Solving All the Wrong Problems
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But more importantly, writing like this makes a fundamental mistake about how humanity moves forward. We don't do it efficiently, moving in a straight line. We do it while wasting tons of effort. A bit like the media. We could turn Allison's own criticism against her with an article about media coverage entitled: Writing All the Wrong Articles.
If you look at any website, there is remarkably little news, and a whole lot of speculation, various ill-informed opinion pieces and other forms of clickbait. Waste is just part of human activity. You need to make mistakes before you get them right.
Also, many startups create solutions that are appropriate for niches that any given newspaper columnist may not occupy. They look useless from the outside, but may serve their target well.
Finally, the author doesn't even address the fact that industries core to human wellbeing, such as healthcare, are among the most heavily regulated. Founding a healthcare startup is a good way to waste 10 years of your life navigating obscure laws that impose a heavy compliance burden. And that is not startups' fault, it's the fault of lawmakers and industry lobbyists.
Ha! I've used the exact same characterization.
Anyway, this seems entirely predictable given a couple different considerations.
1) People are most apt to effectively solve problems for which they have some context.
2) People who are underserved or otherwise have "real problems" don't often have much overlap with people who have discretionary money to pay for solutions.
So you end up with a selection bias in the pool of problem solvers (and thus the scope of addressable problems) and a selection bias in the expectation for investment returns. Which results in the best minds of our generation crunching all manner of machine learning models to make it so we don't have to do something mundane like selecting an outfit to wear that's color and style coordinated.
Washing machines, kitchen appliances and similar technological advances, freed up our at home time so much that we can put a whole nother 50% of the population through college. A whole 50% of the population that can get jobs, have careers, and do cool shit, who was stuck wiping men's proverbial bottoms until the 1950's.
Making free time free is a good thing. There's no telling what will come of it.
Think of it this way: how much time saved on menial stuff will be freed up to go solve the so called more pressing problems? If anything, the problem is that we're thinking up wasteful ways of filling this time even faster than we're freeing the time itself up.
Assuming parking only once a week for each vehicle, that's over 60,000 hours of saved time per day. That engineer's time investment is virtually free in comparison.
Of course these savings will only materialize after parking technology becomes commoditized. Commoditization is part of tech progress.
That complicated stuff with associated costs might benefit middle class and up. The few who buy it among them. Many will also want the pride of parking themselves, distrust the technology, and so on. You're not saving 60,000 hours a day so much as a tiny faction of it. If you succeed where others failed for a few decades worth of PhD hours on computer vision, pathfinding, robotics, etc.
Simplifications in this thread are way off. The real world involves interplay of the technical capabilities, whatever regulations will be, finances, and social factors.
1 If some scientist finds a way to save a minute per instance of brushing your teeth, and if there is no difference in quality and cost, that is 600 million+ minutes saved every day in the US alone.
2 If some scientist finds a way for nocturnal people to contribute to society like other people, that is surely on the same magnitude as 1.
3 If some scientist finds some way to cut 10% of time on inspecting welds, it is surely a huge boost to the economy.
This is of course not meant to endorse situations where the quality drops. E.g. "If one cent is saved per unit of milk produced, I can buy a new yacht!"
A human, due to real constraints can't do a whole lot with an extra minute per day, and humans as a social body due to real constraints can't effectively collectively block-allocate 600 million diffuse minutes to some other cause. Each of them can only reallocate the minute they own/save.
The units and the distribution matter here... a lot. This seems obvious enough to illustrate using your own narrative.
What if I saved 6 Billion people 1ms per day? That's nearly 70 aggregated whole days saved per day. What are you going to spend your newly found 1ms on?
The technology that really saved time was modern food procurement(the supermarket, or food that was ready to bring home with a short walk to a few stores.
And women, they wanted to work. I remember my mom had a lot of time on her hands, but it wasen't due to appliances.
When she got a career, she was happy at first, but then missed all the free time she had when she was a housewife.
And honestly, that concerns almost everything around me, except a fridge, a stove and a washing machine.
(If you're interested, the word "windfall" is of similar origin. It refers to fruit shaken loose of the tree by a stiff wind, thus requiring no effort to collect beyond that involved in simply bending to pick it up.)
Jeopardy style answer/question: "Why is diversity important?"
They are very well received, saves fuel (and thereby CO2) and gives cleaner air indoors.
And, yes: people with money are buying them.
It makes me sad that some of the smartest people in the world are at Google and FB getting people to click ads.
