[HN Gopher] Does computing make the world better? ___________________________________________________________________ Does computing make the world better? Author : brundolf Score : 11 points Date : 2020-06-21 21:47 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.brandonsmith.ninja) (TXT) w3m dump (www.brandonsmith.ninja) | tomrod wrote: | Along several dimensions, computing makes the "world better" | under several philosophical approaches. | | Utilitarian/capitalist: we are more efficient with resources. | | Artistic: new media channels and techniques allow for increased | expression | | Experiential: one of the claims about the benefits of books, pre- | Internet, is that it allowed you to experience places you'd never | seen before. Computers, built on top of computing, allow us to | have even deeper and richer self-driven experiences. How cool was | it when Google Maps launched! I could explore parts of the world | I pined for, wanted to visit, and eventually integrated its | utility into my life much deeper -- no more need to purchase | maps, etc. etc. | | So from a practical perspective, I think computing has made life | unambiguously "better" in several ways. | | Is the "world" better? Probably not. But this isn't due to the | tools themselves, but to the tool wielders. Power consolidation | and maintenance is the realm of political science and political | action. Computing has impacted this, some in positive ways and | some in negative ways. | eat_veggies wrote: | I've written a similar thoughts on computing's mutual recursion | with the offline world, and the software engineer's place as | code-writer and code-reader [0]. Computers, like any means of | production, are only furthering inequality in the world (along | the usual lines -- wealth, race, geography, social standing, | etc). Computing _can_ make the world better but right now it can | 't and won't -- and that kind of sucks. | | I really like the author's sentiment that "It's okay to invent | useless things, create beautiful projects for their own sake, | etc." and I think that's the first step to creating something | that doesn't take computing as capital, as dead labor. | | Computing can be experimental, playful, and helpful to our | communities. It doesn't have to scale, make big profits, or | attract billions in VC bucks; in fact, all of those things just | seem to bring us misery. And importantly, they are all orthogonal | to the software itself. I'm inspired by Robin Sloan's "An app can | be a home-cooked meal" [1] and initiatives like NYC Mesh [2]. | It's okay if our software _merely_ brings joy to our families and | local communities. | | [0] https://blog.jse.li/posts/software/ | | [1] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ | | [2] https://www.nycmesh.net/ | haram_masala wrote: | He makes the point that "the idea of having fun and doing good at | the same time is incredibly seductive." He's right, of course, | but I think the real problem is that (for most people) your work | can be at most two of the following: fun, socially beneficial, | and lucrative. In fact you're lucky if it's just one of those. | | That may seem like a pithy observation, but I think it actually | says a lot about whether technology is a force for good, because | it seems like technology also follows that same two-out-of-three | rule. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-06-21 23:00 UTC)