[hasbroslasher]

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 modern life. Or you can do some third thing: some kind of applied tech a more physical engineering discipline (energy, spaceships, robots, etc.) that might or might not do anything for the common man.

I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the US education system who go to work for Wall Street or in adtech/ecommerce roles. We have the brains and energy and passion to solve alternative energy, vertical farming, asteroid mining, carbon sequestration, and social democracy overnight but our system deliberately misallocates resources to projects that generate capital for the already wealthy instead of promoting one iota of social good. Here's to hoping this is a start of that bigger, necessary change.

[Kalium]

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 equally brilliant mathematicians who cannot even begin to grasp how any person could be concerned with things as minor as governance structure when there is math to be done. It might be possible to press those people into the service of what someone else deems social good, but I must admit I am experiencing some doubts that they would universally consider it socially good for them.

Beyond that, consider what selling trinkets and shipping things around the globe has done. It's helped lift billions of people out of abject poverty. It has made material well-being and food security possible on scales unimaginable only a few centuries ago. It has done so more successfully, and more quickly, than any effort explicitly directed at social good in human history. A critic would point to the price paid, and posit that there might have been a better option, but this critic is almost certainly making perfect the enemy of good in pursuit of an ideal.

I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the US education system who struggle to recognize so many things in life. You're absolutely right - what's lost by chasing money for its own sake is one such. It's just maybe worth considering that there could potentially be others.

[hasbroslasher]

As far as "the price paid" that you mention: the price is not paid in any way. The price is being put on a high-interest credit card and we're paying the minimum. Someday those cans we've kicked down the road (carbon emissions, pacific garbage patch, destruction of ocean ecosystems in general, deforestation, economic inequality, desertification, etc.) in order to sell more plastic trinkets will come back to collect on our outstanding balance.

[ryderm]

> but this critic is almost certainly making perfect the enemy of good in pursuit of an ideal.

Yes, because "good" means preventable poverty related deaths by the millions because it is not profitable to do anything about it \s. Good for you != good, but it is easy to look past that when it isn't right in your face

[Kalium]

You're right. It's incredibly easy to ignore things that aren't immediately in front of me. Like the human rights abuses ongoing in China, which aren't really part of my immediate daily life and I don't generally think about much.

With that said, is it possible that this passage could be interpreted more charitably? Perhaps some might read it as a comment on how demanding perfection can cause more negative effects while seeking to prevent negative effects.

For example, where might our technology be if our species had refused to extract or smelt metals until we had the ability to do so without any emissions of any sort?

It's not about what real preventable human tragedies can be averted, but aren't, because of the evils of human greed you wisely point to. It's about accepting that imperfect improvements to alleviate human pain and reducing human lives lost can, sometimes, be preferable to hoping for perfection at some future date.

[coolaliasbro]

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.

[Kalium]

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 warnings of potentially catastrophic situations are equally credible. As opposed to how seriously I take the warnings of climate scientists.

[ryanwaggoner]

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

[coolaliasbro]

What do you believe to be the cause of that abject poverty?

[ucaetano]

Let me guess, well, maybe the fact that we're born poor?

Poverty is the absence of a lot of things. If you're born in a small isolated tribe in the middle of the Amazon, you're poor. Nobody took anything from you, there is almost no inequality, but you're still poor.

But I think I know where you're trying to get: "They're only poor because X took whatever from them". Probably where X is capitalism, Western countries, or whoever is the fashionable enemy.

Nope.

[hasbroslasher]

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.

[Nasrudith]

Look back further - while certainly not blameless they didn't start the fire - humanity in general did. In South America even the Conquistadors even with their vast advantages would have died if not for all of the other tribes sick of their flower wars and getting captured for sacrifice. They also had an army on their side. One they later betrayed and made an underclass but fifty men in an unfamiliar territory would die eventually to their might. Africa had its own warfare and ironically one of the most benign actions of trade helped set up a collapse - trade with others is how advancement is driven and they wound up benefiting from trade in more productive crops - some with precious metals and ivory and some through slaves. That lead to a population boom and that lead bloody wars of Shaka Zulu. The point being exploitation doesn't need any outside actors and is the true enemy. The true cause of poverty and backwardness is lack of growth.

