[HN Gopher] Technology Saves the World
___________________________________________________________________
Technology Saves the World
Author : elsewhen
Score : 78 points
Date : 2021-06-16 13:34 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (future.a16z.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (future.a16z.com)
| semiconduction wrote:
| Humanity has starved, struggled and regularly died in mass for
| millenia.
|
| Now the population is 100 times larger than it was a few
| centuries ago, and more and more people are living in a post-
| scarcity society.
|
| And yes, thanks to all the pioneers, entrepeneurs and geniuses
| that took an idea or insight into a mass market product. They are
| who truly deserve the credit.
| bttrfl wrote:
| What if all this is because we took a giant environmental
| credit that we won't be able to pay back? It's hard to argue
| that child mortality dropped, literacy increased and so on, but
| at the same time we are facing existential threats due to
| warming, lack of water, loss of biodiversity and so on.
|
| We are also enjoying a relatively peaceful period (despite
| what's happening in Syria and tens of other places) on a global
| scale, but history shows that every single global conflict gets
| more deadly. Will we survive WW3?
|
| Let's not prise the day too early.
| XorNot wrote:
| No, let's absolutely praise it.
|
| Because the existential threats only exist because of
| political malfeasance. This has never been a technological
| problem: even the potentially disastrous consequences of
| climate change only really manifest because of - again -
| politics. Because governments _won 't_ spend to protect their
| own citizens, because of corruption and greed.
|
| Little has changed on that front in thousands of years.
| Technology enabled almost everything we have now - even those
| improvements in governance we got (i.e. mass communications
| and the telegraph made coordinating large empires and
| alleviating local resource shortages via logistics possible).
| bttrfl wrote:
| Technology is neither source of good nor evil. Just like a
| hammer ain't to blame or prise. It's about its application
| and how tech is developed and applied is decided based on
| "politics" if you want.
|
| However, ever-evolving technology leads to globalisation
| and acceleration of processes. With shitty tech we can make
| lots of mistakes and pay small, local consequences. Shitty
| nails result in a shitty coffin. Shitty fridges result in
| an ozone hole. Our margin of error for doing the "politics"
| right is shrinking every day.
| mavhc wrote:
| We have been stealing from the future to pay for the present,
| as long as we keep stealing more and more from the future
| it'll be fine!
|
| Or be forced to not cheat and invent ways to live within our
| means
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Unfortunately, the future is now.
| carapace wrote:
| > history shows that every single global conflict
|
| Er, not to be pissy, but isn't that a sample size of two?
| bttrfl wrote:
| It's your right to be pissy. Let's drop the "global" then.
|
| I counted 18 wars with upper deaths range above 1M between
| 500BC and 1800AC. There were 29 of them after 1800. I
| didn't bother to sum the casualties. Full list:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
| WalterBright wrote:
| There are a lot more people today, too. Of course war
| death tolls will be larger.
| carapace wrote:
| Fair enough. It also adds to your point that the earlier
| wars tended to be a lot longer than the later ones,
| meaning the intensity of the killing has been increasing,
| eh?
|
| FWIW I'm usually on the doom-and-gloom side of the
| argument (benefit vs. hazard of tech).
| semiconduction wrote:
| I don't fall for environmental sensationalism
|
| The world is in it's most "livable" state ever
| phtrivier wrote:
| Half joking take : what "saved the world" (the deal is hardly
| done, unfortunately) was a mix of technology, incredible
| dedication, and vast amount of printed money.
|
| Would medtechs have succeed if they were not sure governments
| would pay "whatever it costs" for vaccines ? Not sure.
|
| Would people have paid Disney+ without government help funds?
| Maybe less.
|
| 2020 was probably better handled than 2008 here.
|
| However, I'm conviced the healthcare workers would have made
| their insane efforts no matter what the policy ; and the
| governments might have failed them so far. We'll have to do
| better for them next time - they saved the day, in the end.
|
| So, now covid 19 is on the list of examples (like Manhattan,
| Apollo, etc...) where "printing unlimited amount of money to have
| dedicated people solve a problem" worked.
|
| When do we start doing that on climate change ?
