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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?

#311

Post by stcredzero »

ubernostrum wrote: post #302
stcredzero wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Here we observe the not-so-subtle attempt to shift the debate from "social democracy" to "collectivism", as if the two terms are synonyms.

Exactly what is the difference between "social democracy" and "socialism?"

In particular, how is there a system of checks and balances to keep the voters from appropriating everything, thus handing all of the power to the central government and thus initiating totalitarianism?

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.

It can be argued that all existing economies are mixed economies.

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

#312

Post by dekhn »

saltcured wrote: post #292
dekhn wrote: post #187

I 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…

Pretty much everyone working in the high-performance computing space has to think about this. If you produce something truly useful, it may find its way into use in those kinds of HPC workloads. At the same time, much of our "civilian" use of HPC is being subsidized by those kinds of national security workloads which fund a lot of research and infrastructure. You might also think about it positively. At least they ar…

I never said I thought there was anything wrong with doing nuclear simulations testing. TBH I think it's an overall good.

Globus was mostly run out of Argonne National Lab, but it existed primarily to support scientific computing and public research. We had a subcontract to build pyGlobus since so many people wanted a Python interface (the Globus team started in C++ and then switched to Java and a really, really bad RPC technology called SOAP with WSDL for schema).

I've definitely come to terms with the modern compromise (in which a great deal of scientific research is motivated and funded by defense).

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

#313

Post by hasbroslasher »

stcredzero wrote: post #280
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…

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…

1. Yeah, sure we have a lot of minds working on AE, but are you really going to argue that working on Farmville is even comparable to the task of establishing the infrastructure and social changes needed to make AE universally solvent? No where am I saying we need an Ah-Ha moment. We need people who can work and proper incentives from the supposedly smart people who run the show in government and industry.

2. If you're unfamiliar with the environmental problems and inefficiencies present in our current food system, I implore you to do some research and get back to me. Decentralized, high-efficiency, urban food production is going to become more and more necessary as human populations continue to move into cities and global warming reduces crop viability in much of the world.

3. I don't understand how "establishment of large scale infrastructure" is a blocker to what I'm saying. Large scale infrastructure means you need smart people to design and build things to make a goal possible. You need "large scale infrastructure" like railroads to ship goods across the U.S. but when that was a need in the 17th century no one was grousing about how much work it was going to be.

4. Say what you will, but a system of distributed C02 scrubbers powered by alternative energy is at least a feasible way to prevent a Hothouse Earth scenario. Better than just accepting climatic doom through inaction.

5. Social democracy doesn't mean we become out-and-out Marxists, it just means that maybe we reconsider government in relation to what people need. Germany is a social democracy, USA is a democracy where people go without clean drinking water. Talk about a false dichotomy.

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

#314

Post by ryanwaggoner »

Kalium wrote: post #264
coolaliasbro wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 warnin…

Your comments are a beautiful example of how to dialogue and disagree constructively. I need to learn this skill :)

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

#315

Post by AnarchoYeasty »

Kalium wrote: post #228
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 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…

The idea that Capitalism has raised billions out of poverty is simply not grounded in reality. What the world bank has done with their statistics should send up red flags for someone whos taken Stats 101. I mean first off, the idea that 1$ / day is the poverty line and being slightly above that is absurd. But what's worse in 2000 the world bank reported that the number Rose from 1.2 billion people who made less than 1$/day in 1987 to 1.5 billion in 2000. That obviously doesn't fit the narrative. So they changed the poverty line from 1.02 / day in 1985 to 1.08 in 1993. The number again changed to $1.25 in 2008. Overnight 316 million people were raised out of poverty.

Of course anyone who experienced life in the 90's can see the glaring problem with this. $1.08 in 1993 has the same purchasing power as $1.61 in 2008. Those hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty? They are all still there. The rate of inflation is greater than the rise of the ipl. They did glaringly bad math tricks to make it appear as if half a billion people were lifted out of poverty by neoliberalism and Capitalism. And yet that couldn't be further from the truth.

Now that doesn't even take into account the situation in "wealthier" countries, such as Sri Lanka. A survey of Sri Lanka found that 35% of the country fell underneath their poverty line. However the world bank using the international poverty line reported only 4% were lifted out of poverty that year!. A wave of the hand and suddenly 31% of the population didn't factor in to their feel good story of capitalistic success.

And again I want to point out these absurd arbitrary numbers. $1.25 a day? Are you kidding me? Have you ever lived on $1.25 a day? The UN reports that the average person in 2005 needed at least $4.50/day just to meet the minimum nutritional requirements. The minimum. In India, one of the harleded successes of the world bank, children living just above the ipl had a 60% chance of being malnourished.

New Castle University once calculated that if people we're to achieve a normal life expectancy they would need at least $2.50 / day as the new IPL. But if we adopted that as the new IPL it would mean that now 3.1 billion people are living in abject poverty.

I got these numbers from this video https://youtu.be/A6VqV1T4uYs but in the description they list out all of their sources.

