[hasbroslasher]

It's true that ultimately there aren't a whole lot of morally "good" things you can do with your compsci degree at the moment. You can work in adtech or building corporate software, ecommerce, etc. to sell plastic trinkets to people and raise your company's stock price. Or you can do ML, which will probably hurt poor people in the near to mid term and probably contribute somewhat to the more Orwellian aspects of modern life. Or you can do some third thing: some kind of applied tech a more physical engineering discipline (energy, spaceships, robots, etc.) that might or might not do anything for the common man.

I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the US education system who go to work for Wall Street or in adtech/ecommerce roles. We have the brains and energy and passion to solve alternative energy, vertical farming, asteroid mining, carbon sequestration, and social democracy overnight but our system deliberately misallocates resources to projects that generate capital for the already wealthy instead of promoting one iota of social good. Here's to hoping this is a start of that bigger, necessary change.

[Kalium]

I know! You're incredibly right! It's seems impossible that so many smart, educated, talented, passionate, hard-working people could fail to solve any problem they put their minds to!

Yet, might it be worth considering that any individual human brain could potentially be less than infinitely malleable in all possible aspects? I have known blindingly brilliant artists who are utterly repulsed by basic arithmetic, and equally brilliant mathematicians who cannot even begin to grasp how any person could be concerned with things as minor as governance structure when there is math to be done. It might be possible to press those people into the service of what someone else deems social good, but I must admit I am experiencing some doubts that they would universally consider it socially good for them.

Beyond that, consider what selling trinkets and shipping things around the globe has done. It's helped lift billions of people out of abject poverty. It has made material well-being and food security possible on scales unimaginable only a few centuries ago. It has done so more successfully, and more quickly, than any effort explicitly directed at social good in human history. A critic would point to the price paid, and posit that there might have been a better option, but this critic is almost certainly making perfect the enemy of good in pursuit of an ideal.

I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the US education system who struggle to recognize so many things in life. You're absolutely right - what's lost by chasing money for its own sake is one such. It's just maybe worth considering that there could potentially be others.

[hasbroslasher]

As far as "the price paid" that you mention: the price is not paid in any way. The price is being put on a high-interest credit card and we're paying the minimum. Someday those cans we've kicked down the road (carbon emissions, pacific garbage patch, destruction of ocean ecosystems in general, deforestation, economic inequality, desertification, etc.) in order to sell more plastic trinkets will come back to collect on our outstanding balance.

[ryderm]

> but this critic is almost certainly making perfect the enemy of good in pursuit of an ideal.

Yes, because "good" means preventable poverty related deaths by the millions because it is not profitable to do anything about it \s. Good for you != good, but it is easy to look past that when it isn't right in your face

[coolaliasbro]

What do you believe to be the cause of that abject poverty?

[AnarchoYeasty]

The idea that Capitalism has raised billions out of poverty is simply not grounded in reality. What the world bank has done with their statistics should send up red flags for someone whos taken Stats 101. I mean first off, the idea that 1$ / day is the poverty line and being slightly above that is absurd. But what's worse in 2000 the world bank reported that the number Rose from 1.2 billion people who made less than 1$/day in 1987 to 1.5 billion in 2000. That obviously doesn't fit the narrative. So they changed the poverty line from 1.02 / day in 1985 to 1.08 in 1993. The number again changed to $1.25 in 2008. Overnight 316 million people were raised out of poverty.

Of course anyone who experienced life in the 90's can see the glaring problem with this. $1.08 in 1993 has the same purchasing power as $1.61 in 2008. Those hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty? They are all still there. The rate of inflation is greater than the rise of the ipl. They did glaringly bad math tricks to make it appear as if half a billion people were lifted out of poverty by neoliberalism and Capitalism. And yet that couldn't be further from the truth.

Now that doesn't even take into account the situation in "wealthier" countries, such as Sri Lanka. A survey of Sri Lanka found that 35% of the country fell underneath their poverty line. However the world bank using the international poverty line reported only 4% were lifted out of poverty that year!. A wave of the hand and suddenly 31% of the population didn't factor in to their feel good story of capitalistic success.

And again I want to point out these absurd arbitrary numbers. $1.25 a day? Are you kidding me? Have you ever lived on $1.25 a day? The UN reports that the average person in 2005 needed at least $4.50/day just to meet the minimum nutritional requirements. The minimum. In India, one of the harleded successes of the world bank, children living just above the ipl had a 60% chance of being malnourished.

