasoline and make renewables more competitive.
A carbon tax might be a simpler approach, though I don't know what you could do on a personal level to influence that.
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#304Lately 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 was in a similar state of mind and things turned around after pursuing more meaningful work in biotech. There's a whole subfield of Psychology that researches how people find meaningful work and it helped me greatly. A few places to start:
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#305I once produced an open source product while working for Berkeley Lab, which is a DoE lab operated by UC. It does non-classified work. One day we got a visit from a couple employees of Lawrence Livermore Labs (classified research) and my manager glanced at their badges- he said something about "Q" and smiled while asking what they worked on. They said "multiphysics combustion codes" and my manager looked at me and sa…
After chatting for a while I realized they were using my code to manage nuclear weapons simulations. That's a consequence of licenses like MIT and BSD and Apache: you don't control who uses your software.
While true, there's a big difference between the guy that makes a generic door stop that's used to prop open the door at a nuclear test lab, and the guy making precision parts specific to a nuclear detonator.
Maybe you can't prevent your work being used for what you consider to be immoral, but you can avoid working on a project that's directly contributing to that use.
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about you. But if I can get riches at Google, I can get riches at Facebook, Apple or Microsoft too. The reason I would have chosen Google, and the reason I entrusted Google with all my personal information in the first place, was knowing they had that slogan. I just couldn't imagine they'd ever erase it... Now who is left? I guess I'm waiting for the Internet Archive to turn evil...
The Internet Archive is a non-profit which in and of itself provides it with freedom to pursue unselfish ends. As long as decent people remain at the helm, the only acceptable options for it and similar non-profits at critical times would be to downsize or close, but never to repurpose the resources they've been entrusted with toward selfish and evil ends that will bring them loads more money. For public companies be…
I think it’s a perfectly valid strategy for a corporation to make less money now for more money in the future, but apparently all investors disagree?
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work for a medical company. It's really a tech company that makes medical software. Runs like a pretty typical successful tech startup. Our customers are hospitals and doctor clinics. The software syncs the data between various networks. Can notify a patient's primary care giver when their patient is checked into the ER, can notify a doctor if that patient is bouncing between hospitals looking for meds, there was e…
I’ve been thinking about finding a new job, and finding something that I feel is moral and pushes society forward are important criteria for me. Medtech seems like the sort of thing that might meet them. If you don’t mind me asking, how’d you end up in the medical device field? Do you feel like the projects you work on contribute to the advancement of human health? And do you feel that you’re adequately compensated?…
I can't speak for xahrepap, but I'm working on my PhD where I operationalize deep learning for radiology. Whenever I do find myself sorta burned out on a project, I do take solace knowing that it's apply a complex technical field to bettering the way we deliver healthcare.
I can't speak to compensation yet since I'm only on a PhD stipend, but there's plenty of blue chip companies (that bring blue chip salary and benefits) that are going into the healthcare field.
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#308It'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…
You could build a decentralized version of facebook or twitter. That would be a truly amazing progress to humankind!
And I am sure the 20 users who manage to get it working correctly will be really happy that they can talk to each other.
Of course, Social only works if a critical mass of users start actively using the network...achieving that number, no matter what the underlying tech is, is a very hard nut to crack.
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
You're making too many assumptions in almost every statement here. If you're going to continue with this line of thinking then please back it up with evidence.
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#310Earlier 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?
I believe Western imperialism has something to do with it... While it's true that capitalism has improved outcomes for some nations, it's also true that capitalist exploitation in Africa and South America really messed up the way their world works. It's made it so that free markets had something to fix later on, not fixed a pre-existing problem with these countries.
People can choose what to believe and all, but it's pretty hard to look at things like the African slave trade or Diamond mining in Zimbabwe or Sierra Leone and find anything but capitalism and imperialism run amok.