A large portion of the world has no access to basics - food, clean water, basic healthcare (i.e. essential medication, antibiotics, etc.), electricity, being able to read&write. The resources and technology we have are unevenly distributed. There are ways to distribute them more evenly: Volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, go teach abroad, document the plight of refugees by visiting refuge camps, learn the language of a poorer country, be politically active in your own community to ask for more equitable distribution and making sure things like Pepfar continue.
> " Products and services are designed to “disrupt” market sectors (a.k.a. bringing to market things no one really needs) more than to solve actual problems, especially those problems experienced by what the writer C. Z. Nnaemeka has described as “the unexotic underclass” — single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over 50 — who, she explains, have the “misfortune of being insufficiently interesting.”"
"Connectors are the people in a community who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions. A connector is essentially the social equivalent of a computer network hub. They usually know people across an array of social, cultural, professional, and economic circles, and make a habit of introducing people who work or live in different circles. [...]"
"Mavens are "information specialists", or "people we rely upon to connect us with new information".[4] They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others."
"Salesmen are "persuaders", charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They tend to have an indefinable trait that goes beyond what they say, which makes others want to agree with them."
Unluckily the groups in the quote above do not fall into these three classes. The problem really is if you start a startup you make a bet that in a rather short time (until money runs out) you will reach a critical mass of people for the startup to become self-sustained (or at least get enough customers such that you can get further funding). Obtaining such a critical mass in a short time is much easier if you concentrate on Malcolm Gladwell's three classes of people than on "single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over 50". Also the opposite holds: If these groups want to stop the "misfortune of being insufficiently interesting" they really should think how they can become a member of the three groups.
Why do you say that single mothers, the white rural poor, and veterans are not definitely connectors, usually mavens, and plausibly salesmen? Out-of-work Americans over 50 are the only group I can see as out of these classes.
> "As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do."
Ha! I've used the exact same characterization.
Anyway, this seems entirely predictable given a couple different considerations.
1) People are most apt to effectively solve problems for which they have some context.
2) People who are underserved or otherwise have "real problems" don't often have much overlap with people who have discretionary money to pay for solutions.
So you end up with a selection bias in the pool of problem solvers (and thus the scope of addressable problems) and a selection bias in the expectation for investment returns. Which results in the best minds of our generation crunching all manner of machine learning models to make it so we don't have to do something mundane like selecting an outfit to wear that's color and style coordinated.
Yeah... it seems to me like the world might be well served to give people with more pressing or interesting problems access to more tools and means to try to solve them.
Help me out here, I really never got wash.io or rinse or any of those services. I'm assuming the target audience was millenials who have never stepped foot inside a dry cleaner and realized that many of them offer "pick up, wash & fold" services. No fancy app I'm sure but the core of the service existed. The comparisons made to "Uber" were not applicable in my opinion because there wasn't some type of laundry cartel controlling laundry medallions resulting in poor laundry services at high prices. Anyways, I'll go back to washing and folding my own laundry which provides some zen time in an otherwise hectic day.
Washing machines, kitchen appliances and similar technological advances, freed up our at home time so much that we can put a whole nother 50% of the population through college. A whole 50% of the population that can get jobs, have careers, and do cool shit, who was stuck wiping men's proverbial bottoms until the 1950's.
Making free time free is a good thing. There's no telling what will come of it.
Think of it this way: how much time saved on menial stuff will be freed up to go solve the so called more pressing problems? If anything, the problem is that we're thinking up wasteful ways of filling this time even faster than we're freeing the time itself up.
The calculus of the opportunity cost presented here isn't the tiny incremental improvement attached to my already amply comfortable lifestyle, but rather the aggregate full-time loss of many dozens or hundreds of engineers, data scientists, and investment $$$ diverted to trivial pursuits. Or put more simply. The lost problem-solving potential for 8-10 hours a day of a single PhD in Applied Mathematics massively dwarfs the 10 minutes that person saved having their car parked for them.
But what about the time cost/opportunity of a single full-time phd versus 10 minutes a day for the 253 million cars on US roads today? Globally?
Assuming parking only once a week for each vehicle, that's over 60,000 hours of saved time per day. That engineer's time investment is virtually free in comparison.
Of course these savings will only materialize after parking technology becomes commoditized. Commoditization is part of tech progress.
"Assuming parking only once a week for each vehicle, that's over 60,000 hours of saved time per day"
That complicated stuff with associated costs might benefit middle class and up. The few who buy it among them. Many will also want the pride of parking themselves, distrust the technology, and so on. You're not saving 60,000 hours a day so much as a tiny faction of it. If you succeed where others failed for a few decades worth of PhD hours on computer vision, pathfinding, robotics, etc.
Simplifications in this thread are way off. The real world involves interplay of the technical capabilities, whatever regulations will be, finances, and social factors.
I think you misunderstand how much time and focus is spent on trivial problems. Somebody already replied to this, but I will add more on the same note.
1 If some scientist finds a way to save a minute per instance of brushing your teeth, and if there is no difference in quality and cost, that is 600 million+ minutes saved every day in the US alone.
2 If some scientist finds a way for nocturnal people to contribute to society like other people, that is surely on the same magnitude as 1.
3 If some scientist finds some way to cut 10% of time on inspecting welds, it is surely a huge boost to the economy.
This is of course not meant to endorse situations where the quality drops. E.g. "If one cent is saved per unit of milk produced, I can buy a new yacht!"
Aggregations in this case aren't interesting unless the component part of the aggregation is by itself interesting.
A human, due to real constraints can't do a whole lot with an extra minute per day, and humans as a social body due to real constraints can't effectively collectively block-allocate 600 million diffuse minutes to some other cause. Each of them can only reallocate the minute they own/save.
The units and the distribution matter here... a lot. This seems obvious enough to illustrate using your own narrative.
What if I saved 6 Billion people 1ms per day? That's nearly 70 aggregated whole days saved per day. What are you going to spend your newly found 1ms on?
Having grown up around apple orchards, I feel it perhaps worth mentioning that this is not in fact true. The fruit that hangs low does so because its weight bends the branches. Once it's picked, the rest is considerably harder to reach. That's why the phrase means what it does.
(If you're interested, the word "windfall" is of similar origin. It refers to fruit shaken loose of the tree by a stiff wind, thus requiring no effort to collect beyond that involved in simply bending to pick it up.)
I'm sure all that technology helped, but I think the free time was more of a result of good union jobs, just a plethora of good private sector jobs, and reasonable housing. These good jobs allowed us to buy food, live where we wanted, take vacations, take on risk, have weekends off, etc.