This doesn't absolve the misdeeds of exploiters - indeed colonies end in independence usually specifically because of mercantilist mismanagement squanders the true potential of the country by seeing it only as a well of land resources instead of an extension to nurture for mutual good but it is important to recognize that getting out "the Imperialists" won't make things better automatically and the wrong replacement can ironically be even worse. As bad as the British were in Rwanda they never decided to genocide the Tutsis even though their manipulations lead to it indirectly. Evil comes from within and without "the tribe" and it is important to recognize that.

[Kalium]

A common response is "Capitalism". It's an easy, glib response. Unfortunately, it's not a good one, because abject poverty predates capitalism and exists without it.

Another response is "deprivation". Unfortunately, this response is effectively an appeal to the definition of poverty.

Since you asked what I believe, I don't believe there is a well-defined single cause of poverty.

[stcredzero]

A common response is "Capitalism". It's an easy, glib response. Unfortunately, it's not a good one

If anything, Capitalism has lifted 90% of the world's population out of poverty. It's a solution to absolute poverty, not a cause. It may, however, be a cause of relative poverty. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it's the worst system for eliminating poverty, after all the other ones we've ever tried.

[AnarchoYeasty]

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.

[sigstoat]

> 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.

uhhh. your bubble is astonishing. or your standards for "good" are unattainable by anyone.

how about folks who work on CAD software? is that bad because it will be used to design plastic trinkets, or good because it'll design medical prosthetics?

(are the medical prosthetics good because they help people, or bad because they make someone money?)

if i write the software for a piece of test equipment for batteries, is that good because now people who buy consumer electronics are less likely to catch on fire? or bad because i helped the big company sell more plastic trinkets?

[untilHellbanned]

Not a generous interpretation of their argument. I’m in biomedical research which also wasn’t mentioned explicitly but I read it as a more general argument about finding something that is future-looking and helpful to many vs a few.

[xahrepap]

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 even a time I heard of a man going between hospitals, checking in, and vandalizing hospital equipment. Our software was able to notify the nurse who checked him in at his last destination.

It's actually an awesome place to work, and it's nice to know that I'm actually helping push the needle a little bit in the right direction to help the medical industry succeed.

[el_benhameen]

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 don’t love asking that last one in the same breath as questions of morality, but I do have a family to take care of.

[xahrepap]

> If you don’t mind me asking, how’d you end up in the medical device field?

I was recruited from a B2B company by an old friend/boss. I was skeptical because I had only ever heard bad things about working for medical companies. I was very impressed with the leadership, product, and direction of the company. So I took the job.

> Do you feel like the projects you work on contribute to the advancement of human health?

I don't feel like I'm making a direct impact, no. However, I can clearly see that the work I do is a single cog in a machine that actually makes a real-world difference for medical professionals. I talked to a family friend who is a nurse. He was complaining that software was horrible for medical professionals, then he went in about this new product they started using and how it's made a world of a difference. Turns out it was our product and I just didn't know he used it and he didn't realize I had switched jobs to that company. He went on and on about how it makes things better (easier to diagnose, easier to see patient history, etc etc)

> And do you feel that you’re adequately compensated?

I got a significant raise that beat out other job offers at the time for another B2B company. I have what I feel is a competitive salary (a respectable amount higher than the average in my area) and the benefits are quite amazing (401k, untracked PTO with management who actually does a good job encouraging vacation, 100% paid health insurance, etc)

[el_benhameen]

Really appreciate the reply, thanks. I think your answer to the second question was a good one. It would be difficult for an engineer to have a direct impact in a non-engineering field, but I think what you've described sounds like a good place to be.

[skwb]

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.

[acdanger]

It's exceedingly depressing and it's one of the reasons I can't stomach the Bay Area.

It doesn't take long to notice serious manifestations of societal rot. And yet some of the brightest minds of our generation spend their best years trying to get people to spend more of their cognitive surplus on mindlessly staring at their device screen.

I'm not at all saying this is tech's fault. I think the problem is much more systemic. But that doesn't make it any less troublesome.

[hasbroslasher]

I completely agree. It's not tech's fault at all - tech companies prey on our basic neural hardware as much as fast-food companies do, as much as predatory banks do, and all for the same reason: to generate capital.

Luckily, I think I'm starting to see more people waking up to smell the societal rot that tech has helped foster, and people are becoming more motivated to fight it. I'm just waiting to see if tech folks can mobilize to push for causes like socialism during my lifetime. That would be the ultimate "Revenge of the Nerds" story line at this point.

[intended]

I read a line from a book review by Krugman where he says “free trade is not as important as saving the planet.”

