http://greaterseas.com/2011/05/the-future-of-innovation/
There's a great quote by Jeff Hammerbacher (an ex-Facebooker) that is great:
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
Said by a founder of a company (Cloudera) that commercialized an open source implementation (Hadoop) originally sponsored by Yahoo (an advertising company) of a paper (MapReduce/GFS) written by Google (an advertising company), the file system in which has been heavily improved by Facebook (an advertising company) and which is heavily used by all kinds of advertising companies, but which has been adopted (technology transfer) by companies in in biotechnology and other non-advertising spheres.
But that doesn't imply that most of what they produce is valuable to more worthy projects, or even much of it.
I'm trying to imagine a world in which more of those great minds were focusing their efforts directly on solving serious problems.
The technical challenges involved in real time auctions and high volume ad serving are a serious technical problem. The optimization and machine learning work to target the ads is another hard technical problem. For many people (myself included) the technical challenge is the most important part of my work, big reason why I want to wake up and head in to the office.
When they decide to move on to another company, they'll come away with greater technical skills that could also be applied to smart meters, DNA analysis, physics, pure systems programming work and the like.
More correct: "The best minds of my generation are making huge amounts of money by solving really hard engineering problems and creating whole new industries. That's awesome".
It's hard to overstate the economic impact of FB, Google + Apple. These people are building the future of the internet. Ads just pay the bills.
That's why the article is important, a lot of minds are spending time in lower priority items from a humanistic point of view.
If you really feel so strongly about it why not set up a fund that attempt to fund exactly those 3 areas.
Talent has nothing to do with it.
http://www.akvo.org/rsr/projects/healthcare/?page=1
Four years ago I was telling people in a session about water and development aid that they should use modern IT and web tools to do their work more effectively. As a result I ended up talking to Jeroen van der Sommen, now our chairman, and we decided to start Akvo.org to provide those tools. There is a huge need for IT tools in humanitarian aid and development work. You could be working on that if you are interested.
There has to be some way of getting some fraction of the really smart computational people into other fields to figure out very hard problems. Unfortunately, the future of the internet is not the only future out there.
Lots of technical value gets created in the process, but as companies like Facebook and Google have grown up, they've realized who their real masters are (not the user). See the recent $400m Admeld acquisition rumor to see this in action with Google.
OTOH Apple gets paid by the consumer. They're a real product company.
Frankly, listening to people like Hammerbacher (who is almost certainly now rich from fb) or Alex the twitter dude who started bank simple (who essentially admitted he got rich from Twitter, see discussion surrounding his claim Conway threatened him) now whine about other engineers trying to get theirs just like Hammerbacher and Alex did is bullshit. Viz Alex dissing lifestyle businesses, etc.