We call ourselves innovators, but most of us are really just iterators

Does it have to be? Slavery was the social norm for thousands of years and has only been widely considered unacceptable for perhaps Ditto race equality - we consider it a moral imperative today, but for thousands of years it was not really a thing.

The notion of morality evolves over time - the fact that a moral conclusion is new does not in and of itself make it less, well, imperative.

But there's also the flip side - in this case this is something that has been considered a moral imperative in history. The concept that the rulers have a moral obligation to be informed and just is well supported by historical societies.

Back when we gave power to people based on familial relations, we called this the noblesse oblige[1]. The concept was also applied to other figures of power, such as the monarchy. The concept is mixed up with a lot of notions that one might find offensive today (e.g., that the masses are unable to rule themselves and from which derives the obligation and responsibility to rule fairly in their stead).

Nowadays we don't give out power based on family (much), we do it instead based on wealth and many other secondary factors - race and religion being large among them.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige

Ignoring the awful "real hackers" commentary, one has nothing to do with what the article was referencing at the time: starting a company.

At the core, if you start a company, you want to make money. Unless you are going the non-profit route, you are in it to make money, and that means getting rich.

There is no middle class anymore: a line created by average folks who earn an average wage and spend too much and make minimum monthly payments on everything and after 20 years of humping the 9-5 or 10-6 or 12-7 wonder why their bank accounts are so anemic and why can't I retire to Hawaii like I planned to when I was 20? "Middle class" is a useless metric anyway, because when pressed to define it nobody can, or they massage the definition as the argument evolves.

Here's the definition: if you qualify for government assistance, you're poor. If you don't have to work for your money - you might choose to, but you don't have to - you're rich. The middle class is right in between. I don't know about you, but I see a huge swath of people in between the states of "waiting in the government cheese line" and "collecting 6/7/8/9-figure interest checks".

There are good arguments to be made on both sides. On the one hand I'd love to create something truly groundbreaking, but on the other, I don't want to toil away my life for decades and finally reach success with only a few decades of my life to live. Who says I need to innovate in the first place? I've only got 80 years here to live, why not make as much money as I can, as quickly as possible, and live my life to its absolute fullest.

Of course, these arguments are based on the assumption that your goal is to become wealthy and to innovate. It's a time issue for me. I don't for one second look down on people working on the next hot social app because there's a chance they may cash out far earlier than had they labored away in a lab studying the subjects that'll really push humans forward.

In the end, there's no great metric by which our accomplishments wil be judged. If you wanna spend your hours on a new email app, fine, and if you wanna spend your years studying photosynthetic biochemical photomicroscopy, then go for it. There's no right or wrong.