The context was the unlikely event of the WTO calling fouls if America and a few other regions levied carbon tariffs on imported goods.

Of course, The article was written in 2013, and it’s cyncisim would be considered wildly optimistic in today’s climate.

But perhaps his point is wrong.

Perhaps for humans, it is free trade that is more important than the planet.

Free trade is effectively our distributed human brain. Our ability to make choices and distributing those choices down information trees encompassed by entire industries.

Society is one big exercise in managing complexity - obfuscating or dispersing away decisions and information.

And maybe for human beings, that is just more important than saving the coral reefs or the elephants.

The insects may die, so we lose almonds and other flowering trees. That just means almonds and other precious species disappear.

But most human beings don’t even get almonds, Or meat, or fruit, as part of their diet anyways.

It would be nice to save other species, but if the whole planet was just covered in bio crop species 1-299, and a few aesthetics, humanity would be alive and ok.

Perhaps the awful truth is that for humanity as a species, free trade and economic growth is more important than saving the planet.

[stcredzero]

It's not tech's fault at all - tech companies prey on our basic neural hardware as much as fast-food companies do

Do you think tech can solve the problem of homeless addiction? There actually aren't that many homeless in the Bay Area.

There is only one problem with socialism. There is no check and balance on the amount of appropriation, which cannot be voluntary. Unchecked power eventually leads to oppression. Systems which you can't opt out of often lead to evil. (This may apply to Capitalism, but there it's somewhat ameliorated by creative destruction.)

[stcredzero]

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 that needs solving? Color me skeptical.

3) Asteroid Mining: Also requires establishment of large scale infrastructure.

4) Carbon Sequestration: The laws of thermodynamics are against you on this, unless you can marshal self-replicators harvesting a significant portion of the sunlight falling on the Earth. If we've gotten that desperate, it must mean that building sunshades at L1 has been made unavailable by groundside politics and/or the Kessler Syndrome.

5) 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.

projects that generate capital for the already wealthy instead of promoting one iota of social good

Is that what the Industrial Revolution was? Or has industrialization raised 90% of the world's population out of poverty? Hint: It's the latter.

Another hint: Has there ever been a collection of intelligent, privileged young people who thought they could change the world into a utopia? I think you might want to study the history a bit. There was one utopian project which was implemented by privileged intellectuals, but which was also based on a good knowledge of history and human nature. Though flawed, that project worked, did some good, and has been going on for well over 200 years.

[ubernostrum]

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.

[stcredzero]

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.

[ubernostrum]

how is there a system of checks and balances to keep the voters from appropriating everything

The US doesn't have one of those.

Literally. The people of the United States can, without consent of Congress or the President or the Supreme Court, do everything you just said, via the amendment-convention process (Congress does not have the option to deny a convention when at least 2/3 of states call for it). Once the convention's underway, even state legislatures can be bypassed by conventions in the states.

Thus it's possible to get amendments into the US Constitution without them ever having been voted on or even considered by Congress or the state legislatures. And if you're worried about a populist wave "appropriating everything" in other countries, why not worry about it in the US? It's just as possible.

[stcredzero]

The US doesn't have one of those.

Another way of saying it, the only check and balance is political.

After the founding, there was another check and balance, in that the voting public, comprised solely of landowners, would never have voted for socialism.

[ubernostrum]

Ask the Roman Republic how the "wisdom" of governance by the landed gentry worked out.

[hasbroslasher]

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.

[solidsnack9000]

Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about. In part that is because survival and solvency are quite difficult in the details; and in part that is because doing “good” requires a much richer concept of what you are doing than is required by being profitable and placating shareholders. It’s easier to get it wrong, harder to say when you’re done and can move resources to other things and harder to keep people’s actions aligned with the goal.

Over the past hundred years, California has been host to thousands of intentional communities, where people set their sights on something higher than making a living. Nearly all of these communities collapse within a generation, neither living up to their ambitions nor providing for their members’ most basic needs. These failures have multiple causes, but ultimately can be summed up in terms of having one institution serve too many different functions, in an environment where there are already specialized institutions serving those functions efficiently.

People seeking to do good in the world aren’t looking for work, they are looking for religion — in the sense of spiritual community and connection to the godhead. Doing good is the role of something like the Salvation Army and charitable missions — institutions of long standing which are subject to very different guidelines than businesses.

Those who would mix business and charitable, virtuous action are asking to be held accountable for neither while enjoying the rewards of both.