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| 3-6 months after it begins to affect the ultra wealthy would be
| my guess.
| belatw wrote:
| Tl;dr: billionaire wanks off over the merits of venture
| capitalism and half assed technological solutions to social
| problems; wants you to do the same.
| klelatti wrote:
| > Permanently divorcing physical location from economic
| opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the
| number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically
| improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people.
|
| This doesn't seem consistent with what is happening in A16Z's own
| backyard. Either Marc knows something we don't or this is
| unwarranted hyperbole.
| jellicle wrote:
| > > Permanently divorcing physical location from economic
| opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the
| number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically
| improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people.
|
| > This doesn't seem consistent with what is happening in A16Z's
| own backyard. Either Marc knows something we don't or this is
| unwarranted hyperbole.
|
| Well, let's run that through the VC->English converter:
|
| "We hope to lay off all the first world engineers living in
| Silicon Valley and hire exclusively the cheapest possible
| people living in the cheapest countries. We can hire twice as
| many bodies (double the good jobs, just not in the USA!) for
| one-tenth as much money, pocket all the profits, and if anyone
| complains (perhaps all the laid off engineers) we can talk
| about how we're raising people out of poverty, how dare they
| complain."
|
| My version is admittedly not as flowery as the original.
| klelatti wrote:
| Or maybe: "Some of our partners want to move to Texas. All
| the money they will spend there will move 10s of people out
| of poverty in Austin."
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Don't conflate "cheaper" with "cheapest".
|
| Ideally, it would be the same talent, in cheaper regions now.
| Cut out the landlord middleman.
|
| I know, the worker _is_ getting less, the company is simply
| subsidising a cheaper home. But many workers, not all but
| significantly many, will prefer a better lifestyle outside of
| cities.
| handrous wrote:
| When you fire 500,000 highly-paid workers, and distribute
| half their pay to dramatically raise the wages of 5,000,000
| workers in very poor places and the other half to 50
| extremely rich capitalists, you've "expand[ed] the number of
| good jobs in the world" and "dramatically improv[ed] the
| qualify of life for millions [...] of people".
|
| It's hard to even argue against, ethically--except that,
| conveniently, the people most vocally pushing it always seem
| to be in a "heads I win, tails you lose" position and are
| never the ones who will lose anything to make it happen.
| Usually quite the opposite.
| csbartus wrote:
| I didn't read the post, just checked the comments. 23 out of 23
| has negative tone.
|
| A tech magnate raises the bar. Goes from 'better' to 'save'.
| Technology is heaven, himself is a god. Perhaps should be better,
| for all of the humanity, to tone down this voice a little bit.
|
| Otherwise it leads to idiocracy.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I found this article to be excellent, unlike most commenters
| here, perhaps because I had not heard of the author before.
| Laying out how so many parts of the economy, health system,
| educational system, and entertainment industries used relatively
| new technology to keep on' running is a very interesting
| observation, and it is fascinating to see it all laid out in one
| concise piece like this.
| rickyci wrote:
| "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" kudos to technology
| for making us stronger in the face of COVID-19
| blackoil wrote:
| Andreessen's posts are strongly biased towards what is beneficial
| for his position.
|
| I have read a lot of his posts since 2008 and before. They are
| intelligent and insightful, but in hindsight lot of them were not
| best advice for founders/readers but best for the VC.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| Same goes for pg. And most other people, I suppose. It's hard
| to forgo self-interest.
| Fordec wrote:
| One's measure of these VCs changes quite distinctly when you
| change from viewing them through the prism of leaders of the
| industry to viewing them as self-interested marketeers acting
| as gatekeepers of a subset of wealth with the express purpose
| of their working role as the endeavor of inflating their own
| wealth.
|
| They haven't gone hungry in quite some time, and it's really
| been showing more and more as time goes on and their memories
| of when they started out are fading.
| klik99 wrote:
| The same is true for any VC blog, it's marketing - to both
| investors and founders. But you can be both biased and
| insightful! I found this essay very inspirational, we truly are
| living during exceptional times
|
| If you don't take into account bias and agendas when you read
| anything, you probably won't be a great founder.