The problem with this type of article is that it conflates all the struggling little startups with the unicorns who are actually making a lot of money. These big companies probably should grow a conscience, but it's not really in their DNA, because if they had been socially conscious from the beginning they never would have succeeded. Meanwhile, all these little companies are in a life or death struggle on a daily basis, so they have to do the thing which gives them a chance to survive til tomorrow. Don't get me wrong, I recognize the privilege of people who get to join a high-risk startup, but just because they are individually privileged with that freedom does not mean that they have the power to actually push our culture to a more socialist mentality. I don't use the word "socialist" as an epithet here BTW, despite American political dog whistles, I think the growing income gap is evidence that we have a real lack of social conscience throughout society.
"The article would much rather focus on an incredibly narrow band of startups that are easy to poke fun at and prove the point."
The article does narrow it a bit but it's overall claim appears to be true. Most startups seem to target either frivilous stuff, stuff useful for businesses, or stuff appealing to middle class and up. That's almost everything I see here and with other sites. That poor are a smaller, troublesome market might be decent reason for many to focus on another segment. It seems that they do from what sample of startups I've seen.
I don't have hard data on the subject, though. I'm not sure how I'd even measure it outside maybe a survey of various startups' demographics of customers tracking what percent sell significantly to the poor. Success might be that hitting a certain percentage or going up over time.
This is drifting pretty far from the article in my opinion which focussed almost entirely on frivolous stuff. The article only obliquely lamented that lower classes don't have enough focus put on them. It mostly seemed to be claiming that it's all frivolous stuff, these last 2 categories are the things I think the article narrowed it's sites to avoid.
You could and there is. The poor still have disposable income they spend on same kinds of things as the middle class. They just collectively buy less of it. Gadgets, apps (esp mobile but also desktop), tax preparation, car work, house-hold appliances... quite a lot of startup potentials. The thing is the product/service has to have marketing or options for that demographic, it has to be good (esp convenient), and has to be affordable. Affordable, not cheap, as they buy both. ;)
That there's products that form in these spaces for the poor show me people are willing to do it and they make money. There's just rarely Silicon Valley startups targeting it. Also rarely best and brightest in general targeting it. Often average bootstrappers or startups putting together whatever they can once they know a problem exists. Sometimes it's an existing company doing a profitable side-project like one, tax service that cost about $25 a year but was owned by a solar company (?!). In that case, software worked like what H&R block people use but simpler with many, local users. SV could've easily made that.
Can you name one?
Apple - my mom never made me any electronics equipment Tesla - my mom never made me a car
You can find many more by googling things like:
Silicon Valley enterprise companies Silicon Valley hardware companies Silicon Valley med tech companies
etc
I'm sure some variant of this story could have been written at any time during the rise of global capitalism, yet the world has, by just about any measure, become a radically better place during just about any 25 year time frime. Show me a chart on https://ourworldindata.org/ where anything has gotten worse - from America to places once considered irredeemably "third world", just about anything we can measure is improving. We don't need concern trolls on high horses to make the world a better place.
The whole article is a fantastic example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. It finds a bunch of ideas that fit the authors thesis and ignores the thousands of companies working on hard problems that impact nearly everybody.
Even the examples in the article are sharpshooters. They drew a circle around a set of people and held them out as support for the idea that tech startups are solely focused one demographic. It's bad logic, but it's also wrong.
Single mothers? There's a whole litany of apps targeted at them. Like SupportPay (https://supportpay.com) for child support collections. Or CareLulu (http://carelulu.com) for finding child care options. The rest of the list (rural poor, out of work Americans over 50, and veterans) can all very much benefit from the huge number of startups trying to make educational accessible over the Internet.
Energy startups are out there trying to help folks shave dollars off their energy bills (shamless plug: I work for Gridium at https://gridium.com - check us out!). Healthcare startups are out there trying to solve hard problems with medical record keeping and information access.
Hell those inwardly focused tech companies like Stripe and Gusto have made starting a small business the easiest it's ever been. Want to solve problems for veterans and the out of work over 50 crowd? Remove the friction around starting a small business and let them put a lifetime of experience and knowledge to work.
So ya some people are out there trying to solve the small problems. That's great, because sometimes solving a small problem leads to a big one. Amazon went from selling books to completely redefining how commerce happens for a large number of people. Solving those small problems also creates a class of person with experience in company building. Maybe they'll put that towards solving those generational problems in a couple of years.
