The weird criticism that Big Tech is too digital | Hacker News Reader

The weird criticism that Big Tech is too digital

theweek.com

40 pointsbuboard30 comments

I think there are real improvements made by the tech industry. For example cellular and smart phones are brand new and overall have improved quality of life and productivity.

But on the whole I think most of the "gains" made through big tech are marginal. Marginal specifically because either:

A.) New tech companies create products primarily to make the tech industry more productive at building/maintaining/deploying systems

B.) New tech companies provide a small amount of value over a preexisting industry and transfer the industry into the tech sector (e.g. Uber/Lyft) through "disruption"

As a result, the industry has provided less overall growth and improvement to society than its raw potential, and at the same time has consolidated wealth as much as it has created it.

Uber was originally supposed to be a commute-sharing app that reduced heavy reliance on vehicles, making a dramatically more efficient use of resources and time. When it came around to executing on this, the real value-making proposition was to transfer and capture an existing market (ride-hailing/taxi services).

My prescription for a fix would be to emphasize computer literacy in the school system, encouraging the entire 12K public school system to introduce the idea of self-automation as a problem solving pattern for the general population.

In two generations, every sector of the economy will apply automation within their own ranks to eek out efficiency, rather than relying on software developers in California to understand their day-to-day and make an app to "disrupt" their industry.

I have a suspicion that most application of computing and Internet technology, even in business, has in fact been neutral or somewhat negative in terms of productivity and, for humans, also for happiness, but some minority of the applications yield such huge gains (on both fronts) that it's an improvement overall and one can be fooled into thinking it's usually good, rather than usually bad but sometimes very good.

You can't make an MVP of a cure for cancer.

You can't "crush code" and build a space elevator in a hackathon.

You can't hustle your way through a robot that collects, folds, and stores all your dirty laundry.

You can't build an O'Neill cylinder with a 2-year horizon of profitability.

Some problems are hard, expensive, and do not lead to fame or fortune in the short term. Startups are not structurally equipped to solve these problems, and perhaps public corporations aren't either. As it turns out, it is much easier to make money by solving (or inventing!) easy problems, and our culture currently views making money as a proxy for creating value for society. If you want a more exciting and ambitious future, we will all need to think further ahead than the next quarterly earnings report.

"we will all need to think further ahead than the next quarterly earnings report"

Good news! People are already throwing billions of dollars at companies with no earnings and no apparent prospect of them. I guess that problem is solved.

”You can't make an MVP of a cure for cancer”

That’s linear thinking. Yes you can.

It is possible to tackle any of the engineering challenges I listed in an incremental fashion. That isn't the point.

The context of a "Minimum Viable Product" is a mental model of products, markets, and profitability. There is a fundamental difference between the goal "cure cancer" and the goal "make money from a cancer cure". The perverse incentives and loopholes of the latter are a serious impediment to the former.

You don't think you can make money from a cancer cure and cure cancer at the same time?

Even if you could -- the statements "can make money doing X" does not imply "can build an MVP for X".

Not OP, but no - the profit motive is the main perverter of the pharmaceutical industry. By talking a profit you ensure that your cancer treatment will not cure cancer - too few people will have access to cure the disease and millions will still suffer and die needlessly. I guess a few rich, first worlders would live, so it's not all bad.

People celebrate Jonahs Salk because not only did he develop the polio vaccine but he rejected his opportunity to massively profit from it because it was more important that patients have access.

No company that develops a cancer cure these days would do that. Their shareholders would revolt, their boards would fire their exeutives, their stock prices would plunge, and their competitors would pile on.

What to do if you have a cure is an imaginary problem. Regulators set minimum standards for efficacy which involve a treatment being just barely statistically significant. The problem is not burying cures, because playing the game of "make believe a treatment is better than placebo" is infinitely simpler than coming up with a cure. The cures people believe in are like the infamous 200 mpg carburetor.

I'm pretty sure he's making reference to the large pharmaceutical companies that earn more by treating problems than fixing them.

The incentive is to continuously charge these people for the rest of their life. They make more money if you stay sick, so they can keep treating you.

If you are cured, then the flow of money stops until you get sick again.

People always state this like it's some dirty secret, but it's an ongoing calculation for any given pharmaceutical company. If they think a cure is within reach, then they try to go for it, because if they focus purely on treatment and a competitor discovers an easily findable cure, then they make no money on the treatment.

If, however, after a lot of work, a cure seems elusive, it makes sense to focus on treatment. Both for the sinister reason that people pay more over a lifetime for treatments, but also for the less sinister reason that it's usually much easier to develop treatments than cures, and having a treatment and not having a cure is strictly better than not having a treatment and also not having a cure.

Sure but,

What is stopping them from discovering a cure, patenting it, and then never manufacturing it?

Many countries would ignore the patent and manufacture it, driving people to medical tourism, and then the patent will expire in 18-23 years anyway.

Patents run out and they are made public. If you go through the expensive process of developing a drug, you're likely to want to get a return on that. If there is enough evidence for the cure to work that a company wants to bury it, they're more likely to not patent it.