The technology that really saved time was modern food procurement(the supermarket, or food that was ready to bring home with a short walk to a few stores.
And women, they wanted to work. I remember my mom had a lot of time on her hands, but it wasen't due to appliances.
When she got a career, she was happy at first, but then missed all the free time she had when she was a housewife.
I think 2 is a common misconception. People who might not have much money to spend on luxury services as described in the article will most likely still pay for something that truly solves a problem. Actually solving a problem will always be worth more than scratching an itch. Taking the 'underserved' seriously as potential customers is worth a strategy meeting at a lot of startups I'd say.
At the bottom, where need is greatest, they may be underserved because they have so little money. I'd love to see the entrepreneurship engine better incented to search for solutions in such a space. I see universal basic income as a worthy pursuit for this reason (among others)--universally distributing an incentive to solve the problems of the bottom 20% would work wonders.
I've probably seen like 40 "boil water with sunlight" inventions over the last decade, each of which is claiming to revolutionize the lifestyle of poor Africans. ...Which is great, I guess, but nobody with money is buying them. And the fact that I've seen so many of these tells me more that people are really trying to sell something to me: the idea that I can feel good about myself by donating money to Joe Rando USA with a pot and some bubble wrap.
Maybe we can try to solve small problems as well as big ones?
It would be as easy to deride the early plans of Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia as what the author does here (finding better kitten pictures, sharing kitten pictures with your sorority, peddling misinformation to your middle school teacher).
It's true that there are large underserved populations of lower economic status. But this isn't because they are "uninteresting" in my view; helping single mothers is much more interesting than coming up with a CRM for all but the most heartless. The rub in my view is people without means don't have the means to fund your startup over food and shelter, and those two segments have some pretty fierce competition.
Perhaps universal basic income or other stimulus programs that will put dollars in the hands of those people, and then companies can compete for those dollars.
To add to your point, some projects are simply not going to be profitable, but will certainly have a benefit to society nonetheless. A lot of civic tech projects help increase awareness to certain issues or aim to empower disenfranchised groups, but don't have have a profitable revenue model.
I'm lucky enough to be well-off in many regards that I can freely spend 20-30 hours a week to design/code projects that will hopefully have a meaningful impact to people in my city, specifically increasing awareness of mental health and injustice towards people of color. But I'm not being paid for it, nor is anyone here capable of giving me a salary/donation that comes even close to what I'd earn at a tech startup. The government is also pretty limited to how much they'd provide as a grant.
I'm reminded of an organization here that created a platform to enable non-profits find and manage volunteers, which has clear efficiency benefits for organizations since the process can be very messy. But because organizations can't really pay them that much, they are limited as to how quickly they can expand the team and add new features. Given the limits of their market, no 'investor' is going to invest in them in the hopes of expecting a meaningful financial return.
I'm not sure where I'm going with my train of thought. Maybe something like it'd be nice if there were a non-VC model that enabled groups to work on projects that had no clear profit model? I know the U.S. has organizations that give grants to transformative projects, like the Sunlight and Knight Foundation. Sadly, not every country is lucky enough to have something like that.
We have a broad spectrum of people working on all sorts of different problems, what's the issue here? There are companies out there making luxury watches and there are companies out there making life-saving medications. Should the former experience constant shame for the professional direction they chose?
It's pretty un-self-aware for someone to simultaneously bitch that:
1. Some populations are underserved because they aren't sexy and high profile and interesting.
2. Some apps are solving small problems instead of tackling global warming.
The truth is that many (perhaps all) of those apps will fail, and if any succeed, most of the successes will be kind of marginal successes that don't upend the world. So what? That's how it works most of the time -- small incremental improvements to people's lives.
It's okay that the marginal successes don't upend the world, the writer simply is asking if those of us in the valley are "disrupting" the right problems for the right populations. A marginal amount of time-savings for a high-income earner in having their car parking woes solved might be economically more viable than working on a problem that is less sexy but potentially has significantly less impact on actual improvement to people's lives.
The "right" problems for the "right" populations is a silly formulation.
First of all, the implicit idea that the founders of these companies are all like, "Oh, hey, I have ten really highly functional business plans for bringing an app to profitability, and I'll reject the ones serving population X because I think it's 5% less profitable than the ones serving population Y" is dumb.
Second, the idea that that writer can identify the "right" populations and problems is risible.
And, to be clear, she absolutely is complaining that people are attacking small problems instead of global warming. She explicitly calls out rising sea levels.
And while a few of the services he identifies are targeted to a rich userbase (such as: locating rentable yachts, and probably the drone filming service, and the valet parking one), plenty of others aren't. The one about renting driveways is probably mostly enabling people who are relatively low-income for the area they live in to monetize an unused asset. Getting a new toothbrush addresses a need everyone has. Getting killed by the police is a problem faced disproportionately by lower-income people and minorities.
There are lots of false steps towards progress, and like I said, probably most or all of those will fail. But we've seen time and time again that top down direction to only focus on what some member of the cultural elite deems important is a recipe for disaster.
First of all, the implicit idea that the founders of these companies are all like, "Oh, hey, I have ten really highly functional business plans for bringing an app to profitability, and I'll reject the ones serving population X because I think it's 5% less profitable than the ones serving population Y" is dumb.
Isn't that precisely what VCs do when assessing the viability of a startup?
But we've seen time and time again that top down direction to only focus on what some member of the cultural elite deems important is a recipe for disaster.
NYT writers may be part of the cultural elite, but software engineers in San Francisco, by dint of their economic power and education levels, are arguably part of it as well. The VCs and startup financial and management classes are definitely so.
No, what VCs do is try to figure out "Does this thing have any chance of making a big business." And they're mostly wrong.
And not every tech idea is or should be VC-backed.
Software engineers are clearly in the cultural elite. And if any software engineer was in the business of telling people "I know what the right population and right problems are," they'd be idiots, too.
Note that that's distinct from, "I have AN idea that I think I can turn into a successful business, by targeting problem X of population Y" which says nothing about the universe of ideas.
I believe the salient point that "the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do" is a direct effect of lack of diversity in our field. Homogenous, largely white, largely male, largely safe people are not going to detect the problems the author appears to be implying are going untreated.
Edit: To be clear I used those examples because they are the majority in America (which I should have been more clear about) in an effort to point out that the majority often does not pay as close attention to the problems that arise from being in a minority.
>Homogenous, largely white, largely male, largely safe people are not going to detect the problems the author appears to be implying are going untreated.
