Ask HN: Disillusioned with the direction of society and technology

[morpheos137]

Technology seems like a giant waste of time and energy for human civilisation.

Specifically the social media giants and advertising funded tech companies seem like the definition of emotional vampires. So do cryptocurrencies.

They are making society worse not better. For a time maybe 15-20 years ago, maybe peaking around the era of Snowden it looked like technology was going to truly democratise the world.

Now we are being led into an orwellian hell hole.

For what tech produces it is overly rewarded economically. The true economic value of some companies like facebook or amazon may be negative.

What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster?

I think it is already too late. The internet is like an opiate or stimulant for the masses and a vampire, feeding off of and feeding into emotions and mass popular delusions allowing people to be manipulated as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions.

[civilized]

Some lessons that will come with age.

1. There is no magic that will change human nature.

2. Rules that keep people from harming others are very important.

3. Don't expect to live a "special" or "great" or "revolutionary" life. Aspire to something extraordinary if you see an opportunity, but ordinary things like health, moderate wealth, and family are also good enough, and will have to be good enough for most people. And there is something very special in simply living a very good ordinary life.

4. Try not to be pushed into doing things that corrode the moral goodness within you. You will not regret spurning material rewards to live in accordance with your values, but you will regret the opposite.

[zouhair]

Let's start by making revolving doors illegal.

[eli_gottlieb]

3a) However, most interviews and opportunities are full of themselves, so make sure you can spin a tale of how extraordinary you are and how your whole life has led to this job interview on an as-needed basis.

[bloqs]

This is excellent advice.

[kingkawn]

5. Resist empty generalizations

[uwagar]

2. Rules that keep people from harming others are very important.

u mean mandatory vaccination?

[gnulinux]

First, very condescending to assume a certain wisdom comes with age. Downvoted just for that.

I think you're completely wrong, especially about 1. Human nature doesn't shape our technological reality, it is becoming more and more obvious that technological reality shapes human culture. And people mistake culture as "nature".

Human nature is very plastic, trying to fit any one thing into "human nature" is (this is my humble opinion, please don't be offended) very bigoted.

[mentos]

Social media giants are like tobacco companies in the 1950/60s.

If the next president ran on a platform of regulating social media as the harmful and addictive product it is, people would probably be receptive. Everyone knows they have an addiction but without collective action the spell can't be broken.

No social media company is going to regulate themselves, but if there was industry wide regulation they could probably find some peace of mind knowing they can implement more healthy practices without fear of a competitor undercutting them.

[afavour]

> people would probably be receptive

I wish I shared your optimism. It would be immediately weaponised (on social media, of course) as an attack on free speech, or whatever is needed to get the right people riled up.

Social media is awful but a) the vast majority love it (if you told my mother she was losing Facebook she’d be livid) and b) it serves the interests of the powers that be.

[jdhn]

>Everyone knows they have an addiction but without collective action the spell can't be broken.

Sorry, but it's literally as simple as closing the tab. I stopped using Facebook on a regular basis in 2019 by uninstalling the app from my phone as well as just not logging on from the desktop. I never found it so addicting that I couldn't go without it for awhile.

[whatgoodisaroad]

An important difference between tobacco companies and big tech is that the latter sells tools to political campaigns.

So far as I know, there was never a system where each cigarette could advertise a politician, but if there were, when world today may look different.

[mandmandam]

Outside of the west, tobacco companies are like tobacco companies in the 50s and 60s.

They haven't learned anything except how to be sneakier. They haven't changed, except as to the minimum possible extent demanded by law.

Which I think helps prove your point.

[goalieca]

I strongly bet that the government instead wants to control the beast to their own benefit. Imagine the power if you could more precisely shape the public discussion. China has demonstrated this quite well.

Edit: i mean political parties and not just a single supposed monolith that is government. The two aren’t quite separate though.

[ceasesurthinko]

Fantastic analogy with social media to tobacco, both seemed innocent at first, then as more research surfaced with tobacco causing lung cancer and now social media causing depression/anxiety in teens and adults, hopefully now we can actually view social media like the disease it is and come to some solution involving regulation.

[morpheos137]

There is no reason why a social media company needs to exist as such. It should be easy to make a personal html/css based website three decades after the innovation that was the WWW.

However now if I make a plain html website nobody will see it because google will not rank it above all the SEO blog spam and portal results (e.g. Reddit, Quora) and everybody is too busy arguing about something on Reddit/Twitter/Facebook and watching the latest viral 30second tiktok vids to care. Everybody is in one pasture or another being shepherded by vampire corporate interests harvesting their time and emotions.