New Castle University once calculated that if people we're to achieve a normal life expectancy they would need at least $2.50 / day as the new IPL. But if we adopted that as the new IPL it would mean that now 3.1 billion people are living in abject poverty.

I got these numbers from this video https://youtu.be/A6VqV1T4uYs but in the description they list out all of their sources.

When you stop making up numbers to hide actual real poverty, the picture becomes clear. Rather than lifting people out of poverty, neoliberal capitalist policies are responsible for plunging half a billion more people into poverty today than in 1980.

[sigstoat]

> It's true that ultimately there aren't a whole lot of morally "good" things you can do with your compsci degree at the moment.

uhhh. your bubble is astonishing. or your standards for "good" are unattainable by anyone.

how about folks who work on CAD software? is that bad because it will be used to design plastic trinkets, or good because it'll design medical prosthetics?

(are the medical prosthetics good because they help people, or bad because they make someone money?)

if i write the software for a piece of test equipment for batteries, is that good because now people who buy consumer electronics are less likely to catch on fire? or bad because i helped the big company sell more plastic trinkets?

[untilHellbanned]

Not a generous interpretation of their argument. I’m in biomedical research which also wasn’t mentioned explicitly but I read it as a more general argument about finding something that is future-looking and helpful to many vs a few.

[xahrepap]

I work for a medical company. It's really a tech company that makes medical software. Runs like a pretty typical successful tech startup. Our customers are hospitals and doctor clinics. The software syncs the data between various networks. Can notify a patient's primary care giver when their patient is checked into the ER, can notify a doctor if that patient is bouncing between hospitals looking for meds, there was even a time I heard of a man going between hospitals, checking in, and vandalizing hospital equipment. Our software was able to notify the nurse who checked him in at his last destination.

It's actually an awesome place to work, and it's nice to know that I'm actually helping push the needle a little bit in the right direction to help the medical industry succeed.

[el_benhameen]

I’ve been thinking about finding a new job, and finding something that I feel is moral and pushes society forward are important criteria for me. Medtech seems like the sort of thing that might meet them.

If you don’t mind me asking, how’d you end up in the medical device field? Do you feel like the projects you work on contribute to the advancement of human health? And do you feel that you’re adequately compensated? I don’t love asking that last one in the same breath as questions of morality, but I do have a family to take care of.

[acdanger]

It's exceedingly depressing and it's one of the reasons I can't stomach the Bay Area.

It doesn't take long to notice serious manifestations of societal rot. And yet some of the brightest minds of our generation spend their best years trying to get people to spend more of their cognitive surplus on mindlessly staring at their device screen.

I'm not at all saying this is tech's fault. I think the problem is much more systemic. But that doesn't make it any less troublesome.

[hasbroslasher]

I completely agree. It's not tech's fault at all - tech companies prey on our basic neural hardware as much as fast-food companies do, as much as predatory banks do, and all for the same reason: to generate capital.

Luckily, I think I'm starting to see more people waking up to smell the societal rot that tech has helped foster, and people are becoming more motivated to fight it. I'm just waiting to see if tech folks can mobilize to push for causes like socialism during my lifetime. That would be the ultimate "Revenge of the Nerds" story line at this point.

[stcredzero]

We have the brains and energy and passion to solve alternative energy, vertical farming, asteroid mining, carbon sequestration, and social democracy overnight

1) Alternative Energy has a lot of minds working on it already. Success is dependent on the establishment of large scale infrastructure and changing societal expectations. One "Ah-Ha!" moment isn't going to cut it.

2) Vertical Farming is a world-saving problem that needs solving? Color me skeptical.

3) Asteroid Mining: Also requires establishment of large scale infrastructure.

4) Carbon Sequestration: The laws of thermodynamics are against you on this, unless you can marshal self-replicators harvesting a significant portion of the sunlight falling on the Earth. If we've gotten that desperate, it must mean that building sunshades at L1 has been made unavailable by groundside politics and/or the Kessler Syndrome.