What you said was both racist and sexist. You're saying that a group of people (based on race and sex) are "not going to ..." do something. Speaking in generalizations using these classifications is generally regarded by most folks as racist/sexist.
It can be tricky though. You might be right, but you'll still be called out for it. For example, the peoples of eastern asia are statistically less tall than their counterparts in western europe. Nevertheless, "asians are shorter than europeans", is still a racist statement.
Unless you can see, as well as explain, how the generalizations you're making benefit the conversation, it's probably best to avoid making those types of statements in the first place.
Racism itself might be "wrong", but that doesn't mean you can't be racist and still be "right" in your assertions. That's the tricky part.
No. There is nothing "racist" in that comment. That comment exhibits "prejudice". Prejudice may co-exist with discriminatory actions ("bigotry") or become institutionalized ("racism") but making comments about an ethnic group is not by itself racist.
"Racism" (note the -ism to denote a system) requires a social, political and/or economic system by which a dominant group retains power over other groups. By that widely-held definition, it's literally impossible for a non-member of the dominant group to exhibit racism.
Thanks. This is what I was going to try to explain but was too tired to bother. Also, as a member of the white male american engineer group, I will 100% cop to this sort of prejudice when dealing with generalizations as in the parent article.
Sorry, but you can't plead guilty on behalf of other people you don't even know. If you state that you are prejudiced, that's not evidence that other people with a similar skin color are prejudiced; it's only evidence that you, personally, are prejudiced.
I don't think you're responding to what I actually said. Perhaps it was poorly worded but what I intended to say was twofold: I am a member of the group (the privileged class in america) and that I exhibited prejudice. I made no further claims.
No, that's not the "widely-held definition," no matter you wish it was; it's not the dictionary definition, it's not the Wikipedia definition, it's not what most people are thinking when they hear that word. Rather, it's a definition carefully crafted by groups that want to express without consequence and write into law racist policies while claiming that they are anti-racists.
Rather than just "believing," can you please provide evidence that "white, male and safe" people do not detect and put their energy into treating the kinds of problems you're alluding to? (In fact I must have missed the specific untreated problems that you and the author mention).
I fail to see how skin color, gender and "safeness," whatever the hell that is, implies someone has a "reduced" ability to detect and solve important problems. If you actually look for it, you will find many examples of people with the superficial characteristics you describe, and find that not only are they an extremely "diverse" group of people -- in the characteristics that truly matter -- but that they are doing precisely the kind of work that I think you speak of.
Why stop at people in "our field"? What about all of the people who possess the superficial characteristics you mention, but who also share an extraordinary amount of "diversity" and have had extraordinary success in treating important problems -- outside of "our field"? Doctors, scientists, engineers ... all over the world ... truly seek to make the world a better place.
Frankly I'm sick of the notion that "white, male and safe" implies a lack of diversity and a lack of ability or desire to detect ... whatever problems you have.
Ah, I should have specified software engineering. However as an example, there have been a good amount of studies that show that problem solving (detection and solution generation) are enabled by diversity† Combined with this, many studies of the demographics in software engineering show that it lacks gender and racial diversity†† I certainly should have been more clear about what I was implying. I used white and male because those are the two majorities in America which was also something I should have specified at the outset. Evidence of a personal bias that comes from being American, I suppose.
It's very difficult, sometimes even dangerous to try to solve problems that are not yours. I think it would be important to do it with the effected people, but certainly not just for them.
"I’m concerned that such a focus on comfort and instant gratification will reduce us all to those characters in “Wall-E,” bound to their recliners, Big Gulps in hand, interacting with the world exclusively through their remotes."
I found this quote puzzling in light of the rest of the article. The author's main argument seems to be that tech "innovators" are focused on providing frivolous solutions to imaginary problems, while society crumbles in the background. But this quote -unless I'm misunderstanding it - ascribes a hugely far-reaching, dystopian power to technology that undercuts her overall point.
You can't have it both ways. Either tech products are mostly irrelevant, or they are fundamentally changing the most basic aspects of our existence. Which is it?
You certainly can have it both ways. Tech products are mostly irrelevant; those which are not irrelevant are fundamentally changing the most basic aspects of our existence.
Hundreds of millions of people, at least, now experience a social world whose existence and interactions are mediated by a single, rather secretive, advertising company. I'd call that both a relevant and a fundamental change.
I fail to see how "And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police killings." fits on the list of problems that don't need to be solved. Am I missing something?
My interpretation from the article is that app was included to emphasize just how many frivolous apps crossed her radar except for that particular one that was truly solving a meaningful problem.
Although I would argue that it's worth asking whether or not that's a problem best addressed by means of an app. I'm not going to presume that that's why the author included it in the list, but it does seem a worthy question nonetheless.
There are definitely ways this _could_ make sense in the context of the article but you're right that without proper explanation is seems at best heartless and at worst pretty racist.
Responding to the point you're trying to make: How big of a problem are police killings--really?
We all understand the act of (unjustified) police killings is a bad one, but how much of a _problem_ is it? Look at the evidence.
Then look at all of the other problems that we all face, not just in the states, but worldwide. I can name a great problem that almost all of us should be focusing on: global warming. Why don't we spend our energy on a significant and catastrophic problem?
We need to prioritize. Anyone who tries to up or downplay something as a problem to you might have their own agenda, or have bought into someone else's agenda. Don't just believe me. Look for the evidence.
I think that the spread of phones with video recorders is a huge part of why police killings get more attention in 2016 than they did in 2006. In at least one case a woman live streamed a police killing, defeating later attempts to suppress the video. If the name Rodney King means anything to you it's because someone happened to have a video camera in the right place at the right time when they were rare. So it's hardly absurd to think that an app could help fight police killings.
It's cyclical. Warren buffet classically highlighted the nature of the cycle some time ago :
- The innovator, the imitator, and the idiot..
"At one point, his interviewer asked the question that is on all our minds: “Should wise people have known better?” Of course, they should have, Buffett replied, but there’s a “natural progression” to how good new ideas go wrong. He called this progression the “three I’s.” First come the innovators, who see opportunities that others don’t. Then come the imitators, who copy what the innovators have done. And then come the idiots, whose avarice undoes the very innovations they are trying to use to get rich."
Cloud computing, big data, social media, and most of tech is in a prolonged idiot phase. A new paradigm will be ushered in and the cycle will begin again. Any more detail just highlights or attempts to justify the idiocy.
The cause and effect one is kind of interesting to me, it's almost like having a life coach/accountant that gives it to you straight and keeps you on track. For example, what if it knew you got a penalty fee for being late on paying your phone bill and it knew you bought a six pack of beer last week which caused you to not have enough money? Maybe it can berate you and let you know that the six pack of beer > no money in your account > late payment > late fee > in debt and broke? Can an app be heartless? This one has potential.