Typically, the largest group of students in open online courses like MOOCs are those from privileged backgrounds, like white males, and those who already have high or relatively high levels of education. Certainly, I still believe that these online courses are an amazing resource but they haven't been shown to increase access in ways that people hoped. There are dozens of reasons for this.
I think the real problem is that some startups are unable to recognize exactly what problems they are solving and for whom they are solving them. Extra disposable income from driveways is good, as are promoting healthy drinking habits. However, there's a very real chance that these potentially useful tools never reach the audiences where they would be most impactful.
For example, it seems like the people who could most benefit from extra income from rentable driveways are most likely to live in areas that are less desirable (high crime rates), are not even likely to have a driveway (apartments). Now, I have no idea what app this even is referring to, to be clear. This is just a potential situation.
"At one point, his interviewer asked the question that is on all our minds: “Should wise people have known better?” Of course, they should have, Buffett replied, but there’s a “natural progression” to how good new ideas go wrong. He called this progression the “three I’s.” First come the innovators, who see opportunities that others don’t. Then come the imitators, who copy what the innovators have done. And then come the idiots, whose avarice undoes the very innovations they are trying to use to get rich."
Source : https://hbr.org/2008/10/wisdom-of-warren-buffet-on-imi
Cloud computing, big data, social media, and most of tech is in a prolonged idiot phase. A new paradigm will be ushered in and the cycle will begin again. Any more detail just highlights or attempts to justify the idiocy.
I found this quote puzzling in light of the rest of the article. The author's main argument seems to be that tech "innovators" are focused on providing frivolous solutions to imaginary problems, while society crumbles in the background. But this quote -unless I'm misunderstanding it - ascribes a hugely far-reaching, dystopian power to technology that undercuts her overall point.
You can't have it both ways. Either tech products are mostly irrelevant, or they are fundamentally changing the most basic aspects of our existence. Which is it?
Hundreds of millions of people, at least, now experience a social world whose existence and interactions are mediated by a single, rather secretive, advertising company. I'd call that both a relevant and a fundamental change.
Perhaps I'm living under a rock but it seems to me that the great majority of tech companies and their employees (including me) are working on things that aren't very important in the scheme of things. Which is fine.
What isn't fine are the delusions of grandeur. Especially when people are actually buying into it. I hadn't realized how crazy stuff had got until I read this, from one of our own homegrown entrepreneurs:
https://blog.websummit.net/maths-and-conferences-lanyards-an...
Maybe I should have been watching Silicon Valley on TV.
Companies promise to make money by offering valuable goods and services to customers. "Making the world a better place" is just Silicon Valley hype. Companies aren't non-profits.
I don't know about your radar but my world is a pretty great place.
I can summon an Uber for myself or anyone else, get packages the next day at a fixed cost, live in a cash-less, paper-less world if I choose to, download a book 1 minute after learning about it while on the subway and have someone read it to me in a soothing tone, listen to my favorite writers and journalist on demand as they give away their wisdom for free all queued up on my infinite storage phone.
why pick and choose small niche startups for this article? what about self driving cars, 3d printing, VR, crypto currency or machine learning?
1. Some populations are underserved because they aren't sexy and high profile and interesting.
2. Some apps are solving small problems instead of tackling global warming.
The truth is that many (perhaps all) of those apps will fail, and if any succeed, most of the successes will be kind of marginal successes that don't upend the world. So what? That's how it works most of the time -- small incremental improvements to people's lives.
First of all, the implicit idea that the founders of these companies are all like, "Oh, hey, I have ten really highly functional business plans for bringing an app to profitability, and I'll reject the ones serving population X because I think it's 5% less profitable than the ones serving population Y" is dumb.
Second, the idea that that writer can identify the "right" populations and problems is risible.
And, to be clear, she absolutely is complaining that people are attacking small problems instead of global warming. She explicitly calls out rising sea levels.
And while a few of the services he identifies are targeted to a rich userbase (such as: locating rentable yachts, and probably the drone filming service, and the valet parking one), plenty of others aren't. The one about renting driveways is probably mostly enabling people who are relatively low-income for the area they live in to monetize an unused asset. Getting a new toothbrush addresses a need everyone has. Getting killed by the police is a problem faced disproportionately by lower-income people and minorities.
There are lots of false steps towards progress, and like I said, probably most or all of those will fail. But we've seen time and time again that top down direction to only focus on what some member of the cultural elite deems important is a recipe for disaster.
