Technology absolutely solves humanity's problems. There's pretty much no problem that given a large thoughtful effort, technology has not solved. The problem is that humanity is bad at choosing where to invest in technology. Our society has been set up so that orders of magnitude of more money is spent on advertising technology than clean energy, sanitation, sustainability, and ethical food production. Technology is…
> Our society has been set up so that orders of magnitude of more money is spent on advertising technology than clean energy, sanitation, sustainability, and ethical food production. Technology is not the problem. The problem is that in order to invest in "clean energy, sanitation, sustainability, and ethical food production" you need a huge amount of capital. A good way to build capital is to invest into technologie…
If you feel that these companies like Google are in it to make humanity better, you really need a better understanding of people. Google, Exon Mobile, Phillip Morris, and every other public company work in virtually the same way. They maximize profit. If you work at one of these companies and you don't help the company make more money, see how long you keep your job. Google is just in a different market. You may respond with why does Google invest in self-driving cars or 4g weather balloons? Very simply, to make more money. I'm not saying you can't make money from doing things to help humanity or that you shouldn't but let's be very clear, Google is not a person with a conscious. It's a system set up to make money and it will disappear as soon as it stops.
From a planning perspective, hoping large systematic changes will be brought corporations completely ignores history. The military has been behind virtually every significant technology at least in the United States. Even technologies created by corporations almost always have some sort of public assistance.
Our problem now is that corporations are seeping deeper into the centralized decision-making network we call the government. The whole point of government is to have a centralized power that can avoid the local maximums of profit motive. Corporations, in their bid to continue their existence, erode our public institutions. If we really wanted to, we could have the government mobilize trillions of dollars to solve any problem we wished. Capital may be the problem for figuring out fusion but it's certainly not the problem for clean energy, sanitation, sustainability, and ethical food production.