It seems geared toward helping users become more aware of the impact their habits have on their well-being & emotions. The description in the article makes it easy to dismiss, but speaking from the standpoint of someone who's been emotionally disconnected for 20 years through information addiction (yep...it's a thing, complete with withdrawal symptoms) until earlier this year, there's a huge market.
I'm only just starting to learn how to recognize my emotions in the moment. Anxiety was so pervasive, it was my norm. Now, my struggle is to identify when I'm getting anxious because it's a vital signal from my body telling me there's a need of mine that I'm overlooking (another thing I'm just starting to learn).
It's why I'm considering getting a Microsoft Band 2 to help monitor my heart rate & sleeping habits.
"Every day, innovative companies promise to make the world a better place. Are they succeeding?"
Companies promise to make money by offering valuable goods and services to customers. "Making the world a better place" is just Silicon Valley hype. Companies aren't non-profits.
She's free to get away with a smear like this because it's impossible to quantify or predict the amazing things that can arise from instant access to information or from every human saving hundreds of hours a year and getting better products and services shopping online. Even when things inarguably improve - like when society suddenly decides to embrace and defend the rights of new categories of minorities - it's impossible to establish a definitive cause.
I'm sure some variant of this story could have been written at any time during the rise of global capitalism, yet the world has, by just about any measure, become a radically better place during just about any 25 year time frime. Show me a chart on https://ourworldindata.org/ where anything has gotten worse - from America to places once considered irredeemably "third world", just about anything we can measure is improving. We don't need concern trolls on high horses to make the world a better place.
I find articles like this pretty frustrating. There's tons of companies in Silicon Valley that are trying to do audacious things that people's mothers never did for them. They don't get much press coverage and that's fine, media outlets are businesses too so they need to write about companies that their readership wants to read about. But the fact that they then turn around and complain about the fact that all the companies on their radar are the same is outrageous. They're all the same because there's this huge selection bias applied by the fact that they only cover companies they think their average reader can understand. Which isn't a very wide variety.
I fail to see a single original thought in this article. This same article could have been written 10, 20, 100 years ago, about the stupid ideas from those times. There is no shortage of stupid ideas and there never has been. (If you think those periods didn't have as many stupid ideas, it's only because of survivor bias.)
Perhaps 10, 20, and 100 years ago, it was also a tragedy that so much effort was directed toward the minor desires of the reasonably well-off and so comparatively little into addressing the needs of those with little disposable income.
One might say Uber and Airbnb, among most hyped, were counter-examples where poor travelers or workers got more benefit than they otherwise would in those sectors. I haven't priced these in a while so these examples might be good or bad. I just know there's supply and demand side opportunities here for lower classes.
I don't see what's wrong with building businesses which serve niche desires. Does she not understand that surely there's somebody somewhere who desperately needs their car parked, that without the internet people already had beer delivered to their door?
She just seems to have such a curmudgeonly attitude, where all people must be working to solve her favourite enormous issues and never to slightly enhance the lives of some customers.
None of this is going to change unless capital miraculously grows a conscience. As an entrepreneur seeking funding you can't afford to solve problems for the poor because there's no way to raise money for that, and there's certainly not a lot of disposable income available to bootstrap from.
The problem with this type of article is that it conflates all the struggling little startups with the unicorns who are actually making a lot of money. These big companies probably should grow a conscience, but it's not really in their DNA, because if they had been socially conscious from the beginning they never would have succeeded. Meanwhile, all these little companies are in a life or death struggle on a daily basis, so they have to do the thing which gives them a chance to survive til tomorrow. Don't get me wrong, I recognize the privilege of people who get to join a high-risk startup, but just because they are individually privileged with that freedom does not mean that they have the power to actually push our culture to a more socialist mentality. I don't use the word "socialist" as an epithet here BTW, despite American political dog whistles, I think the growing income gap is evidence that we have a real lack of social conscience throughout society.
One of the reasons few 'startup' businesses target the needs of the poor is that many (especially among venture capital and government regulators) are uncomfortable with doing business with (or 'making money off') the poor. Marc Andreessen commented that a partner at A16Z has veto-d at least one funding proposal because of this discomfort.
There's a difference between predatory lending and tackling actual problems. And a16 actually has a few serious companies in its portfolio such as opengov.
There are plenty of companies who raise money to solve problems for the poor. Although if you want to be cynical you could dismiss it as them just trying to make money off the poor, they are businesses after all. Lendup is a good example of this, their goal is to provide loans to poor people that are better than pay day loans. Pretty impactful stuff if you ask me, but it doesn't seem to count in this article or in your comment. The article would much rather focus on an incredibly narrow band of startups that are easy to poke fun at and prove the point.
I counterpointed this comment, too, but you might be going too far here:
"The article would much rather focus on an incredibly narrow band of startups that are easy to poke fun at and prove the point."
The article does narrow it a bit but it's overall claim appears to be true. Most startups seem to target either frivilous stuff, stuff useful for businesses, or stuff appealing to middle class and up. That's almost everything I see here and with other sites. That poor are a smaller, troublesome market might be decent reason for many to focus on another segment. It seems that they do from what sample of startups I've seen.
I don't have hard data on the subject, though. I'm not sure how I'd even measure it outside maybe a survey of various startups' demographics of customers tracking what percent sell significantly to the poor. Success might be that hitting a certain percentage or going up over time.
> Most startups seem to target either frivolous stuff, stuff useful for businesses or stuff appealing to the middle class and up.
This is drifting pretty far from the article in my opinion which focussed almost entirely on frivolous stuff. The article only obliquely lamented that lower classes don't have enough focus put on them. It mostly seemed to be claiming that it's all frivolous stuff, these last 2 categories are the things I think the article narrowed it's sites to avoid.
" As an entrepreneur seeking funding you can't afford to solve problems for the poor because there's no way to raise money for that, and there's certainly not a lot of disposable income available to bootstrap from."
You could and there is. The poor still have disposable income they spend on same kinds of things as the middle class. They just collectively buy less of it. Gadgets, apps (esp mobile but also desktop), tax preparation, car work, house-hold appliances... quite a lot of startup potentials. The thing is the product/service has to have marketing or options for that demographic, it has to be good (esp convenient), and has to be affordable. Affordable, not cheap, as they buy both. ;)
That there's products that form in these spaces for the poor show me people are willing to do it and they make money. There's just rarely Silicon Valley startups targeting it. Also rarely best and brightest in general targeting it. Often average bootstrappers or startups putting together whatever they can once they know a problem exists. Sometimes it's an existing company doing a profitable side-project like one, tax service that cost about $25 a year but was owned by a solar company (?!). In that case, software worked like what H&R block people use but simpler with many, local users. SV could've easily made that.
