> Like a building full of PhD's advanced.
On a more serious note, it's unfortunate that so many smart people use their intelligence to enable this kind of gross technology. It's all about "solving puzzles" rather than making the world a better place. There's gotta be more productive ways to advance your career.
I'd figure it's more about getting paid. Making the world better usually doesn't make anyone money, or at least, costs too much before it starts making anyone money.
Making the world truly better requires us to give up a lot of what gets ingrained into us since childhood. We've made money an ends instead of a means. I'm not making a political statement – this is true of every human society, culture and country today. We should collectively rethink what it means to be a successful human and have a fulfilling life (without abandoning technology and progress.)
What's the end goal of civilization? Are we to just multiply and expand, ad infinitum?
>I'd figure it's more about getting paid. Making the world better usually doesn't make anyone money, or at least, costs too much before it starts making anyone money.
This. I get paid (a lot) for handling marketing campaigns. I also started a health project this year (would love to work on it fulltime on a 10% payment vs what I make now), but that gets ignored.
Excerpt From: King, Stephen. “Different Seasons.”
When writing ad targeting code, user surveillance, nuclear missile guidance, VW pollution test circumvention code... you know exactly what is going on.
This is usual network security.
At some point someone need to glue together existing devices and software into something that has an obvious use case with ethical implications e.g. the chinese "great firewall".
Where does this take us though? If you build a bridge, how do you know what will go across it? Either we all stop or we accept that not all ethical questions can be resolved by individuals acting alone.
We live in a capitalist society.
It just so happens that this "gross technology" makes advertising insanely profitable for millions of companies (mine included), which makes FB billions, so they'll happily pay really smart people millions to build it. And those smart people will happily accept millions to solve those hard problems.
It's just business. If you can figure out how to better align individual and corporate incentives with making the world a better place, we're all ears.
Always a solid cop-out for allowing bad things to continue
How many people do go into computer engineering with an idea of making the world a better place?
Don't misunderstand me, I'm sure many computer engineers are nice, socially conscious people, but if your primary motivation in life is to make the world a better place through your work, there are many more direct ways to achieve this.
It's telling that the Gates Foundation, which has enormous resources, and which could build, should it so wish, the world's best-funded 'change the world with code' startup, instead chooses to allocate its resources on physical things such as malaria drugs.