| wangii wrote:
| indeed. I feel it's a lot more difficult to agree with the `SV
| elites` (az, pg, etc.) recently, wondering if I'm too old or
| they live in their own rdf.
| Swizec wrote:
| The world looks different from a throne.
|
| There was a great comment on reddit once that calculated a
| $50,000 car costs about the same to Jay-Z as a tank of gas
| does to a median person. That's a huge difference in
| perspective.
|
| Someone like az, pg, etc probably sees higher daily
| variations in their stock portfolio than my annual salary.
| Imagine what life is like when $200k rounds down to "daily
| noise"?
|
| For me, after lots of saving, those fluctuations are in the
| $300 range and even that changed my perspective and way of
| thinking. Very different feel than when I was starting out
| and having $300 felt like unimaginable wealth.
|
| For comparison, a $500 unexpected expense would bankrupt 41%
| of americans.
| Infinitesimus wrote:
| For anyone looking for the original comment about Jay-Z's
| wealth: https://reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2r8xoj
| /request_...
|
| It probably costs even less now given how much his wealth
| has grown
| shoto_io wrote:
| Of course. That's because they're a VC!
|
| In fact the first large VC who realized that having an own
| media outlet would benefit their startups immensely.
|
| https://fortune.com/2021/01/20/tech-and-crypto-funder-andree...
| d--b wrote:
| This is Andreessen trolling to get traffic on their new
| publication website... Obviously technology is not saving the
| world. Sure we made a vaccine for a disease that was bad. But
| technology is mostly responsible for propagating it in the first
| place.
|
| And climate change, you know.
|
| EDIT: also on HN front page, fully autonomous killer drones are
| being mass-produced.
| throwkeep wrote:
| Jon Stewart just made that point yesterday too:
|
| "I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science," Stewart
| said. "Science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of
| this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science."
| (1)
|
| I disagree with regard to climate change though because that
| externality has so far been a net positive for humanity and we
| can solve the downside. Yes, technology enabled us to dig up
| and burn buried carbon at scale sufficient to alter the
| climate, but that's what lifted billions out of poverty and
| eliminated starvation in much of the world. We'll solve the
| negative externality with renewable energy, clean nuclear
| energy, carbon capture, improved manufacturing efficiency and
| materials, etc.
|
| 1) https://news.yahoo.com/jon-stewart-endorses-lab-
| leak-1305162...
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > which was more than likely caused by science
|
| This is absolutely not true. There's zero evidence of a lab
| leak.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| _Easing_ starvation enabled more people to have offspring and
| that fact likely cause a swing in population which increased
| demand and use of fossil fuels.
|
| The possible outcomes of a a runaway population living on a
| planet with a runaway climate are likely harder to predict
| than a simpler and smaller system.
|
| I certainly do hope we can solve our problems with
| technology, but it will take concerted effort and unified
| attention to do so.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| hmm, I'm not sure I agree with all points made in this post,
| but surely two things can be true at once? In other words, yes
| technology introduces problems (possibly the pandemic, as you
| stated), but might it not also provide the remedy?
| osekkat wrote:
| >> yes technology introduces problems (possibly the pandemic,
| as you stated), but might it not also provide the remedy?
|
| Sure, but even with the "remedy" we still had 600k deaths in
| the US and 3.8M globally. Not to mention the other problems
| caused by technology that are don't have a remedy yet, aka
| Climate crisis. I do agree with the comment above that we
| can't technology our way out of the climate crisis.
| sbarre wrote:
| If you want to get super pedantic about it.. "Technology"
| doesn't do anything.
|
| Humans do stuff, using technology. Some of it good, some of
| it is bad.
|
| So it's really up to us, humans, to save the world. Or
| destroy it.
| megabless123 wrote:
| Exactly, humanity will not be able to "technology" itself out
| of the climate crisis. There's no better carbon removal
| technology than our most efficient trees.
| scatters wrote:
| Trees use the C3 pathway. There are much faster-growing plant
| species (for example bamboo, switchgrass) that could be
| incorporated into a BECCS process.
| cma wrote:
| Even were that true we'd be better off with fusion-powered
| stacked greenhouses of them.