5) Social Democracy Overnight: Why is this desirable, outside of theory? The whole of history indicates to us that collectivism works either on small scales, or as a disguised totalitarianism.

projects that generate capital for the already wealthy instead of promoting one iota of social good

Is that what the Industrial Revolution was? Or has industrialization raised 90% of the world's population out of poverty? Hint: It's the latter.

Another hint: Has there ever been a collection of intelligent, privileged young people who thought they could change the world into a utopia? I think you might want to study the history a bit. There was one utopian project which was implemented by privileged intellectuals, but which was also based on a good knowledge of history and human nature. Though flawed, that project worked, did some good, and has been going on for well over 200 years.

[ubernostrum]

Social Democracy Overnight: Why is this desirable, outside of theory? The whole of history indicates to us that collectivism works either on small scales, or as a disguised totalitarianism.

Here we observe the not-so-subtle attempt to shift the debate from "social democracy" to "collectivism", as if the two terms are synonyms.

We also see a denial that mixed economies with strong social safety nets can ever work on, say, the scale of a nation. Despite plenty of evidence available, in the real world, that they can.

[hasbroslasher]

1. Yeah, sure we have a lot of minds working on AE, but are you really going to argue that working on Farmville is even comparable to the task of establishing the infrastructure and social changes needed to make AE universally solvent? No where am I saying we need an Ah-Ha moment. We need people who can work and proper incentives from the supposedly smart people who run the show in government and industry.

2. If you're unfamiliar with the environmental problems and inefficiencies present in our current food system, I implore you to do some research and get back to me. Decentralized, high-efficiency, urban food production is going to become more and more necessary as human populations continue to move into cities and global warming reduces crop viability in much of the world.

3. I don't understand how "establishment of large scale infrastructure" is a blocker to what I'm saying. Large scale infrastructure means you need smart people to design and build things to make a goal possible. You need "large scale infrastructure" like railroads to ship goods across the U.S. but when that was a need in the 17th century no one was grousing about how much work it was going to be.

4. Say what you will, but a system of distributed C02 scrubbers powered by alternative energy is at least a feasible way to prevent a Hothouse Earth scenario. Better than just accepting climatic doom through inaction.

5. Social democracy doesn't mean we become out-and-out Marxists, it just means that maybe we reconsider government in relation to what people need. Germany is a social democracy, USA is a democracy where people go without clean drinking water. Talk about a false dichotomy.

[solidsnack9000]

Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about. In part that is because survival and solvency are quite difficult in the details; and in part that is because doing “good” requires a much richer concept of what you are doing than is required by being profitable and placating shareholders. It’s easier to get it wrong, harder to say when you’re done and can move resources to other things and harder to keep people’s actions aligned with the goal.

Over the past hundred years, California has been host to thousands of intentional communities, where people set their sights on something higher than making a living. Nearly all of these communities collapse within a generation, neither living up to their ambitions nor providing for their members’ most basic needs. These failures have multiple causes, but ultimately can be summed up in terms of having one institution serve too many different functions, in an environment where there are already specialized institutions serving those functions efficiently.

People seeking to do good in the world aren’t looking for work, they are looking for religion — in the sense of spiritual community and connection to the godhead. Doing good is the role of something like the Salvation Army and charitable missions — institutions of long standing which are subject to very different guidelines than businesses.

Those who would mix business and charitable, virtuous action are asking to be held accountable for neither while enjoying the rewards of both.

[ryderm]

> Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about.

If only society / the global economic system wasn't set up to incentive profit over all else....

[WalterSear]

> Those who would mix business and charitable, virtuous action are asking to be held accountable for neither while enjoying the rewards of both.

The problem isn't that people are expecting businesses to be charities. It's that survival and solvency make abuse of the commons a business necessity.

People want jobs that don't involve abusing the commons.

[pimlottc]

Might I suggest the civic tech sector as a place where coders (and designers and product managers) can find morally satisfying work? You can work directly for government in organizations like the US Digital Service and 18F that bring the lean startup model into the public sector or join purpose-driven private companies like Nava and Ad Hoc that contract on government project spaces like healthcare using modern development practices. And there's lots of charitable and volunteer opportunities at well.

https://usds.gov/jobs https://18f.gsa.gov/jobs https://jobs.codeforamerica.org/ https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/

[nradov]

There are many interesting opportunities in healthcare related to improving care quality, increasing interoperability, cutting inefficiencies, boosting EMR usability, and integrating wearable device data. Funding and jobs are available.