Developed world is dying of obesity, diabetes, suicide and depression. Are those problems less severe than under developed countries, without access to vaccination, medical care and nutrition?
All problems are relative to your frame of reference. For someone who always lived with access to basic needs, some problems might be crippling enough to cause significant impact.
Yeah you can have food, medical care, and a house, but if you take 2h commuting each way to work you'll probably feel miserable. If you have a crippled or distant social network, despite having all physical basic needs, Social Networking tools might be lifesaving for you (eg. depression, isolation).
And I've heard this quite some times:
"Todays developed world problems, are going to be tomorrows developing world problems."
The interesting thing about technology is that it has proven to be so powerful that when people do mundane things with it, it is viewed as a failure (maybe rightly so, to some degree).
But, and this is a big but, the vast majority of people go to work every day and do very little of importance. 99% of people are not changing the world, for the better or otherwise. All the people making coffee, serving food, pushing paper at the DMV, driving trucks, driving cabs, trimming trees and mowing lawns, writing articles for the NYTimes, etc. they aren't changing the world and they aren't making a significant difference in the lives of the least privileged (except maybe themselves and their own families, if they're in that category).
No one writes articles lamenting the fact that a barista isn't changing the world. So, why do techies get blamed for lack of world-changing work?
I'm not saying I disagree, per se. I just wonder what makes us (in the broad use of "us" here, to mean anyone who builds technology for a living) that we get tasked with fixing the world? Maybe it's the way tech entrepreneurs often hype the products of their labor as being world-changing...even while probably knowing it's merely a historical footnote, if even that, in the grand scheme of things.
I want to make a positive impact on the world with my work, sure, but I also find I have to make economic decisions not unlike people who go to a regular job every day. I have to work on problems that I don't consider important, sometimes, just because I know it will keep my rent paid and food on my table this month. I'm not gonna feel guilty for that, but I also would love to know what the author proposes be done to make it so I don't have to worry about stuff like that and can go back to important but not profitable problems.
So, why do techies get blamed for lack of world-changing work?
Because there's a visceral, emotional response people get when they see the amount that we're being paid to work and the capital that's being poured into what looks like frivolous trivialities. Artless commerce. If we weren't here the focus would remain on Wall Street, except CDOs and complex financial instruments are trickier to reduce to absurdity in the NYT op-eds.
Or because "we" keep insisting that our work "makes the world a better place" and "changes the world". I'm sure there's at least one barista in soho who claims that (and frankly I've had more than one barista or bartender greatly improve my little corner of the world) but it's not constantly used to justify mind boggling financial returns or to write off the negative externalities of their work.
None of this is to say that tech can't change the world for the better but that the tech community gets a lot of monetary and prestige benefits that derive from these arguments so we shouldn't be surprised when people want to see results.
Edited to add: Wall Street never tried to get the mileage we get out of "no really, we might get rich but the whole world is a better place for it".
To pick an example, baristas do make a difference in the world. They help in many small ways to build communities. The wave of services that the author rails against do exactly the opposite. They replace people you could have called and talked to with mechanisms controlled by faraway companies that view human labor as a stepping stone to the totally automated future. Is this good? I guess we will have to wait and see.
Rant:
Often those who seem to be making a difference are just those we notice because they are making the biggest mess. Some companies operate like speedboats tearing through no wake zone. Isn't it grand how fast they go? Behind them is a trail of senseless destruction that they care not to see. Just because you make money doesn't mean its good. If we don't relearn to regulate ourselves this way we risk social order. Inequality will rise. Human interaction will be mediated by corporate lords. Then everything will start to smell. People are going to revolt, and nobody is going to have a nice time.
> I just wonder what makes us (in the broad use of "us" here, to mean anyone who builds technology for a living) that we get tasked with fixing the world?
Because:
-- we are the ones who have the intellectual abilities to do it,
-- we are the ones who received an education allowing us to do it,
-- our companies and a fair number of us pretend to do it and yell it everywhere,
-- an insane amount of money is poured in companies and projects we work for, and most of these companies and projects are either useless or harmful.
This set makes a big difference with people who are just in charge of making the world go round day after day, and who just do it well. Those do not disappoint. Those do not deceive.
> Here is just a sampling of the products, apps and services that have come across my radar
I don't know about your radar but my world is a pretty great place.
I can summon an Uber for myself or anyone else, get packages the next day at a fixed cost, live in a cash-less, paper-less world if I choose to, download a book 1 minute after learning about it while on the subway and have someone read it to me in a soothing tone, listen to my favorite writers and journalist on demand as they give away their wisdom for free all queued up on my infinite storage phone.
why pick and choose small niche startups for this article? what about self driving cars, 3d printing, VR, crypto currency or machine learning?
117 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadThe problem is: According to Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point...) there are three kind of people that one have to reach to become viral (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point...):
"Connectors are the people in a community who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions. A connector is essentially the social equivalent of a computer network hub. They usually know people across an array of social, cultural, professional, and economic circles, and make a habit of introducing people who work or live in different circles. [...]"
"Mavens are "information specialists", or "people we rely upon to connect us with new information".[4] They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others."
"Salesmen are "persuaders", charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They tend to have an indefinable trait that goes beyond what they say, which makes others want to agree with them."
Unluckily the groups in the quote above do not fall into these three classes. The problem really is if you start a startup you make a bet that in a rather short time (until money runs out) you will reach a critical mass of people for the startup to become self-sustained (or at least get enough customers such that you can get further funding). Obtaining such a critical mass in a short time is much easier if you concentrate on Malcolm Gladwell's three classes of people than on "single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over 50". Also the opposite holds: If these groups want to stop the "misfortune of being insufficiently interesting" they really should think how they can become a member of the three groups.
The most important thing in the world is love.
The most cherished thing in the world is a memory of a loved one.
Idea! I must make an app that helps me take pictures of loved ones, and share them with other loved ones.
If you hint at dating startups, here two texts why this is difficult:
> http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html
> http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/
The joke is (I hate explaining these): the most overdone app, exemplifying the NYtimes article, that I can think of is a photosharing app.
And then I worked back into how a photosharing app is what the article is encouraging us to create.
Although a dating app joke would have worked just as well, and I suspect wolfgke was implying that.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/microsoftpi...