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| This statement denies reason.
|
| There are plenty of ways in which we can technology our way
| out, even if we accept your premises (which, to be clear, I
| don't but I'm willing to play ball).
|
| Indeed, our _only_ option - save for some type of genocidal
| movement - is to technology ourselves out of the climate
| crisis.
|
| 1. Engineer trees that store more carbon in denser and long
| lasting root systems
|
| 2. Create drone systems to plant and maintain tons more trees
|
| 3. Improve energy capture technology to reduce our net new
| greenhouse gases
|
| 4. Create more efficient motors for the same reason as above
|
| 5. Create new recycling technologies so we can reuse more of
| the stuff we already have without mining more
|
| 6. Speaking of raw material acquisition, we can mine
| asteroids instead of our own planet
|
| 7. Transition more activities online to reduce the need for
| physical travel for more things
|
| 8. Hell, move more business to the internet to reduce the
| environmental footprint of office space
|
| Literally this list can go on and on. Technology is the only
| thing that fundamentally improves the trajectory of human
| society.
| swader999 wrote:
| It would be very simple, fast, effective and not costly to
| use airliners with sulfur added to their fuel to increase
| earth's albedo. Problem solved. Of course we don't want to
| do this but it is an option.
| factsaresacred wrote:
| A technology creates externalities. Another technology
| neutralizes those externalities.
|
| Given that we're unlikely (or unwilling) to put technological
| genies back in the bottle, what else can we hope for?
| mdorazio wrote:
| More responsible development & deployment of technology to
| avoid externalities in the first place?
| tigerBL00D wrote:
| In reality humans have a complicated relationship with
| technology. As much as it promises to save the world, technology
| is also what is increasingly over the last couple centuries
| threatening to destroy the world and our species. So technology
| may be saving the world, but largely from itself.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Do you want a nasty, brutish, and short life living in cave
| instead? Because everything better than that came from
| technology.
|
| And even stone age man had sufficient technology to extinctify
| other species.
| handrous wrote:
| You've at least twice on this story borrowed from Hobbes to
| dismiss posts expressing what amounts to, "maybe our
| relationship with technology is a bit complex, and a mixed
| bag, and worth some examination and consideration", as if you
| were responding to posts advocating full-on anarcho-
| primitivism. Why?
| streamofdigits wrote:
| a man's got to do what a man's got to do. talk up his book.
| cheerlead the workforce towards the next big thing etc.
|
| the fact is an idiotic strand of rna has defeated us all. our
| collective intelligence crumbled. toilet papers and flour
| disappeared from shelves and that was just the start.
|
| the billions of "supercomputers in our pockets": defanged,
| untrusted, unusable as a tool in the fight against the most
| simplistic of spreading algorithms
|
| the billions of "platform" users: amplifiers of deep and
| justified distrust, preventing even the miracle of quick vaccines
| (which was by no means a given) to reach the masses
|
| to be sure the systemic failure we witnessed is by far not just a
| "tech" or even V/C failure. you can try put lipstick on a pig.
| but "tech" was measured and came up short.
|
| for any thinking techie out there (and there are many) a time to
| reflect, then act
| [deleted]
| notdarkyet wrote:
| "Moderna, a product of the American venture capital system,
| created the first mRNA COVID vaccine within two days of receiving
| the genetic code for COVID by email."
|
| I love how the lab leak theory is now mainstream but everytime I
| brought that up along with where the sequencing came from I
| looked like a crackpot.
|
| That email and sequence came directly from China.
|
| Look at the Jan 11 note here: https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-
| work-potential-vaccine-ag...
| notdarkyet wrote:
| Please explain why anything said above is not factual rather
| than downvote?
| qq4 wrote:
| I believe you're being down voted because you haven't said
| anything of substance. You mentioned an anecdote and how the
| sequence reached Moderna. If you're implying something, maybe
| say that instead of baiting people to guess your position.