I would also note that a Computer Science degree isn't necessarily the best preparation for a career building commercial software.

[illumin8]

You can work on blockchain projects that might have the potential to bring financial services to the unbanked and poor in 3rd world countries, but, oh wait a minute, the technology will probably just be used to create predatory financial products for payday lenders to expand their market...

The best way to make sure you are working on ethical projects is to start and run your own company. Any technology can be used for good or evil. Personally, I do think blockchain has a lot of potential, but the best way to ensure that your technology gets used for good is to design it yourself that way - in other words, build a micro-lending system that helps finance small business owners in 3rd world countries with fair interest rates, instead of building a predatory payday lending system that charges unfair interest rates.

[annabellish]

I have yet to see even a concept, never mind a product, that actually uses a blockchain in a net-positive way, especially for "the unbanked". Universally high transaction fees and slow confirmation times on anything that sees leitimate amounts of use with no clear path towards mitigating this situation, if it's even possible to mitigate at all, combined with several choices of security system each with devastating concequences - from the morally black proof-of-work burning precious resources at a time climate change is already threatening to destroy us, to the morally grey proof-of-stake that simply reinforces the idea that those with the most resources deserve even more resources - makes for something that doesn't seem to have much potential for _good_. The "Unbanked" aren't going to be served by these systems, they need efficient, reliable, and safe systems.

[ForHackernews]

Even aside from the financial scams, any proof-of-work blockchain project is an ecological obscenity.

[clubm8]

I think there's a lot of good, moral work out there.

I have a friend who's a security engineer at a bank. I was surprised when he took the job - he'd always been pretty to the left politically.

But he takes pride in making sure the grandmas of the world don't get their accounts drained. He realizes he's not saving the world, but he's not swapping around debt vouchers until the economy crashes.

It's counter intuitive, but in his mind he's more moral than someone working at Google or Facebook.

(He also brags to me about the vacation - apparently they're encouraged to take their time for anti-fraud reasons?)

[alleyshack]

My understanding is that the anti-fraud vacation thing is related to being able to correlate a decrease in fraud with a specific person going on vacation. If you have money that mysteriously goes missing on the regular and 10 employees who touch it along the way, it's hard to determine which of those employees is responsible. If one of them goes away on vacation for a week and no money goes missing that entire week, you suddenly have a much better idea who might have been involved.

[DoreenMichele]

So, I run a bunch of websites on a platform provided for free provided by that Evil Overlord Google and I make a few bucks that way, which matters to me because I remain desperately poor, and I also disseminate useful info for free that way to needy people, such as homeless people.

BlogSpot is a robust platform and some of the folks who worked on it probably have compsci degrees.

I'm also curing the incurable, but most people don't believe that, so probably no point in trying to convince you that I may yet win a Nobel Prize in medicine someday, if people will ever stop calling me crazy and take me seriously.

Don't mind me. I'm just cranky cuz reasons.

[starpilot]

The effective altruism perspective is to make as money as possible doing whatever, then use that to fund noble causes. At the individual level it's the Wall Street quant who donates his income. At the corporate level, it's FB using ad money to create the Chan-Zuckerberg Intiative to cure cancer.

[jcmoscon]

You could build a decentralized version of facebook or twitter. That would be a truly amazing progress to humankind!

[cubano]

And I am sure the 20 users who manage to get it working correctly will be really happy that they can talk to each other.

Of course, Social only works if a critical mass of users start actively using the network...achieving that number, no matter what the underlying tech is, is a very hard nut to crack.

[julienreszka]

It's just your lack of imagination

[djohnston]

applied tech to a physical engineering degree could wreak far more havoc on humanity than ad tech

[uhtred]

I wonder if socialism done right (if that's possible, as no one has yet proven it is) would lead to smart people working on the kinds of things you listed. In theory it would, as there'd be no need for adtech, ecommerce, Wall Street, etc.

[hasbroslasher]

I'm not necessarily advocating for socialism, I'm just suggesting that the USA government spends more on incentivizing technological innovation in areas that have real payouts for humanity. It's almost a tautology that if you started offering government jobs at $100k a year and funding to work on interesting, novel problems, you'd attract a whole lot of people who are bored and disenfranchised with adtech or high finance.