False dichotomy much?
In addition...
Brain power is not a fungible resource. You cannot divert excess brain power to any task you choose. It's a highly specific, highly targeted resource which seems to me to be horribly capricious and (ironically?) irrational in its choice of target.
In other words, the answer for any app entrepreneur when asked "Why didn't you work on a cure for cancer?" is simply "Well, I didn't think of that. I thought of an app."
I like the apparent contradiction in the Telegraph article too:
"Hackers/entrepreneurs used to invent revolutionary things like the PC!"
"People are only using personal computing devices for trivialities!"
Either personal computing was a great idea or it's a platform for the trivial and banal, you can't have it both ways.
Obviously the PC is revolutionary given that people can now do things that were impossible/difficult before, like meeting people from disparate communities (see: HN), freely communicating with distant family/friends, becoming citizen journalists through blogging, finding their place in hard-to-find or sparsely-located communities, so on.
Well, you can. Cheap personal computers unleashed an amazing amount of creativity in all areas of human endeavor
and
they also enabled that power and creativity to be used for trivial, disposable things, as well as scams and harmful things.
Human life went online, with both the good and the bad.
>Either personal computing was a great idea or it's solely a platform for the trivial and banal, you can't have it both ways.
Even then I concede that this was a straw man for the Telegraph journalist's position. How embarrassing.