| aborsy wrote:
| Not yet.
|
| Much of the world doesn't yet have access to vaccine.
|
| Let's remind ourselves that, these technologies are products of
| decades of scientific effort funded by public. Many of these
| projects never pan out (public pays for risk). VC and private
| sector join only when technology is sufficiently mature, and will
| pocket the lion share of the profit. Even within the private
| sector, gains and risks of technology are not widely shared. This
| is how it works, but let's get the credit assignment right.
|
| Of course, technology also creates problems that are often passed
| to public (socialized risk, private profits), until the next
| iteration of the above process. Environmental damage is a case in
| point.
|
| So, yes, science and technology are wonderful, but let's share
| the productivity gains widely, and let us all contribute to the
| effort (directly, and through fair taxation and policies).
| carapace wrote:
| (With apologies to those that have heard it before) Bucky Fuller
| (an engineer) calculated that we would have by sometime in the
| 1970's all the technology necessary to create a kind of secular
| utopia if we applied our knowledge to solving our problems
| _efficiently_.
|
| We could each work for two years and then retire having paid for
| the rest of our lives during that two-year career.
|
| This happened more or less right on schedule (the technological
| advances, not the social/economic shift.)
|
| Ergo, our problems now are not physical, they are
| mental/emotional. The only thing holding us back is ourselves and
| our (regressive or at least complacent) attitudes and beliefs.
|
| - - - -
|
| As an aside, "But yet, one gets the sense that Pandora's box has
| been opened." That's not the right metaphor. The box Pandora
| opened was filled with evil demons.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There are a _lot_ more people alive today than in the 1970s.
| carapace wrote:
| True. So we work for _three_ years, eh?
|
| More seriously, you're correct that population pressure is
| one of the main problems that could derail a techno-utopian
| scenario. Fortunately, population seems to be leveling off.
|
| I like to joke that the Amish are the "meek" who will
| "inherit the earth", as they are fantastic farmers and still
| have large families. But there's an element of truth to the
| joke: if most folks stop increasing their own population, but
| a few (like the Amish) don't, then in the fullness of time
| they would eventually, uh, overrun the rest of us regardless
| of any particular technological change.
| handrous wrote:
| Aside from the usual hedonic treadmill explanation, a lot of
| our problems with ever-inflating costs are due to competition
| for limited goods-- _especially_ those conferring advantage to
| our kids. Houses in good school districts, private school
| slots, various expensive activities that make getting into top-
| tier colleges more likely, et c.
|
| Two-income households? Now you're richer? LOL no, just more
| money lost to zero-sum competition. Making retirement
| contributions voluntary? Oh great, now my competitors who
| choose not to save well can out-compete me for advantage for
| their children _now_ , thanks a bunch. And so on.
| carapace wrote:
| FWIW Bucky meant that we could eliminate poverty and
| starvation, not that we could supply unbounded luxuries.
|
| The rise of non-fungible tokens shows that folks will find
| ways to compete for limited resources, even if they have to
| dream them up.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Arms races, the growing search space for attack asymmetries,
| and the ever increasing mobility of capital paired with the
| inherent centralization of returns due to computing.
|
| Housing price inflation and advantages to children are
| examples of figurative arms races. And you're right, it's
| destroying our societies.
|
| Cyberwarfare and military buildups are actual arms races.
| Defence is getting more and more expensive. Globally,
| cybersecurity spending is going north of $1T, and I doubt it
| will ever decrease.
|
| What we have is a coordination or alignment problem. If we
| could get values aligned enough to coordinate more
| effectively we wouldn't have such an insane world.
|
| And as an aside, I highly doubt we'll be able to solve the
| alignment problem with AI. Either the AGI is going to want to
| coordinate due to its own character, or it won't, and short
| of putting it in some unobservable virtual machine and
| testing it to, say, see if it would give up its life for its
| friend; I don't know what else you could do to really know
| how deeply embedded its values are.