Isn't that precisely what VCs do when assessing the viability of a startup?
But we've seen time and time again that top down direction to only focus on what some member of the cultural elite deems important is a recipe for disaster.
NYT writers may be part of the cultural elite, but software engineers in San Francisco, by dint of their economic power and education levels, are arguably part of it as well. The VCs and startup financial and management classes are definitely so.
And not every tech idea is or should be VC-backed.
Software engineers are clearly in the cultural elite. And if any software engineer was in the business of telling people "I know what the right population and right problems are," they'd be idiots, too.
Note that that's distinct from, "I have AN idea that I think I can turn into a successful business, by targeting problem X of population Y" which says nothing about the universe of ideas.
It would be as easy to deride the early plans of Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia as what the author does here (finding better kitten pictures, sharing kitten pictures with your sorority, peddling misinformation to your middle school teacher).
I fail to see how skin color, gender and "safeness," whatever the hell that is, implies someone has a "reduced" ability to detect and solve important problems. If you actually look for it, you will find many examples of people with the superficial characteristics you describe, and find that not only are they an extremely "diverse" group of people -- in the characteristics that truly matter -- but that they are doing precisely the kind of work that I think you speak of.
Why stop at people in "our field"? What about all of the people who possess the superficial characteristics you mention, but who also share an extraordinary amount of "diversity" and have had extraordinary success in treating important problems -- outside of "our field"? Doctors, scientists, engineers ... all over the world ... truly seek to make the world a better place.
Frankly I'm sick of the notion that "white, male and safe" implies a lack of diversity and a lack of ability or desire to detect ... whatever problems you have.
† https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation
†† http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm (search 'Software developers, applications and systems software')
Edit: To be clear I used those examples because they are the majority in America (which I should have been more clear about) in an effort to point out that the majority often does not pay as close attention to the problems that arise from being in a minority.
What you said was both racist and sexist. You're saying that a group of people (based on race and sex) are "not going to ..." do something. Speaking in generalizations using these classifications is generally regarded by most folks as racist/sexist.
It can be tricky though. You might be right, but you'll still be called out for it. For example, the peoples of eastern asia are statistically less tall than their counterparts in western europe. Nevertheless, "asians are shorter than europeans", is still a racist statement.
Unless you can see, as well as explain, how the generalizations you're making benefit the conversation, it's probably best to avoid making those types of statements in the first place.
Racism itself might be "wrong", but that doesn't mean you can't be racist and still be "right" in your assertions. That's the tricky part.
"Racism" (note the -ism to denote a system) requires a social, political and/or economic system by which a dominant group retains power over other groups. By that widely-held definition, it's literally impossible for a non-member of the dominant group to exhibit racism.
Look, it's simple.
The "right" problems tend to be hard problems, otherwise they wouldn't be problems anymore.
Hard problems are hard to solve not because they require a lot of focus, otherwise spending more money on solving cancer would have solved the problem a long time ago.
Hard problems are hard to solve because the solutions are not obvious, and they require serendipity. Quote from Matt Ridley:
"Gutenberg made printed books cheap, which triggered a rise in literacy, which created a market for spectacles, which led to the invention of microscopes and telescopes, which led to the discovery that the earth went round the sun."
If the path to the solution to those problems was obvious, yeah, it would make sense to criticize "superfluous" stuff.
Until then, find more interesting subjects for your op-eds.
All problems are relative to your frame of reference. For someone who always lived with access to basic needs, some problems might be crippling enough to cause significant impact.
Yeah you can have food, medical care, and a house, but if you take 2h commuting each way to work you'll probably feel miserable. If you have a crippled or distant social network, despite having all physical basic needs, Social Networking tools might be lifesaving for you (eg. depression, isolation).
And I've heard this quite some times: "Todays developed world problems, are going to be tomorrows developing world problems."
Perhaps universal basic income or other stimulus programs that will put dollars in the hands of those people, and then companies can compete for those dollars.
I'm lucky enough to be well-off in many regards that I can freely spend 20-30 hours a week to design/code projects that will hopefully have a meaningful impact to people in my city, specifically increasing awareness of mental health and injustice towards people of color. But I'm not being paid for it, nor is anyone here capable of giving me a salary/donation that comes even close to what I'd earn at a tech startup. The government is also pretty limited to how much they'd provide as a grant.