When you stop making up numbers to hide actual real poverty, the picture becomes clear. Rather than lifting people out of poverty, neoliberal capitalist policies are responsible for plunging half a billion more people into poverty today than in 1980.

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

#316

Post by AnarchoYeasty »

stcredzero wrote: post #311
ubernostrum wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Here we observe the not-so-subtle attempt to shift the debate from "social democracy" to "collectivism", as if the two terms are synonyms. Exactly what is the difference between "social democracy" and "socialism?" In particular, how is there a system of checks and balances to keep the voters from appropriating everything, thus handing all of the power to the central government and thus initiating totalitarianism? We…

[dead]

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

#317

Post by honr »

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…

Perhaps a correction, if we are talking about the phrase "don't be evil", literally, I can see it on: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html

Perhaps "erased" is not quite accurate.

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

#318

Post by EdgarVerona »

domador wrote: post #222
EdgarVerona wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. It is also easy to be so wrapped up in the trappings of what you're doing and the pleasure/sense of duty/sense of fulfillment you're getting from the actual act of your work and the compensation around it that you stop thinking about the consequences of your actions. This sounds terrible, but it's really just a small variant on the banality of evil. Solving problems, working on tight deadlines, and getting…

Sounds like engineers (and people in general) are good at optimizing locally (achieving what's good for me) and stink at optimizing globally (achieving what's good for everyone in society).

Aye, I definitely think it's a human thing. I apologize, because I'm going to use the word "addicting" in a non-scientific sense, but the normal use of the word that best conveys the situation in my opinion. Solving problems is addictive. Getting the rush of a job well done - regardless of what that job is - is addictive. Getting recognition is addictive. Having a comfortable salary is addictive.

It's so easy for me to slip into those addictions and not pay attention to the bigger picture. And I feel like I'm not the only one suffering from this problem. In fact, I can see it empirically in the people who have worked at the aforementioned jobs with me.

There needs to be a balance. A person doesn't need to be outright altruistic, but focusing exclusively on local optimization allows for a sort of hedonistic behavior set that can justify - and has historically justified - participation as a cog in larger and harmful systems.

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

#319

Post by EdgarVerona »

ryandrake wrote: post #155
EdgarVerona wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. It is also easy to be so wrapped up in the trappings of what you're doing and the pleasure/sense of duty/sense of fulfillment you're getting from the actual act of your work and the compensation around it that you stop thinking about the consequences of your actions. This sounds terrible, but it's really just a small variant on the banality of evil. Solving problems, working on tight deadlines, and getting…

When I went to undergrad in the mid 90s there was a single, optional “social and ethical issues in computing” class which was a total joke. Hopefully today the situation is better, but I suspect not, given the truckloads of new grads year after year, all prepared to not worry so much about the ethics of how their products are being used.

Aye, I went through my undergrad in the early-to-mid 2000's, and the ethics class (I think it was in 2004? It was a long time ago!) was more about your personal ethical duties to your company, with some discussion of general ethics. I don't recall any significant discussion of the ways in which a company itself might be unethical.

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

#320

Post by solidsnack9000 »

longerthoughts wrote: post #291
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the other way around -- if only we didn't expect the economic system to serve every social need. Business and the economy are doing what they are supposed to do. It's our expectations that are out of line.

If businesses are exempt from satisfying social needs, is the expectation that the government (through legislation) and private citizens (by voting) are responsible for addressing them? Basically just regulate businesses with the expectation that they have no social conscience and hope legislation is enough to prevent them from taking actions that damage society?

If businesses are exempt from satisfying social needs, is the expectation that the government (through legislation) and private citizens (by voting) are responsible for addressing them?

They aren't exempt from serving any social needs -- that's taking what I said further than I said it. Business do serve many social needs. They just can't serve every social need. They are a limited institution with a limited function.

It's not just government and individual people that come together to make a robust society that can counterbalance business interests; and business, government and the individual are not all we have at our disposal to meet the broad challenge of maintaining a just, livable and inspiring society. The wide variety of "civil society" institutions that, at one time, characterized the American polity -- unions & professional associations, men's and women's organizations, benevolent societies, church groups and religious federations -- are important avenues to political participation outside of (a) government, (b) the individual and (c) business. Francis Fukuyama, in Political Order & Political Decay, highlights the great significance of civil society organizations in the survival of democracy in America, and the eventual adoption of it in England, Denmark and many other countries.

Basically just regulate businesses with the expectation that they have no social conscience and hope legislation is enough to prevent them from taking actions that damage society?

They need to be regulated so as to (a) "...prevent them from taking actions that damage society" and (b) encourage them to stick closer to action that is beneficial to society. Were businesses to determine on their own what those things mean, it would effectively be undermining the political will of the rest of society. Businesses are paid to do a job.

Please consider that your reply was a little exaggerated, taking what I said further than I said it. This is quite characteristic of American politics at present; and perhaps of hacker politics in general. It doesn't serve us, though: it neither helps us to understand one another, nor to come to a workable agreement that improves public life.

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