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Comment by spicyusername | Hacker News Reader

    What should we have spent the last ten years researching instead?

Literally solving any of the other critical problems ailing society.

    Climate change
    Gun violence
    Poverty
    Political corruption
    Wealth inequality
    Drug abuse
    Healthcare
    Etc

But "solving" those with the latest over hyped JavaScript framework, shitcoin, LLM, or cloud service isn't something we can pretend to do and rake in endless VC money, so instead we put all our energy towards eliminating artists and keeping children glued to tablet screens.

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I don't necessarily disagree, but this kind of cynical energy is literally not helping much. It's too easy to piss on personal pet peeves in the tech world while claiming it's a zero sum game with monumentally complex social problems that almost everyone would love to "solve" if they could. It's quite possible to help ease the suffering of others while also being excited about a new JS framework, machine learning, etc.

I don't think radical technical breakthroughs will be the solutions to any of those problems. Those are human problems. There's nothing wrong solving technical problems while human problems persist. Putting programmers, data scientists, etc on human problems doesn't solve them better or faster than putting someone outside of STEM on them

> Putting programmers, data scientists, etc on human problems doesn't solve them better or faster than putting someone outside of STEM on them

True, but per GP there is also an unimaginable amount of money and natural resources sent towards those technical problems. And unlike programmers, money and resources are reallocateable.

If, in an alternate history without the gravitational money-pull of the software industry, even 1% of the resources lent to that industry in our timeline had been put towards addressing one of the problems listed above, it would create a vastly different world. A better one, I suspect, in many ways.

Agreed that reallocating money and resources for the greater good is a good thing. That said, these are all topics that still receive lots of debate politically. That's what I mean when I say it's a human problem.

You can't solve healthcare by throwing tech, money, etc at it anymore than you could solve a broken heart with those things. Sure, money could help you get therapy or pay for lobbying for whatever your solution to healthcare is. OTOH, perhaps the person cutting the checks thinks the solution to heartbreak is a raise ("it shows we care"), and the solution to healthcare issues is to lobby for criminalizing generics ("they're probably cutting corners and making people worse off"). People don't even agree on what are the problems in healthcare (and other things in that list), let alone how to solve them

<3 Sincerely: What are you working on? Trying to figure out my next thing.

You mean US society?

It's trendy to dunk on the U.S., and the U.S. does deserve it for the most part, having so much room for improvement in areas other places have already made good progress on, but the reality is that most of the things on this list can be found in most places, to some degree or another.

There is always progress to be made. The goal posts can always be moved forward. The standards for what is possible raised.

There is no limit to how high we could raise the global standard of living.

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