I'm reminded of an organization here that created a platform to enable non-profits find and manage volunteers, which has clear efficiency benefits for organizations since the process can be very messy. But because organizations can't really pay them that much, they are limited as to how quickly they can expand the team and add new features. Given the limits of their market, no 'investor' is going to invest in them in the hopes of expecting a meaningful financial return.
I'm not sure where I'm going with my train of thought. Maybe something like it'd be nice if there were a non-VC model that enabled groups to work on projects that had no clear profit model? I know the U.S. has organizations that give grants to transformative projects, like the Sunlight and Knight Foundation. Sadly, not every country is lucky enough to have something like that.
We all understand the act of (unjustified) police killings is a bad one, but how much of a _problem_ is it? Look at the evidence.
Then look at all of the other problems that we all face, not just in the states, but worldwide. I can name a great problem that almost all of us should be focusing on: global warming. Why don't we spend our energy on a significant and catastrophic problem?
We need to prioritize. Anyone who tries to up or downplay something as a problem to you might have their own agenda, or have bought into someone else's agenda. Don't just believe me. Look for the evidence.
It's possible to do this without ignoring other issues.
But, and this is a big but, the vast majority of people go to work every day and do very little of importance. 99% of people are not changing the world, for the better or otherwise. All the people making coffee, serving food, pushing paper at the DMV, driving trucks, driving cabs, trimming trees and mowing lawns, writing articles for the NYTimes, etc. they aren't changing the world and they aren't making a significant difference in the lives of the least privileged (except maybe themselves and their own families, if they're in that category).
No one writes articles lamenting the fact that a barista isn't changing the world. So, why do techies get blamed for lack of world-changing work?
I'm not saying I disagree, per se. I just wonder what makes us (in the broad use of "us" here, to mean anyone who builds technology for a living) that we get tasked with fixing the world? Maybe it's the way tech entrepreneurs often hype the products of their labor as being world-changing...even while probably knowing it's merely a historical footnote, if even that, in the grand scheme of things.
I want to make a positive impact on the world with my work, sure, but I also find I have to make economic decisions not unlike people who go to a regular job every day. I have to work on problems that I don't consider important, sometimes, just because I know it will keep my rent paid and food on my table this month. I'm not gonna feel guilty for that, but I also would love to know what the author proposes be done to make it so I don't have to worry about stuff like that and can go back to important but not profitable problems.
Rant:
Often those who seem to be making a difference are just those we notice because they are making the biggest mess. Some companies operate like speedboats tearing through no wake zone. Isn't it grand how fast they go? Behind them is a trail of senseless destruction that they care not to see. Just because you make money doesn't mean its good. If we don't relearn to regulate ourselves this way we risk social order. Inequality will rise. Human interaction will be mediated by corporate lords. Then everything will start to smell. People are going to revolt, and nobody is going to have a nice time.
Ahem ahem...
Because there's a visceral, emotional response people get when they see the amount that we're being paid to work and the capital that's being poured into what looks like frivolous trivialities. Artless commerce. If we weren't here the focus would remain on Wall Street, except CDOs and complex financial instruments are trickier to reduce to absurdity in the NYT op-eds.
None of this is to say that tech can't change the world for the better but that the tech community gets a lot of monetary and prestige benefits that derive from these arguments so we shouldn't be surprised when people want to see results.
Edited to add: Wall Street never tried to get the mileage we get out of "no really, we might get rich but the whole world is a better place for it".
Because:
-- we are the ones who have the intellectual abilities to do it,
-- we are the ones who received an education allowing us to do it,
-- our companies and a fair number of us pretend to do it and yell it everywhere,
-- an insane amount of money is poured in companies and projects we work for, and most of these companies and projects are either useless or harmful.
This set makes a big difference with people who are just in charge of making the world go round day after day, and who just do it well. Those do not disappoint. Those do not deceive.
The most important thing in the world is love.
The most cherished thing in the world is a memory of a loved one.
Idea! I must make an app that helps me take pictures of loved ones, and share them with other loved ones.
If you hint at dating startups, here two texts why this is difficult:
The joke is (I hate explaining these): the most overdone app, exemplifying the NYtimes article, that I can think of is a photosharing app.
And then I worked back into how a photosharing app is what the article is encouraging us to create.
Although a dating app joke would have worked just as well, and I suspect wolfgke was implying that.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/microsoftpi...
I'm sure there are many innovative companies silently changing the world in their own small way, we just don't see them because they're not marketing themselves towards individual consumers through tv commercials, online ads, etc.
If you think about it, this moral duplicity is behind majority of SV mockery, like the TV show or this article.
