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Comment by js8 | Hacker News Reader

I watched Angela Collier, an astrophysicist, on YT the other day. I'll paraphrase an off-hand remark she made:

This is a really cool technology, but then you think how big companies are going to ruin it for profit, as they do with everything. It's hard to get excited about technology these days.

I think this is the root of problem. If you want to make technology cool again, you need to cut out the gold rush that's ruining everything. Almost tautologically, the motivation for a society to do things must be something else than "make more money".

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I‘ll probably get downvoted for this, but big companies do not ruin everything for profit. Google Calendar, for example, is a simple tool which is very well implemented on various systems and it just works. And if you want more privacy, then you can go to Proton Calendar.

Also a typical argument is made that more should be done against anti-competitive behaviour. The problem is that there is no better alternative. If you regulate competition too much then people will not spend their time and/or money on moonshot ideas anymore. Why take a massive amount of risk if you aren’t allowed to reap the rewards? This is what happened in the Soviet Union and nowadays partially in China. Innovation stalls and all you can do is copy. Russia, for example, tried to make chips by copying the American designs, but without understanding the fundamentals. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work.

So complete regulation for anti-competitive behaviour doesn’t work. Then governments should probably just regulate a little bit? This is precisely what the US is doing. Yes, sometimes corporations push it too far and consumers are negatively affected. However, the alternative is less innovation which will also negatively affect customers.

For the counterargument that technology doesn’t make things better. (Even this is nowadays a common argument.) Compare living today with living in the 1980s. Transportation, education, medical aid, and entertainment are in general much better. Yes, there are some negative sides, but I wouldn’t want to be born 40 years earlier. Having to write letters to your family when they are overseas. No YouTube. Internet measured in kB/s. Sending patches via email on repositories without CI/CD. No thanks.

While the latter part of your statement is reasonable, it is also only opinion. Many people would prefer a less technically advanced society. This forum, for instance, is about as simple as it gets and that is to it's credit.

The initial point misses a fairly significant consideration though. A huge number of advancements are publicly funded. That public funding turns into private profit. People largely unaware of that fact, recently were made aware with the massive vaccine development spending that led to record shattering profits for pharma companies. To cite just one prominent example in the last few years.

Edit: shout out to text only

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