[f_salmon]

This may be nice for certain niche users.

But the trend I see is companies telling us to regularly buy stuff we really don't need (and obviously throw away our "old" solutions). The world has way more pressing issues than yet-another-gadget. And the planet's resources are not unlimited.

[dualogy]

I'm sorry that I'm not able to solve world hunger and world peace. Not sure why that means I cannot take it upon myself to hypothetically build a mobile computer-vision-powered app? Please enlighten.

[coldtea]

It doesn't mean it. It just means that if enough people think the same way, the world is doomed.

Or, if not doomed, it's not getting any better in areas that matter.

(People laugh at words like "doomed", assuming everything will be as it was when they were growing up. For some lucky ones that's true. For others the worse happens, like a financial collapse or a world war, and then they "knew it all along it was going to happen").

[dualogy]

> It just means that if enough people think the same way, the world is doomed.

True in the sense that if "enough people" believe the Internet's favourite scare-story of imminent-financial-collapse (growing in popularity ever since Y2K) then it will indeed by necessity finally happen ;)

[coldtea]

What "scare story"? Financial collapse already happened in 2008.

People paid a trillion in the US alone, out of their pockets, to ameliorate it (plus close to another trillion they lented to Detroit). And tons of middle/working class jobs are not coming back in the foreseeable future.

And that's the US. For some European economies it is even worse -- they got from 30% unemployment to double the suicide rates in 3-4 years time.

[dualogy]

That sure was a big crisis but the word collapse for me implies total breakdown == after something collapsed, it no longer exists. The "financial system" still exists seemingly, even if arguably not in its best shape ever since.

[Joeri]

You're right that the science and practice of morality hasn't moved that much over the past 50 years while the science of technology has jumped by orders of magnitude, and that this is a problem that needs addressing. That doesn't mean we should stop evolving the state of the art in technology though. This is not an either/or situation. Ethical science relies on the advancement of technology, and vice versa.

[scribu]

I agree that the practice of morality seems sort of neglected in the western world.

I don't see how ethical science relies on the advancement of technology, though. I'm not even sure what ethical _science_ is, to be honest.

[bertil]

One fairly obvious application of that is to have motorbikes that can act like Google self-driving car. If we replace most cars by two-wheels (say, with a roof for confort under the rain) we divide to a third the oil consumption for transport, i.e. a third of world’s oil spending.

That's 20% saving on global non-renewables. “Niche”?