-Marshall McLuhan
Yes please. So I can have more time to solve bigger, and more challenging problems...
I don't understand how we can even tackle these harder problems if we're spending so much time on mundane chores.. it all adds up.
The problem is: According to Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point...) there are three kind of people that one have to reach to become viral (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point...):
"Connectors are the people in a community who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions. A connector is essentially the social equivalent of a computer network hub. They usually know people across an array of social, cultural, professional, and economic circles, and make a habit of introducing people who work or live in different circles. [...]"
"Mavens are "information specialists", or "people we rely upon to connect us with new information".[4] They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others."
"Salesmen are "persuaders", charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They tend to have an indefinable trait that goes beyond what they say, which makes others want to agree with them."
Unluckily the groups in the quote above do not fall into these three classes. The problem really is if you start a startup you make a bet that in a rather short time (until money runs out) you will reach a critical mass of people for the startup to become self-sustained (or at least get enough customers such that you can get further funding). Obtaining such a critical mass in a short time is much easier if you concentrate on Malcolm Gladwell's three classes of people than on "single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over 50". Also the opposite holds: If these groups want to stop the "misfortune of being insufficiently interesting" they really should think how they can become a member of the three groups.
A service that sends someone to fill your car with gas.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-02/gas-delive...
A service that sends a valet on a scooter to you, wherever you are, to park your car.
A service that will film anything you desire with a drone.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/03/droners-is-a-market...
A service that will pack your suitcase — virtually.
A service that delivers a new toothbrush head to your mailbox every three months.
A service that delivers your beer right to your door.
An app that analyzes the quality of your French kissing.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifrenchkiss-french-kissing/i...
A “smart” button and zipper that alerts you if your fly is down.
https://www.fastcodesign.com/3060268/brilliant-this-zipper-w...
An app with speaker that plays music from within a mother’s vaginal walls to her unborn baby.
https://www.babypod.net/en/babypod/
A sensor placed in your child’s diaper that sends you an alert when the diaper needs changing.
https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/advisor/smart-diaper-ale...
An app that lets us brew our coffee from anywhere.
A refrigerator advertised as “the Family Hub” that promises to act as a personal assistant, message board, stereo and photo album.
http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/family-hub-refrigerator/
An app to locate rentable driveways for parking.
https://www.justpark.com/rent-out-a-parking-space/
An app to locate rentable yachts.
WTF? An app to help you understand “cause and effect in your life.”
An app that guides mindful meditation.
An app that imparts wisdom.
And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police killings.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/zenta-stress-emotion-mana...
It seems geared toward helping users become more aware of the impact their habits have on their well-being & emotions. The description in the article makes it easy to dismiss, but speaking from the standpoint of someone who's been emotionally disconnected for 20 years through information addiction (yep...it's a thing, complete with withdrawal symptoms) until earlier this year, there's a huge market.
I'm only just starting to learn how to recognize my emotions in the moment. Anxiety was so pervasive, it was my norm. Now, my struggle is to identify when I'm getting anxious because it's a vital signal from my body telling me there's a need of mine that I'm overlooking (another thing I'm just starting to learn).
It's why I'm considering getting a Microsoft Band 2 to help monitor my heart rate & sleeping habits.
She just seems to have such a curmudgeonly attitude, where all people must be working to solve her favourite enormous issues and never to slightly enhance the lives of some customers.
I know there is some truth to the criticism of current tech-startup scene in SV. Most startups are without much potential or without much creative juice (e.g. "we will fill your car's tank for you" type). But there are some which have very large disruptive and creative potential. Elon Musk comes to my mind, to begin with. Boston Dynamics is another.
This article also reminds me a personality trait that makes some people always complain with "whatever happened to good old days". Seems that people like this article author, want us to prepare our meals the way you see a person is seen doing in this video [1].
(Disclaimer: I have no disrespect to the person in that video [1], I just want to point out that I don't want to live like that and I wish to point out a fallacy in the article.)
Such people always seem to complain: Whatever happened to the good old days and good old ways of doing things? All the while, seemingly unaware of the fact that they themselves have become so much used to the technology.
Of course, it is apparent that she doesn't realize that without the very technology and the very technology creators she is so happy to criticize, she would not have been able to put her photo along with the article she has written/typed.
Since when and why has the ability to publish our photos along with articles become so critical for us? and for such writers? So much for the person criticizing the technology creators from self-assumed higher moral ground.