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Comment by davidwihl | Hacker News Reader

But ad optimization has led to many other technical innovations in ML and scalability. I don’t think the same can be said about law school.

Disclosure: work on ad tech at Google. Opinion my own.

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Sure it can! Law school has lead to many technical innovations in international tax law, responsible for outsized contribution margin to shareholder value that motivates the executives at the multinational FAANG that _you_ work for to invest in further improvements to ad optimization.

Now, whether either the innovations that top tier tax lawyers have built deliver long term value or not is a different question entirely, but the same could be said for technical innovations in ML and scalability. Law, ML, scalability, ad optimization -- none of these things contain intrinsic societal good, although they have the potential to contribute towards it.

I think marketing (all of it, not just ad-technology) should be added to the list of jobs where too much human talent gets spent/wasted.

I have seen honest businesses destroyed when bad actors entered their market, charging 5 times more for the exact same service, easily outbidding the honest businesses on Google adwords and other marketing channels and then use the proceeds to buy positive reviews and pay off the few customers who found out they were ripped off.

All this ad-tech only serves Google/FB and businesses that overcharge customers, at the expense of society.

None of those "innovations" in ML have actually translated to successful real world use cases that aren't basically ads as of yet. And no, talking to Google or Alexa doesn't count. That's just yet another data collection strategy. We still don't have self driving cars, automatic diagnostic systems, automatic wealth planning, or even automatic government planning.

Computer Vision has benefited from the ML work of the big corps, but now it's just being used to more efficiently spy on the population.

That’s a very cynical comment. I recommend you examine the research and open source contributions Google has made to ML that have nothing to do with ads.

Also ad optimization has brought in revenue for a commercial entity (Alphabet) that is willing and eager to pour its resources into amazing and beneficial things that a Law firm or Bank simply would never think to invest in building themselves.

This is patently wrong. Plenty of law firms and banks, once they reach a given amount of surplus capital, open up investment arms that can and do invest in long shots that large multinationals like Alphabet have branded themselves for. Don't conflate the brand Alphabet has regarding investment in innovation for a monopoly on that kind of investment in innovation.

On the other hand, banks aren't building systems to extract more and more private information from individuals. The harm coming from a business like Alphabet significantly outweights the beneficial things they do.

They don’t need to when they can charge you a $50 fee for keeping an account open that costs them virtually nothing to maintain and lending you money at virtually no risk because the Fed can just print more in case they mess up.

> The harm coming from a business like Alphabet significantly outweights the beneficial things they do.

Doubt it. This is first world privileged thinking.

You don't think law is important to society?

My comment isn’t about importance to society, it is about innovation for future contributions to society. I believe that ad tech has fueled more recent and greater potential contributions than law has, and therefore is more meritorious as a field for intelligent people entering their careeers.

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