Also, this presupposes that the companies are actively trying to do evil. In reality, most people would rather have cancer cured than not cured. The profit motive can bend these incentives, but I think the caricature of a company full of amoral sociopaths making decisions to maximize human suffering are kind of... unrealistic.

No. They said the exact opposite of that.

Indeed. For instance, suppose you thought you had a path for a general cure for cancer, but getting regulatory approval for use on humans would be too expensive and time consuming.

So cure dog cancer. Regulatory burden would be far less, and everyone would love you (if it works...).

Can you expand on this?

I'll give an example to expand on. What if disease was connected to neuron signatures in the brain? The brain is the central organism and the ruler of everything. It controls functions like breathing and sleep and so on. You could have technology that modulated breathing for example or games that prescribed shots of dopamine or made you more intuitive. Going further, maybe you could have realtime gene splicing that connected to other API's that worked with the brain. This is the future.

I think my problem is RodgerTheGreat said "You can't _____" and your response was "Yes you can."

Neither one of you provided anything by way of supporting details, citations, etc. At least RTG expanded a little, but even that was just an explanation of why they felt the way they did, nothing even approaching proof.

say what? This article just hit the front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21865579

You can't get it through the FDA trials, though.

What even is "Big Tech"? I feel like it's a buzzword coined by news outlets to vilify the tech industry. "Big Tech" companies like Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook are in entirely different industries: Electronic hardware products, online retail, video media, and social platforms. The article mentions how "Big Tech" is centered on advertising but only 1 out of those three derive their main source of revenue from advertising. Heck, depending on how you define "Big Tech" arguably the majority of "Big Tech" does not rely on advertising: Facebook and Google do while Microsoft (bing is trivial), Apple, Netflix, and Amazon do not.

I don't think the article successfully argues against Thiel's criticism. Clearly there is an opportunity cost to putting highly trained individuals to work on some issue vs another. If you look for example at the number of PhD physicists in finance it seems obvious to me that if these people were working on biotech or materials or infrastructure or process optimisation there would at least be some more progress than there currently is.

Digital tech giants barely interact with other sectors of the economy in meaningful ways, the lack of economic or productivity growth after the computer era is well documented, and there would be tangible benefits from aiming resources and talent at sectors that interact with the material world and the economy at large.

The article also brings up Europe as an example that the lack of digital giants doesn't result in more progress, but that's actually not true. Infrastructure costs in Europe are significantly lower than in the US. One only needs to look at the transport sector in Germany or France and compare it to California's attempt to build high-speed rail. The US trails not only Europe but even countries like China in some key sectors.

Now building high-speed transport infrastructure for the masses might not make it into the next Pivot podcast or on the frontpage of techcrunch, but for the long term health of the economy and the general surplus for society is probably larger than more smartphone apps.

> One only needs to look at the transport sector in Germany or France and compare it to California's attempt to build high-speed rail

California is about the same size as Germany and less than half the population. Germany has several existing, historical train systems. California, less so. There's a lot going on in that case beyond just California having a lot of digital tech folks.

> California is about the same size as Germany and less than half the population.

California is about 20% larger than Germany, in terms of land area, much longer when you look at the longest dimension. Germany is both substantially smaller and more compact for it's land area.

The author may be right for the reason that, the criticism is based on linear extrapolations of what people wanted in the past decades. Perhaps they don't want flying cars, but instead the ability to tele-work and telecommunicate. Perhaps flying cars are the "faster horses" of our time , which will be overtaken by some yet-unknown tech in the future. Physical infrastructure is good, if there is going to be a lot of use for it. With industrial production shifting to china and then africa, there's little incentive to build new roads. There is a case to be made however about "weird" overregulation in biotech/medicine. As populations are aging we will be forced to remove barriers and move faster there.

The author's conclusion "Silicon Valley will almost certainly keep playing a big role in them" is not well justified imho. Silicon Valley has failed in most its major promises in 2010s: VR, IoT, blockchain, Selfdriving robots (and soon satellite internet). Instead, the advertising money that is fueling its economy, is being recycled through SaaS/Paas companies that make the developers job ever-so-slightly easier, creating a closed, inward looking economy. IMHO , the real failure is the lack of ambitious consumer-facing tech

Working on a hardware startup, I'm seeing that hardware infrastructure is way behind software infrastructure. Figuring out to test a new iteration in a week feels like magic, when software companies can deploy iterations in an hour.

I think software infrastructure for hardware development is going to get better, but one of the biggest barriers is the small size of the open source hardware movement compared to open source software.

Hardware tooling is bad. Like really lifesuckingly bad. Download yourself some free Xilinx IDE and try to do some Verilog Hello World on a cheap demo board. Blink a LED or something. Its so bad you will want to scream: Dog slow sythesis (~compilation), useless IDE support, ten steps to run something, badly composed. Errors will land in some arbitrarily named logfile somewhere between the code. More expensive tools are hardly any better.

I started doing hardware but ran away, I feel it is a waste of developer time to even consider doing any custom hardware designs. People should be punished for even thinking about using FPGAs. Just don't do it.

Sorry for the rant, but I feel warning yall is my duty ;)

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