[wzwy]

Do you have any notable example of brilliant people working on something that doesn’t improve the world?

My naïveté inclines me to think that there are more brilliant people working on world-improvement project than the opposite.

[galdosdi]

The smartest people I met in my career were at Google, and their main concern, institutionally, ultimately, was increasing ad click thru rates. (their main concern, individually, was doing whatever the institution required for getting promoted)

There's a lot of people on HN who can relate to this experience. That's where our intuition that there's a lot of people working on stuff that is useless to 99% of people, but will help a small elite get richer, comes from. It's literally what we do for a living, or used to.

Look at the top companies on the S&P 500 and where most of their revenue comes from. How much are these activities really improving the world?

If only the internet had had a built in mechanism for automatically micropaying for content as part of your internet bill (like flip phone ringtones used to work in the aughts, or how Minitel supposedly worked in France in the 1980s) adtech would never have happened and we would have a totally different internet. Instead we have this tragedy of the commons where the greatest minds money could buy are figuring out how to get people to waste more of their precious minutes on earth clicking on more cat videos so candy companies will pay for the server bill.

[js8]

> Do you have any notable example of brilliant people working on something that doesn’t improve the world?

Manhattan project?

[hkpack]

I think for the most part we can only say retrospectively, what was worth doing.

Facebook was created to connect people and ended up facilitating genocide.

Breakthrough in private health-improving tech can bring unfathomed gap between rich and poor.

We can only speculate where new developments such as AI will lead us.

[jmeister]

>Facebook was created to connect people and ended up facilitating genocide.

Throwing out the baby with the bath water here. How many lost friendships were recovered through FB? In my network of immigrants and refugees: countless.

>Breakthrough in private health-improving tech can bring unfathomed gap between rich and poor.

This is absurd. Why is the gap more important than the absolute level of the poor? All medical tech began as expensive and only for the rich.

[bee_rider]

"Throwing out the baby with the bathwater" is an expression that's never really made sense to me. The bath isn't a permanent position, babies and bathwater aren't fundamentally inseparable, why do we want to throw out the bathwater in the first place, is it even safe for the baby?

In the case of Facebook, the bath is toxic, we should remove the baby from the bathwater, toss out the bathwater, and then figure out what's going on (maybe we can just refresh the bath, maybe we need to figure out a regulatory framework for designing baths).

[baq]

history of civilization is a history of people making other people miserable using whatever tools available. this _maybe_ changed a bit in the second half of XX century... looks like we're back to usual programming nowadays.

[lupire]

Was genocide so rare before Facebook?

The 1990s Rwandan genocide was coordinated by 1-way radio.

[hardware2win]

Ads, imo.