[ryderm]

> 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....

[intended]

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 immortal material called plastic which costs nearly nothing to make and is better for our environment than using tin tubes.

Profit has many ills, as single numbers often do - they reduce complex decisions down to a simple number.

That’s the magic of it all. We don’t have to examine the calculus of our morality when buying a pixel or an iPhone.

We just have to Examine the price.

I think we have to come to terms with the fact that humanity as a distributed entity, is not a moral organism.

Profit is just a way to reduce complexity. We have a society that reflects this because our reality is such.

Which is why many of the popular solutions today are prices which reflect carbon costs.

[johnny22]

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.

[intended]

Well yeah, if someone is going to try and simplify how the world economy works in one paragraph, I would expect large amounts of simplification.

[toofy]

Indeed. We need a new and more comprehensive set of metrics by which we measure value add or success.

When considering how successful a thing, a person, or a project is, innovation and market success certainly should be weighted heavily but we really need some other metrics to include.

[kareemsabri]

It's really not. People take jobs for all sorts of reasons. They are answerable to their friends, family, community etc. If that were the case, why would people be resigning from Google over moral issues?

[hasbroslasher]

This person is saying is that our economic system incentivizes profit, not that it mandates it for every agent. So while a few relatively well-off, well-educated, and principled Googlers can quit over perceived injustice, many people either can't economically justify such a choice, don't know enough to know that there's a problem with their work, or simply don't care and take the money over morals.

And furthermore, when was the last time you saw someone held to account for their job title? I've done that and every time it results in me alienating someone, because no one wants to lie to themselves and be forced to answer that they work at Raytheon because they think that's the way to do good in the world.

[kareemsabri]

No, they said our society and economic system incentivize profit over all else. Neither of those things are true.

Lots of people make principled decisions every single day. You think only rich engineers can afford to put morals over money, and everyone else is selling their soul for a paycheck? Where do you live?

[solidsnack9000]

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.

[longerthoughts]

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?

[solidsnack9000]

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.

[CamperBob2]

Any better suggestions?

Ones that actually work as intended in the general case, and don't frequently malfunction by getting a bunch of people exiled, consigned to real poverty, or killed?

[WalterSear]

> Those who would mix business and charitable, virtuous action are asking to be held accountable for neither while enjoying the rewards of both.

The problem isn't that people are expecting businesses to be charities. It's that survival and solvency make abuse of the commons a business necessity.

People want jobs that don't involve abusing the commons.

[solidsnack9000]

The parent comment does mentions several key areas of public benefit where they'd like to see business step in.

[pimlottc]

Might I suggest the civic tech sector as a place where coders (and designers and product managers) can find morally satisfying work? You can work directly for government in organizations like the US Digital Service and 18F that bring the lean startup model into the public sector or join purpose-driven private companies like Nava and Ad Hoc that contract on government project spaces like healthcare using modern development practices. And there's lots of charitable and volunteer opportunities at well.

https://usds.gov/jobs https://18f.gsa.gov/jobs https://jobs.codeforamerica.org/ https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/

[nradov]

There are many interesting opportunities in healthcare related to improving care quality, increasing interoperability, cutting inefficiencies, boosting EMR usability, and integrating wearable device data. Funding and jobs are available.

I would also note that a Computer Science degree isn't necessarily the best preparation for a career building commercial software.

[illumin8]

You can work on blockchain projects that might have the potential to bring financial services to the unbanked and poor in 3rd world countries, but, oh wait a minute, the technology will probably just be used to create predatory financial products for payday lenders to expand their market...

The best way to make sure you are working on ethical projects is to start and run your own company. Any technology can be used for good or evil. Personally, I do think blockchain has a lot of potential, but the best way to ensure that your technology gets used for good is to design it yourself that way - in other words, build a micro-lending system that helps finance small business owners in 3rd world countries with fair interest rates, instead of building a predatory payday lending system that charges unfair interest rates.

[annabellish]

I have yet to see even a concept, never mind a product, that actually uses a blockchain in a net-positive way, especially for "the unbanked". Universally high transaction fees and slow confirmation times on anything that sees leitimate amounts of use with no clear path towards mitigating this situation, if it's even possible to mitigate at all, combined with several choices of security system each with devastating concequences - from the morally black proof-of-work burning precious resources at a time climate change is already threatening to destroy us, to the morally grey proof-of-stake that simply reinforces the idea that those with the most resources deserve even more resources - makes for something that doesn't seem to have much potential for _good_. The "Unbanked" aren't going to be served by these systems, they need efficient, reliable, and safe systems.

