I'm Leaving Mojang

Your last sentence got me thinking about the differences, and it's interesting.

In terms of poor now versus rich a couple of centuries ago, I think it comes down to creature comforts versus power. A poor person today can summon a symphony on command. They can view plays at will. They can travel to the next city in hours. If they're financially smart, they could even take a vacation on another continent every few years.

Yet, they probably don't have very good food. Quantity is fine, but quality lacks. If they do have good food, they almost certainly have to cook it themselves. Servants, in general, are lacking. They have to buy their own clothes. They have to wash them, too, and while machinery makes that way easier than it was, it's still more work than letting a servant handle it.

Furthermore, the lives of the modern poor are fundamentally uncertain by comparison. If they're working poor, they can be unemployed on a whim. Their landlord can raise rents beyond what they can pay. If they're on benefits (either employed, or supplementing income from work) then the political winds can easily change next election. By comparison, a rich person from 200 years ago almost certainly owns land (and, in many places, people) and can be fairly confident that they will remain there, if they choose to, for a long time. They almost certainly have political power as well, so barring a violent revolution they won't have too much trouble with the state.

Medicine is one place this breaks down, since we've decided (in the richer countries) that the poor should still have access to the services of doctors, and those far exceed anything anyone could get 200 years ago. That would probably be the deciding factor for me, at least, if I had to choose between the two situations.

It's also interesting to compare with a rich person today. If they're not ultra wealthy, they probably still have no servants, still wash their own clothes, may still cook their own food, still drive themselves around, etc. If they own substantial land, it's probably as a luxury rather than a productive asset. Many still work for someone else.

> What's funny (for some definitions of fun), we will actually need to do that - given how our current economy pushes automation to replace humans everywhere, we can either accept that people should be allowed to live and thrive without having to earn for the living, or we'll see a massive increase of poverty.

Most likely, such a realization will occur, if at all, only after (1) we do see massive increase in poverty, and (2) the people subject to that massive increase in poverty violently demonstrate their displeasure with it, and even then the realization will be far from universal and a matter of lasting controversy.

See, for a historical parallel, how we got from the industrial revolution and how long it took before there was significant effort to provide even basic protection for workers from exploitation. (And how frequently people still argue that some of the basic protections adopted are unnecessary and counterproductive imposition by government on the rights of corporations.)

I just checked out Dune2, looks good thanks for the recommendation.

Too bad, his claim that he isn't a developer and just wants to have fun playing and tinker makes him sound a lot like the famous Miyamoto from the StarFox development stories. Miyamoto apparently often played with many different implementations, making the programmers throw out a lot of work, but this was done to find something fun. Notch now had the money and organization to do that without worrying about having to push out a release. I wonder if his descent into writing useless things like Doom map viewers is just sort of chickening out. It's fun and easy to write for him maybe, no stress, but completely meaningless for the industry.

Minecraft was grown out of the way Notch works.

What you are suggesting is impossible. No one, not even Steve Jobs sits down and says "My life mission is to benefit humanity". This is because we really do not know which efforts will have the largest impact on humanity. You could waste a lifetime trying to make a better battery - but it might never happen.

Or you could hack around on a game and watch it explode and impact millions of lives around the world.

In my opinion the important part is that you are doing something meaningful to you as an individual. If it ends up exploding and benefiting humanity all the better. But the world would be so much better off if we just had everyone doing this.