Ha! I've used the exact same characterization.
Anyway, this seems entirely predictable given a couple different considerations.
1) People are most apt to effectively solve problems for which they have some context.
2) People who are underserved or otherwise have "real problems" don't often have much overlap with people who have discretionary money to pay for solutions.
So you end up with a selection bias in the pool of problem solvers (and thus the scope of addressable problems) and a selection bias in the expectation for investment returns. Which results in the best minds of our generation crunching all manner of machine learning models to make it so we don't have to do something mundane like selecting an outfit to wear that's color and style coordinated.
It makes me sad that some of the smartest people in the world are at Google and FB getting people to click ads.
Washing machines, kitchen appliances and similar technological advances, freed up our at home time so much that we can put a whole nother 50% of the population through college. A whole 50% of the population that can get jobs, have careers, and do cool shit, who was stuck wiping men's proverbial bottoms until the 1950's.
Making free time free is a good thing. There's no telling what will come of it.
Think of it this way: how much time saved on menial stuff will be freed up to go solve the so called more pressing problems? If anything, the problem is that we're thinking up wasteful ways of filling this time even faster than we're freeing the time itself up.
Assuming parking only once a week for each vehicle, that's over 60,000 hours of saved time per day. That engineer's time investment is virtually free in comparison.
Of course these savings will only materialize after parking technology becomes commoditized. Commoditization is part of tech progress.
That complicated stuff with associated costs might benefit middle class and up. The few who buy it among them. Many will also want the pride of parking themselves, distrust the technology, and so on. You're not saving 60,000 hours a day so much as a tiny faction of it. If you succeed where others failed for a few decades worth of PhD hours on computer vision, pathfinding, robotics, etc.
Simplifications in this thread are way off. The real world involves interplay of the technical capabilities, whatever regulations will be, finances, and social factors.
1 If some scientist finds a way to save a minute per instance of brushing your teeth, and if there is no difference in quality and cost, that is 600 million+ minutes saved every day in the US alone.
2 If some scientist finds a way for nocturnal people to contribute to society like other people, that is surely on the same magnitude as 1.
3 If some scientist finds some way to cut 10% of time on inspecting welds, it is surely a huge boost to the economy.
This is of course not meant to endorse situations where the quality drops. E.g. "If one cent is saved per unit of milk produced, I can buy a new yacht!"
A human, due to real constraints can't do a whole lot with an extra minute per day, and humans as a social body due to real constraints can't effectively collectively block-allocate 600 million diffuse minutes to some other cause. Each of them can only reallocate the minute they own/save.
The units and the distribution matter here... a lot. This seems obvious enough to illustrate using your own narrative.
What if I saved 6 Billion people 1ms per day? That's nearly 70 aggregated whole days saved per day. What are you going to spend your newly found 1ms on?
(If you're interested, the word "windfall" is of similar origin. It refers to fruit shaken loose of the tree by a stiff wind, thus requiring no effort to collect beyond that involved in simply bending to pick it up.)
The technology that really saved time was modern food procurement(the supermarket, or food that was ready to bring home with a short walk to a few stores.
And women, they wanted to work. I remember my mom had a lot of time on her hands, but it wasen't due to appliances.
When she got a career, she was happy at first, but then missed all the free time she had when she was a housewife.
And honestly, that concerns almost everything around me, except a fridge, a stove and a washing machine.
http://www.primestoves.com/
They are very well received, saves fuel (and thereby CO2) and gives cleaner air indoors.
And, yes: people with money are buying them.
Jeopardy style answer/question: "Why is diversity important?"
It would be as easy to deride the early plans of Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia as what the author does here (finding better kitten pictures, sharing kitten pictures with your sorority, peddling misinformation to your middle school teacher).
Perhaps universal basic income or other stimulus programs that will put dollars in the hands of those people, and then companies can compete for those dollars.
I'm lucky enough to be well-off in many regards that I can freely spend 20-30 hours a week to design/code projects that will hopefully have a meaningful impact to people in my city, specifically increasing awareness of mental health and injustice towards people of color. But I'm not being paid for it, nor is anyone here capable of giving me a salary/donation that comes even close to what I'd earn at a tech startup. The government is also pretty limited to how much they'd provide as a grant.
I'm reminded of an organization here that created a platform to enable non-profits find and manage volunteers, which has clear efficiency benefits for organizations since the process can be very messy. But because organizations can't really pay them that much, they are limited as to how quickly they can expand the team and add new features. Given the limits of their market, no 'investor' is going to invest in them in the hopes of expecting a meaningful financial return.
I'm not sure where I'm going with my train of thought. Maybe something like it'd be nice if there were a non-VC model that enabled groups to work on projects that had no clear profit model? I know the U.S. has organizations that give grants to transformative projects, like the Sunlight and Knight Foundation. Sadly, not every country is lucky enough to have something like that.
1. Some populations are underserved because they aren't sexy and high profile and interesting.
2. Some apps are solving small problems instead of tackling global warming.
The truth is that many (perhaps all) of those apps will fail, and if any succeed, most of the successes will be kind of marginal successes that don't upend the world. So what? That's how it works most of the time -- small incremental improvements to people's lives.
First of all, the implicit idea that the founders of these companies are all like, "Oh, hey, I have ten really highly functional business plans for bringing an app to profitability, and I'll reject the ones serving population X because I think it's 5% less profitable than the ones serving population Y" is dumb.
Second, the idea that that writer can identify the "right" populations and problems is risible.
And, to be clear, she absolutely is complaining that people are attacking small problems instead of global warming. She explicitly calls out rising sea levels.
And while a few of the services he identifies are targeted to a rich userbase (such as: locating rentable yachts, and probably the drone filming service, and the valet parking one), plenty of others aren't. The one about renting driveways is probably mostly enabling people who are relatively low-income for the area they live in to monetize an unused asset. Getting a new toothbrush addresses a need everyone has. Getting killed by the police is a problem faced disproportionately by lower-income people and minorities.
There are lots of false steps towards progress, and like I said, probably most or all of those will fail. But we've seen time and time again that top down direction to only focus on what some member of the cultural elite deems important is a recipe for disaster.
Isn't that precisely what VCs do when assessing the viability of a startup?
But we've seen time and time again that top down direction to only focus on what some member of the cultural elite deems important is a recipe for disaster.
NYT writers may be part of the cultural elite, but software engineers in San Francisco, by dint of their economic power and education levels, are arguably part of it as well. The VCs and startup financial and management classes are definitely so.
And not every tech idea is or should be VC-backed.