[slimshady94]

Ironically, it seems the 'banked' have become 'unbanked' after the recent speculative highs and subsequent crash of bitcoin prices.

[ForHackernews]

Even aside from the financial scams, any proof-of-work blockchain project is an ecological obscenity.

[camjohnson26]

Any system that generates value will create an incentive to waste an equal amount to get it. In proof of work all of that wasted energy is on chain, since that's the most efficient way to get the benefit. Every other protocol provides the same incentive to waste work. Just look at how much work financial institutions spend to chase the money released by the US government in the form of debt.

http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

[ForHackernews]

No. You are tragically misinformed. Most systems that generate value incentivize generating as little waste as possible.

There is nothing "efficient" about proof-of-work -- in fact, it's deliberately inefficient because it's a zero-sum game and all the miners have to waste as much electricity as possible to compete with the other miners.

The wasted energy is not "on the chain". It's gone, converted into CO2 poisoning the planet.

Banks may do stupid or damaging things, but they aren't in the business of wasting energy just to prove they wasted it.

[camjohnson26]

Every system of currency creation is a “zero sum game” because someone ends up with the unit of currency and everyone else doesn’t. The wasted energy is on the chain as hashes which are difficult to recreate. These are the basics. Do you seriously think people aren’t wasting energy trying to get their hands on created dollars? And they’re incentivized to waste up to a dollar to receive a dollar.

[ForHackernews]

"Currency creation" is not value-creation. A good currency is a medium of exchange and a unit of account.

[clubm8]

I think there's a lot of good, moral work out there.

I have a friend who's a security engineer at a bank. I was surprised when he took the job - he'd always been pretty to the left politically.

But he takes pride in making sure the grandmas of the world don't get their accounts drained. He realizes he's not saving the world, but he's not swapping around debt vouchers until the economy crashes.

It's counter intuitive, but in his mind he's more moral than someone working at Google or Facebook.

(He also brags to me about the vacation - apparently they're encouraged to take their time for anti-fraud reasons?)

[alleyshack]

My understanding is that the anti-fraud vacation thing is related to being able to correlate a decrease in fraud with a specific person going on vacation. If you have money that mysteriously goes missing on the regular and 10 employees who touch it along the way, it's hard to determine which of those employees is responsible. If one of them goes away on vacation for a week and no money goes missing that entire week, you suddenly have a much better idea who might have been involved.

[clubm8]

Also, it makes sure there are no single points of failure. Apparently many embezzlers refuse to take vacation for fear someone will look over the books and notice irregularities.

[DoreenMichele]

So, I run a bunch of websites on a platform provided for free provided by that Evil Overlord Google and I make a few bucks that way, which matters to me because I remain desperately poor, and I also disseminate useful info for free that way to needy people, such as homeless people.

BlogSpot is a robust platform and some of the folks who worked on it probably have compsci degrees.

I'm also curing the incurable, but most people don't believe that, so probably no point in trying to convince you that I may yet win a Nobel Prize in medicine someday, if people will ever stop calling me crazy and take me seriously.

Don't mind me. I'm just cranky cuz reasons.

[starpilot]

The effective altruism perspective is to make as money as possible doing whatever, then use that to fund noble causes. At the individual level it's the Wall Street quant who donates his income. At the corporate level, it's FB using ad money to create the Chan-Zuckerberg Intiative to cure cancer.

[jcmoscon]

You could build a decentralized version of facebook or twitter. That would be a truly amazing progress to humankind!

[cubano]

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.

[julienreszka]

It's just your lack of imagination

[djohnston]

applied tech to a physical engineering degree could wreak far more havoc on humanity than ad tech

[uhtred]

I wonder if socialism done right (if that's possible, as no one has yet proven it is) would lead to smart people working on the kinds of things you listed. In theory it would, as there'd be no need for adtech, ecommerce, Wall Street, etc.

[hasbroslasher]

I'm not necessarily advocating for socialism, I'm just suggesting that the USA government spends more on incentivizing technological innovation in areas that have real payouts for humanity. It's almost a tautology that if you started offering government jobs at $100k a year and funding to work on interesting, novel problems, you'd attract a whole lot of people who are bored and disenfranchised with adtech or high finance.