[jamescostian]

I don't think radical technical breakthroughs will be the solutions to any of those problems. Those are human problems. There's nothing wrong solving technical problems while human problems persist. Putting programmers, data scientists, etc on human problems doesn't solve them better or faster than putting someone outside of STEM on them

[zbentley]

> Putting programmers, data scientists, etc on human problems doesn't solve them better or faster than putting someone outside of STEM on them

True, but per GP there is also an unimaginable amount of money and natural resources sent towards those technical problems. And unlike programmers, money and resources are reallocateable.

If, in an alternate history without the gravitational money-pull of the software industry, even 1% of the resources lent to that industry in our timeline had been put towards addressing one of the problems listed above, it would create a vastly different world. A better one, I suspect, in many ways.

[jamescostian]

Agreed that reallocating money and resources for the greater good is a good thing. That said, these are all topics that still receive lots of debate politically. That's what I mean when I say it's a human problem.

You can't solve healthcare by throwing tech, money, etc at it anymore than you could solve a broken heart with those things. Sure, money could help you get therapy or pay for lobbying for whatever your solution to healthcare is. OTOH, perhaps the person cutting the checks thinks the solution to heartbreak is a raise ("it shows we care"), and the solution to healthcare issues is to lobby for criminalizing generics ("they're probably cutting corners and making people worse off"). People don't even agree on what are the problems in healthcare (and other things in that list), let alone how to solve them