The Trouble with Silicon Valley
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Traffic issue? Let's not solve the political problems to make public infrastructure, uber, self driving cars, (even tunnels underground) will save the day!
Education? we need iPads in schools delivering "personalized" education.
Every issue across the board is like this.
Its all B.S. and somehow they have convinced "educated" people that their vision is only correct one. They have co-opted the imagination of elite Americans and that is their biggest crime.
That is one of the known dark-sides of power or elites in absolutely any form. Down to the tribal elders who insist upon keeping to 'traditional ways' not out of a fear of side effects of the new but because it would undermine their power and control.
Now Silicon Valley certainly does have its sins but lets not make them a scapegoat for long preexisting conditions. That approach just gives a short-lived catharsis while failing to address the fundamental problems.
Viewing everything as a technical problem isn't even technically wrong - although in practice a given approach may be doomed to failure. It is the execution which is the issue really and that is in no way unique to them, nor is trying to choose the wrong tool for the job leading to a foregone failure.
If you follow the politics of the Bay Area, you would know that tech companies do lobby for infrastructure and housing improvements, and are even willing to put up their own money to fund it.
These proposals are generally DOA because the most powerful voting block, property owners, will aggressively oppose anything that may threaten the appreciation of their "investment".
A big issue with LVT is that it seems it can easily result in displacement of residents. Long-time homeowners, especially those on fixed income may not be able to keep up with the increasing tax and will be forced to sell.
I imagine self-driving cars will alter society for the better even more.
iPads in schools may be a good example of what you're talking about but Uber and self-driving cars actually did (or will) enact significant societal change for the better.
It didn't it literally did the opposite of everything promised.
It made traffic in cities worse: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756945/uber-lyft-tnc-vmt...
It made car ownership in cities even greater: https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/01/uber-lyft-make-t...
The second link is also not as clear as you make it seem. The growth in car-free and car-light households is exceeding the growth of the general population. Those cities are notable as they were the first to get Uber/Lyft.
I think there's a huge market opportunity for programmers who are willing to dive deep into other fields, and coordinate closely with people who don't work or think the same way that they do. Domains where the point isn't the software. Governance, energy, industrial design, scientific research, etc. These are areas that seem ripe for software-based improvements, but have gotten orders of magnitude less attention than, say, cloud hosting.
I don't think the blame lies with a single party: software developers are biased by a desire for agility and being in control, but members of the above domains are probably also not taking the initiative they should be to solicit these kinds of solutions.
What if there were a conference that specifically paired software developers with these other hard-to-penetrate industries, as a cross-pollenation exercise? I wonder what would come of it.
1. Working in that field, funding is often tied to government grants, so I would have been making a lot less money, and likely working harder.
2. Little to no opportunities for advancement, or even having your ideas heard, because you'll be the only one in the room without a PhD, in an industry where those 3 letters are literally everything that matters.
3. Even people with PhD are treated like crap in the hard sciences. I have a friend that has a PhD in biology, makes less than 1/3rd of what I do, and works longer hours.
If we as a society want the best minds to go into those fields, we need to pay those people more.
1. There is simply less money in that line of work because it's tied to government grants.
2. The Physics field (which I have direct experience in) is dominated by old people with PhDs. They're very smart people, but also tend to be stubborn, and (again generalizing) are not too keen on listening to the opinions of people who don't have a PhD.
It has been a 'science advances one funeral at a time' thing in practice unfortunately. Although there are a few who do integrate and reap the benefits. I recall an article about one unusual young city council making good use of social media live streaming for meetings and text chat to make their governance more accessible, transparent, and responsive.
Given the issues involved with either trying to build up an expertise to reproduce the field of knowledge or trying to get them to cooperate it is no wonder from a business standpoint why software developers are biased to 'just software'. It has the least number of additional complications in what is already a risky business.
At least they lead with this so you know that it's going to be another mainstream media piece lamenting their lack of influence in the world.
Faster roads in an increasingly remotely-connected world does not seem very forward-looking, instead the world needs faster networks , cleaner cities, the ability to become independent from megacorps, and decent communities that can be enjoyable to live in. economists or technologists often claim to know what people want, but maybe they 're not being observant of what makes people unhappy
An incredible statement from the Atlantic. The lack of self awareness is astonishing.