Software engineers are clearly in the cultural elite. And if any software engineer was in the business of telling people "I know what the right population and right problems are," they'd be idiots, too.
Note that that's distinct from, "I have AN idea that I think I can turn into a successful business, by targeting problem X of population Y" which says nothing about the universe of ideas.
Edit: To be clear I used those examples because they are the majority in America (which I should have been more clear about) in an effort to point out that the majority often does not pay as close attention to the problems that arise from being in a minority.
What you said was both racist and sexist. You're saying that a group of people (based on race and sex) are "not going to ..." do something. Speaking in generalizations using these classifications is generally regarded by most folks as racist/sexist.
It can be tricky though. You might be right, but you'll still be called out for it. For example, the peoples of eastern asia are statistically less tall than their counterparts in western europe. Nevertheless, "asians are shorter than europeans", is still a racist statement.
Unless you can see, as well as explain, how the generalizations you're making benefit the conversation, it's probably best to avoid making those types of statements in the first place.
Racism itself might be "wrong", but that doesn't mean you can't be racist and still be "right" in your assertions. That's the tricky part.
"Racism" (note the -ism to denote a system) requires a social, political and/or economic system by which a dominant group retains power over other groups. By that widely-held definition, it's literally impossible for a non-member of the dominant group to exhibit racism.
I fail to see how skin color, gender and "safeness," whatever the hell that is, implies someone has a "reduced" ability to detect and solve important problems. If you actually look for it, you will find many examples of people with the superficial characteristics you describe, and find that not only are they an extremely "diverse" group of people -- in the characteristics that truly matter -- but that they are doing precisely the kind of work that I think you speak of.
Why stop at people in "our field"? What about all of the people who possess the superficial characteristics you mention, but who also share an extraordinary amount of "diversity" and have had extraordinary success in treating important problems -- outside of "our field"? Doctors, scientists, engineers ... all over the world ... truly seek to make the world a better place.
Frankly I'm sick of the notion that "white, male and safe" implies a lack of diversity and a lack of ability or desire to detect ... whatever problems you have.
† https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation
†† http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm (search 'Software developers, applications and systems software')
I found this quote puzzling in light of the rest of the article. The author's main argument seems to be that tech "innovators" are focused on providing frivolous solutions to imaginary problems, while society crumbles in the background. But this quote -unless I'm misunderstanding it - ascribes a hugely far-reaching, dystopian power to technology that undercuts her overall point.
You can't have it both ways. Either tech products are mostly irrelevant, or they are fundamentally changing the most basic aspects of our existence. Which is it?
Hundreds of millions of people, at least, now experience a social world whose existence and interactions are mediated by a single, rather secretive, advertising company. I'd call that both a relevant and a fundamental change.
We all understand the act of (unjustified) police killings is a bad one, but how much of a _problem_ is it? Look at the evidence.
Then look at all of the other problems that we all face, not just in the states, but worldwide. I can name a great problem that almost all of us should be focusing on: global warming. Why don't we spend our energy on a significant and catastrophic problem?
We need to prioritize. Anyone who tries to up or downplay something as a problem to you might have their own agenda, or have bought into someone else's agenda. Don't just believe me. Look for the evidence.
It's possible to do this without ignoring other issues.
"At one point, his interviewer asked the question that is on all our minds: “Should wise people have known better?” Of course, they should have, Buffett replied, but there’s a “natural progression” to how good new ideas go wrong. He called this progression the “three I’s.” First come the innovators, who see opportunities that others don’t. Then come the imitators, who copy what the innovators have done. And then come the idiots, whose avarice undoes the very innovations they are trying to use to get rich."
Source : https://hbr.org/2008/10/wisdom-of-warren-buffet-on-imi
Cloud computing, big data, social media, and most of tech is in a prolonged idiot phase. A new paradigm will be ushered in and the cycle will begin again. Any more detail just highlights or attempts to justify the idiocy.
A service that sends someone to fill your car with gas.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-02/gas-delive...
A service that sends a valet on a scooter to you, wherever you are, to park your car.
http://luxe.com/
A service that will film anything you desire with a drone.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/03/droners-is-a-market...
A service that will pack your suitcase — virtually.
http://www.dufl.com/
A service that delivers a new toothbrush head to your mailbox every three months.
http://www.getquip.com/
A service that delivers your beer right to your door.
https://sauceyapp.com/
An app that analyzes the quality of your French kissing.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifrenchkiss-french-kissing/i...
A “smart” button and zipper that alerts you if your fly is down.
https://www.fastcodesign.com/3060268/brilliant-this-zipper-w...
An app with speaker that plays music from within a mother’s vaginal walls to her unborn baby.
https://www.babypod.net/en/babypod/
A sensor placed in your child’s diaper that sends you an alert when the diaper needs changing.
https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/advisor/smart-diaper-ale...
An app that lets us brew our coffee from anywhere.
http://smarter.am/coffee/
A refrigerator advertised as “the Family Hub” that promises to act as a personal assistant, message board, stereo and photo album.
http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/family-hub-refrigerator/
An app to locate rentable driveways for parking.
https://www.justpark.com/rent-out-a-parking-space/
An app to locate rentable yachts.
https://getmyboat.com/
WTF? An app to help you understand “cause and effect in your life.”
An app that guides mindful meditation.
An app that imparts wisdom.
And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police killings.
Maybe https://www.headspace.com/
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/zenta-stress-emotion-mana...
It seems geared toward helping users become more aware of the impact their habits have on their well-being & emotions. The description in the article makes it easy to dismiss, but speaking from the standpoint of someone who's been emotionally disconnected for 20 years through information addiction (yep...it's a thing, complete with withdrawal symptoms) until earlier this year, there's a huge market.
I'm only just starting to learn how to recognize my emotions in the moment. Anxiety was so pervasive, it was my norm. Now, my struggle is to identify when I'm getting anxious because it's a vital signal from my body telling me there's a need of mine that I'm overlooking (another thing I'm just starting to learn).
It's why I'm considering getting a Microsoft Band 2 to help monitor my heart rate & sleeping habits.
Companies promise to make money by offering valuable goods and services to customers. "Making the world a better place" is just Silicon Valley hype. Companies aren't non-profits.
-Marshall McLuhan
I'm sure some variant of this story could have been written at any time during the rise of global capitalism, yet the world has, by just about any measure, become a radically better place during just about any 25 year time frime. Show me a chart on https://ourworldindata.org/ where anything has gotten worse - from America to places once considered irredeemably "third world", just about anything we can measure is improving. We don't need concern trolls on high horses to make the world a better place.