| bob33212 wrote:
| The ultimate question for humanity is what happens when we can
| fix this. It will first start with extreme mental issues (
| addiction, the suicidal, the pedophiles). But eventually it
| gets to "Should children born with a desire to be the best at
| any cost be 'fixed' to remove that desire?" Are we still human
| when we remove the tribal and lizard brain desires that
| dominate human activity today?
| mrfusion wrote:
| He seems to ignore Florida, Texas, etc who did just fine before
| the "technology" was ready.
|
| Edit sorry to offend but his false dichotomy of five years of
| lockdown without a vaccine just rubs me the wrong way.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| "Knowledge work simply kept going on" - or maybe it simply is
| irrelevant? We're just shuffling papers, what really matters is
| on what car we spend our money on, or what chinese crap we buy
| off amazon.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| I love me some technology, don't get me wrong.
|
| But if the lab-leak hypothesis turns out to be correct than
| technology is undoubtedly the very thing that put the world in
| peril in the first place, as far as COVID-19 is concerned, before
| you even consider increased air travel and globalization
| encouraging/increasing the instant spread of modern pathogens.
| hairytrog wrote:
| Maybe this will play out like nuclear technologies. Incredible
| potential for good also means incredible potential for bad. For
| nuclear, the good was roughly limitless energy at very low
| environmental cost and low human labor. The bad was nuclear
| weapons material and nuclear accidents. After the accidents,
| the nuclear industry in advanced countries basically goes into
| sleep mode, maintaining existing assets, but unable to expand
| or grow. Perhaps the lab-leak will have the same result for
| biomed sciences. Accident leads to millions or tens of millions
| of deaths and industry must go into stasis. You might say the
| gain-of-function research is sufficiently differentiated from
| normal biomedical research that they don't get grouped
| together. But I doubt it. You can probably do gain-of-function
| in any old bio lab. The only thing stopping it is the good
| intentions of the users.
|
| The effort to cause massive societal disruption and destruction
| is so much easier for bio based weapons than for nuclear. In
| nuclear, you need so many things to line up if you're building
| a weapon from obtaining the requisite materials, enrichment,
| weapon design and electronics, delivery vehicles; and so many
| things to go wrong if you are going to have a consequential
| nuclear accident. In contrast, bio weapons can be developed in
| a dinky lab, deployed, and then self-propagate worldwide.
| onion2k wrote:
| _if the lab-leak hypothesis turns out to be correct than
| technology is undoubtedly the very thing that put the world in
| peril in the first place_
|
| Whatever lessons we might learn if it were to turn out that
| COVID is a human-made experiment are lessons we should be
| taking heed of even if it isn't.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| Absolutely! Not to mention that we _already_ have very strong
| evidence that dangerous pathogens have escaped from _other_
| labs in the past.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Eh, not really more so than usual. We've probably had fewer the
| last 100 years due to better tech and science. Pandemics have
| always been a civilizational challenge, often caused by
| technology, greed and hubris. Making it in a lab (unlikely, but
| theoretically possible) and transporting it by air instead of
| doing both in the hull of a galley is just a new twist that
| enabled greater scale.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Ironically, it is technology that gets the world out of these
| perils, too. I get your point though, nature could only fuel so
| much growth before it irreversibly changes course and stops
| sustaining life as we know it.
| mempko wrote:
| >Moderna, a product of the American venture capital system
|
| Moderna got a government grant to do the mRNA work didn't they?
| Seems a product of public investment.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/years-of-research-laid-g...
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/24/fac...
|
| https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
| simonsarris wrote:
| No, they got an enormous amount of VC money for years. They
| reached a $1 billion valuation in just two years after founding
| (2012), faster than Uber/Dropbox/Lyft etc did.
| mempko wrote:
| Ok, but ...
|
| https://seekingalpha.com/news/3609955-moderna-failed-to-
| disc...
|
| And Derrick Rossi's research was publicly funded which led to
| creation of Moderna...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Rossi
|
| > Rossi based his developments on the results of Katalin
| Kariko and Drew Weissman on mRNA. He succeeded in finding
| investors for his plans to transfer these findings into new
| medications and vaccinations by founding Moderna
|
| This is a tale as old as time. Government funds labs which
| invent and discover. VCs then fund companies to exploit and
| make money off publicly discovered work.
