[gmt2027]

We are a generation of fluff and polish.

Today's most celebrated young 'engineer' is Mark Zuckerberg, creator of a really cool way to rank hot chicks, measure faux popularity and extend the social dyamics of high school into the real world. We make dramatically scored movies about his trials and ultimate triumph and rank Facebook as the greatest company to emerge in the last half-decade with a $50bn valuation.

Where is our Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla or even Howard Hughes? Is it Steve Jobs and his charisma? What we consider innovation has taken the form of the iPhone and the iPad, fancier toys in polished packages with glaringly less functionality than is a technical possibility today, conveniently dumbed-down so it is easier to keep us not thinking too hard and, God-forbid, doing anything really imaginative.

Sure there is interesting work being done out there in green energy, space, biotech and nanotechnology research. These were all conceivable decades ago. We are unable to create good science fiction anymore because our imagination is just as bad as it was in the 1800s. My God, they built driverless cars that work, why isn't that game-changing Google spin-off the hot new company of the decade? Does anyone even know the name of the former Stanford Professor whose work could lower accident rates, eliminate traffic jams and parking problems, make automobile ownership obsolete and drastically cut down emissions and manufacturing waste? We could have a real transportation cloud that actually does something useful other than being a repository for our videos and photos that allows 'sharing with family and friends'.

We are complacent enough to only care about things that distract us from actually being productive. Just about any system out there leaves huge room for improvement. Everything is broken or needlessly inefficient: the government, the legal, financial, energy, educational, healthcare, transportation, and disaster management systems. Even the Internet is broken. We should be building efficient sustainable systems that scale, not software. Real innovation requires an iterate-or-die mindset.

I am an African. Don't even get me started on the developing world.

[FrojoS]

Helping to connect all humans on the planet is not important? This has been said many time before and you don't have to agree with it, but imho Facebook is a really important and revolutionary tool that has improved many lives including my own. Sometimes the benefits where beyond my expectations.

I think, the reason why you see so much development in software, is because its easy! I'm a mechanical engineer and still spend most of my time writing code. Why? Because, all I need as PC! No staff, regulations, no material, no manufacturing tools. This saves time and money and makes you independent and fast. The entrance barrier is just very, very low, so as long as there is any demand for innovation in software, there will be someone who will try to code.

I have this "to much software" feeling all the time, too. We definitely need more innovation in hardware. Luckily, with innovations like 3D printers or Polycaprolactone the entrance barrier for hardware is becoming lower, too. However, in my experience, even these trends are largely fulled and based on software. We are living in the Information Age.

[gmt2027]

Email already connects everyone on the Internet but billions of people are not online by an accident of geography and birth. Mobile phones connect a reasonable percentage of the rest. I may be mistaken but it is doubtful that many users' quality of life would be dramatically affected by the sudden demise of Facebook. It may be as bad as losing your favourite TV channel, but life goes on. Facebook is a convenience that does not solve any of our real problems or alleviate human drudgery in any way, It only increases the enjoyment of existing wealth at idle time.

Incidentally, an explicit statement of what mankind's actual goals are and what resources are being committed to solving them would go a long way to show that we really all want the same things. Anyone that believes our interests are best served by large corporations and governments at war is delusional. These entities rely on the premise that success can only come at the expense of the 'other guy'. In the grand scheme of things they are local optima that promote the very scarcity that they have evolved to manage. Open Source Software can teach something here, there are multiple distributions and programs, each freely borrowing from the successes and avoiding the failures of the other. The healthy but open competition between them means that we get the best operating systems that no money can buy. Even OSS is not immune to meaningless rivalries and sabotage.

The information age gives us new tools to approach the physical world which is where ALL the real challenges still are, even in computing (think the end of Moore's law, and the potential of quantum computing and communication). You mention mechanical engineering, we should have amazing open-source mechanical modelling software that realistically simulates the physical properties of large systems, allowing you to design, build and test machines from a catalog of reuseable components and subsystems in a virtual lab (Tesla did this in his head), and send it out into the cloud for fabrication and delivery.

We all seem to agree that life is hard, why can't we approach it as an engineering problem? I would like to see someone attempt to engineer a society in a systematic scientific way. Evolutionary algorithms, game theory and a few Petaflops of modelling power for the common objective function. No secrecy, sentiment or ideology just let the best algorithms decide.