Yes please. So I can have more time to solve bigger, and more challenging problems...
I don't understand how we can even tackle these harder problems if we're spending so much time on mundane chores.. it all adds up.
Can you name one?
Apple - my mom never made me any electronics equipment Tesla - my mom never made me a car
You can find many more by googling things like:
Silicon Valley enterprise companies Silicon Valley hardware companies Silicon Valley med tech companies
etc
She just seems to have such a curmudgeonly attitude, where all people must be working to solve her favourite enormous issues and never to slightly enhance the lives of some customers.
The problem with this type of article is that it conflates all the struggling little startups with the unicorns who are actually making a lot of money. These big companies probably should grow a conscience, but it's not really in their DNA, because if they had been socially conscious from the beginning they never would have succeeded. Meanwhile, all these little companies are in a life or death struggle on a daily basis, so they have to do the thing which gives them a chance to survive til tomorrow. Don't get me wrong, I recognize the privilege of people who get to join a high-risk startup, but just because they are individually privileged with that freedom does not mean that they have the power to actually push our culture to a more socialist mentality. I don't use the word "socialist" as an epithet here BTW, despite American political dog whistles, I think the growing income gap is evidence that we have a real lack of social conscience throughout society.
"The article would much rather focus on an incredibly narrow band of startups that are easy to poke fun at and prove the point."
The article does narrow it a bit but it's overall claim appears to be true. Most startups seem to target either frivilous stuff, stuff useful for businesses, or stuff appealing to middle class and up. That's almost everything I see here and with other sites. That poor are a smaller, troublesome market might be decent reason for many to focus on another segment. It seems that they do from what sample of startups I've seen.
I don't have hard data on the subject, though. I'm not sure how I'd even measure it outside maybe a survey of various startups' demographics of customers tracking what percent sell significantly to the poor. Success might be that hitting a certain percentage or going up over time.
This is drifting pretty far from the article in my opinion which focussed almost entirely on frivolous stuff. The article only obliquely lamented that lower classes don't have enough focus put on them. It mostly seemed to be claiming that it's all frivolous stuff, these last 2 categories are the things I think the article narrowed it's sites to avoid.
You could and there is. The poor still have disposable income they spend on same kinds of things as the middle class. They just collectively buy less of it. Gadgets, apps (esp mobile but also desktop), tax preparation, car work, house-hold appliances... quite a lot of startup potentials. The thing is the product/service has to have marketing or options for that demographic, it has to be good (esp convenient), and has to be affordable. Affordable, not cheap, as they buy both. ;)
That there's products that form in these spaces for the poor show me people are willing to do it and they make money. There's just rarely Silicon Valley startups targeting it. Also rarely best and brightest in general targeting it. Often average bootstrappers or startups putting together whatever they can once they know a problem exists. Sometimes it's an existing company doing a profitable side-project like one, tax service that cost about $25 a year but was owned by a solar company (?!). In that case, software worked like what H&R block people use but simpler with many, local users. SV could've easily made that.
All problems are relative to your frame of reference. For someone who always lived with access to basic needs, some problems might be crippling enough to cause significant impact.
Yeah you can have food, medical care, and a house, but if you take 2h commuting each way to work you'll probably feel miserable. If you have a crippled or distant social network, despite having all physical basic needs, Social Networking tools might be lifesaving for you (eg. depression, isolation).
And I've heard this quite some times: "Todays developed world problems, are going to be tomorrows developing world problems."
But, and this is a big but, the vast majority of people go to work every day and do very little of importance. 99% of people are not changing the world, for the better or otherwise. All the people making coffee, serving food, pushing paper at the DMV, driving trucks, driving cabs, trimming trees and mowing lawns, writing articles for the NYTimes, etc. they aren't changing the world and they aren't making a significant difference in the lives of the least privileged (except maybe themselves and their own families, if they're in that category).
No one writes articles lamenting the fact that a barista isn't changing the world. So, why do techies get blamed for lack of world-changing work?
I'm not saying I disagree, per se. I just wonder what makes us (in the broad use of "us" here, to mean anyone who builds technology for a living) that we get tasked with fixing the world? Maybe it's the way tech entrepreneurs often hype the products of their labor as being world-changing...even while probably knowing it's merely a historical footnote, if even that, in the grand scheme of things.
I want to make a positive impact on the world with my work, sure, but I also find I have to make economic decisions not unlike people who go to a regular job every day. I have to work on problems that I don't consider important, sometimes, just because I know it will keep my rent paid and food on my table this month. I'm not gonna feel guilty for that, but I also would love to know what the author proposes be done to make it so I don't have to worry about stuff like that and can go back to important but not profitable problems.
Because there's a visceral, emotional response people get when they see the amount that we're being paid to work and the capital that's being poured into what looks like frivolous trivialities. Artless commerce. If we weren't here the focus would remain on Wall Street, except CDOs and complex financial instruments are trickier to reduce to absurdity in the NYT op-eds.
None of this is to say that tech can't change the world for the better but that the tech community gets a lot of monetary and prestige benefits that derive from these arguments so we shouldn't be surprised when people want to see results.
Edited to add: Wall Street never tried to get the mileage we get out of "no really, we might get rich but the whole world is a better place for it".
Rant:
Often those who seem to be making a difference are just those we notice because they are making the biggest mess. Some companies operate like speedboats tearing through no wake zone. Isn't it grand how fast they go? Behind them is a trail of senseless destruction that they care not to see. Just because you make money doesn't mean its good. If we don't relearn to regulate ourselves this way we risk social order. Inequality will rise. Human interaction will be mediated by corporate lords. Then everything will start to smell. People are going to revolt, and nobody is going to have a nice time.
Ahem ahem...
Because:
-- we are the ones who have the intellectual abilities to do it,
-- we are the ones who received an education allowing us to do it,
-- our companies and a fair number of us pretend to do it and yell it everywhere,
-- an insane amount of money is poured in companies and projects we work for, and most of these companies and projects are either useless or harmful.
This set makes a big difference with people who are just in charge of making the world go round day after day, and who just do it well. Those do not disappoint. Those do not deceive.
I don't know about your radar but my world is a pretty great place.
I can summon an Uber for myself or anyone else, get packages the next day at a fixed cost, live in a cash-less, paper-less world if I choose to, download a book 1 minute after learning about it while on the subway and have someone read it to me in a soothing tone, listen to my favorite writers and journalist on demand as they give away their wisdom for free all queued up on my infinite storage phone.
why pick and choose small niche startups for this article? what about self driving cars, 3d printing, VR, crypto currency or machine learning?