| jaypeg25 wrote:
| You're taking a pretty pessimistic view of the funding and
| R&D process. A good idea with initial funding by the
| government is useless if the VC funding doesn't bring the
| idea to the finish line. The government can't afford to
| (and shouldn't) fund every good idea to their finish line.
| mempko wrote:
| It's not pessimistic, just a fact of the R&D process.
| Public takes the risk, reward is privatized. Otherwise
| the VC model wouldn't work since most research doesn't
| fall within the horizon of a VC fund's lifetime.
| mavhc wrote:
| That's how it's set up to work, government does the early
| work because it's not profitable for a company, we all pay
| into that work so we have the new technology sooner.
|
| See: the internet, railways, computers, everything.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| In the real world, both government grants and VC funding
| create great things.
|
| If your political views make you want to diminish the
| importance of either, then perhaps it's time to update
| those views.
| mempko wrote:
| I'm trying to create a more balanced view. Andreessen
| made a claim that is completely false.
|
| > Moderna, a product of the American venture capital
| system -- Andreessen
|
| Where is he talking about the importance of government
| grants?
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| Yep this. The actual nose to the grindstone basic research
| work is often publicly funded but the VC fundraising
| bragging is often things like jets and swanky offices. The
| un-sexy work of doing basic research is not something
| capitalism handles well at all and we expect the government
| to subsidize it so the VCs can walk in, claim the work of
| their own, claim it was done via capitalism and the VC
| process, and then sell themselves as our saviors by
| creating media outlets that serve them. This is very
| dystopian and anti-government.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Technology accelerates change at an accelerated rate. While this
| could be beneficial to society, the main driver of innovation or
| creation of technology remains capitalism.
|
| Guy Kawasaki has made some great points about how a business,
| founded in capitalism, should find purpose to make the world a
| better place. In many cases those changes brought on by a given
| technology isn't obvious until the technology has been adopted in
| a widespread way.
|
| Facebook may "help" people connect and discuss important matters,
| but it also created a conduit (deluge) of information which
| hijacks people's attention away from things that may serve them
| better in the long run. It's when technology like Facebook,
| Twitter and other social media platforms _push_ data to us that
| we give way, emotionally, to the influence.
|
| When emotions get involved, attention is diverted.
| julbaxter wrote:
| "Technology has become the idol of our society, but technological
| progress is--more often than not--aimed at solving problems
| caused by earlier technical inventions."
|
| "Interesting possibilities arise when you combine old technology
| with new knowledge and new materials, or when you apply old
| concepts and traditional knowledge to modern technology."
|
| Quotes from https://www.lowtechmagazine.com
| mavhc wrote:
| Isn't that the case for anything though? New problems only
| occur because of a previous change, and change usually only
| happens due to technology
| arvinsim wrote:
| You could say tech fosters a dependency on itself by people to
| sustain itself.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I opt for technology rather than leading a nasty, brutish and
| short life.
| _Microft wrote:
| I do not read something like that out of that quote.
|
| Vaccines, emergency medicine, construction or farming
| equipment, all these things that make life easier, healthier
| and longer are not what GPs comment was about.
|
| It talked about technology that was needed to fix problems
| created by earlier technology (think: someone has to write an
| ad-blocker because someone else optimized distributing
| advertisements).
| WalterBright wrote:
| Um, these technologies enable a larger human population,
| which then causes problems. Tractors enable ever larger
| tracts of the best land to be devoted to farming, to enable
| a larger population, to need more land to cultivate, etc.
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| This presupposes two questionable assumptions: that you have
| any choice in the matter, and that technology itself isn't
| the thing that is making your life nasty, brutish, and short.
| thedogeye wrote:
| Before the industrial revolution 25% of deaths were
| homicide.
| h2odragon wrote:
| "we thought the world was gonna end, it didn't because we saved
| us!" ... or, possibly, the world wasn't going to end in the first
| place, and y'all selling fear caused much of the harm you're so
| proud to have mitigated now...
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