[gambler]

I hate the gaslighers who try to downplay this by putting into some BS "context". The situation with tech is abysmal right now. I do think it's fixable, though.

> What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster?

We have to use extreme lateral thinking and build systems that support themselves and over time outcompete garbage like social media and "crypto". Neither are long-term stable anyway.

One of the problems, though, is that this needs to be worked on over time. People who see the problem need places to cooperate. Social media is clearly not the place to do that, because pretty much by definition it is ran and inhabited by people who aren't interested in solving these kind of problems. (In fact, they are interesting in the opposite.)

One of my biggest regrets right now is that I spent too much time on my normal work in tech, while spending not enough time and effort on cultivating independent communities of people who actually think about stuff like this. It was easy to find interesting and interested people to cooperate with in late 90s and early 00s. Today it's really hard. Everything is filtered through social media. We are on social media right now.

Another problem is that we have no good conceptual vocabulary or an analytical framework to precisely talk about these problems. Everyone just repeats terms like "misinformation" and "censorship". Public conversations about this spin in place, going nowhere good. I understand (at least I think I understand) what you're talking about because I've already independently reaches the same conclusions. That's not enough to conceptually advance anywhere.

[mancerayder]

>Everything is filtered through social media. We are on social media right now.

What's an example of the anti-social media that fits the mould you seek? BBSes? email groups ?

I agree about mindless repetition of terms like misinformation and censorship. These terms are used to attack political opposition rather than advance any progress.

[uniqueuid]

Three things help greatly.

(a) big picture. Read about the past centuries, millennia. In a lifetime that only lasts an hour, appreciate how much, how little is within our power. Democracy is an outlier. Individual freedom is an outlier. But total dystopia is also an outlier (and not to be expected).

(b) appreciate that the balance of bad and good that we see is not a zero-sum-game, we aren't presented a ratio. We are presented with negative and positive narratives independently. Some of the negative narratives we see today are over-rated, and many of the lesser seen positive ones remain very valid.

(c) almost nothing is a tipping point. The systems of our world are full of feedback loops, and often extreme outcomes are averted by (super-)exponential costs that ultimately change our behavior. There are dynamics that humans can't run away from, and they will (probably) not be the spontaneous destruction of earth, but rather a gradual forced change of behavior.

[dealforager]

I highly recommend the book "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order" for helping see the big picture. I am also saddened by the state of the world, particularly in regards to inequality which I think is the source of many problems. After reading the book, I realized that social media (or the internet in general) is a technology like any other and the countries that can harness its power for good will likely lead the next century. For instance, a country that sets aside short term profits from anxiety inducing ads and instead focuses on inspiring its people will win in the long run. Same for crypto, it is just technology and it depends on people to put it to good or bad uses. We've been fortunate to live through extremely easy times, but that is the exception not the rule. Think about how people must have felt during WWII or the Great Depression or any of the other countless tragedies we've faced. They also probably though the world was ending, but at the end of the day most people figured out a way to work together to get through it. Finally, be careful when reading news because almost everything you read has an agenda behind it.

[atentaten]

> But total dystopia is also an outlier (and not to be expected).

Depends on which groups of people and time periods you're talking about. Many groups of people have suffered through total dystopias throughout history.

[prirun]

Focus on yourself and what you can improve about your own life and the lives of others close to you. If you focus on things outside your sphere of influence (ie, you can't fix it), you will only upset yourself and live in a state of unhappiness.

[morpheos137]

This is true. I find I have wasted a huge amount of my time with technology for very little real reward. It is kind of like a monkey in a cage pushing a lever to get a shot of some dopamine releasing substance. I am seriously considering disconnecting the internet at home. The thought seems unfathomable on the one hand on the other how did we as a society let this anti-social, time wasting vampiric force take over so much of our lives. It truly is like the frog boiled slowly. It is true valuable and useful information can be found online, but at the end of the day so much of it just does not matter to our daily life and even good information or positive social engagement can serve as a distraction from better, more real world uses of time, like going for a hike or building a house or falling in love or planting a garden or taking care of elders.

[jyounker]

Get involved in local politics so you can expand the sphere of people that you can influence.

[recuter]

This is a common thought and hardly a new one.

Reminds me of a certain manifesto from the 90s. It starts like this: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."

More happily, it also reminds me of Douglas Adams:

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”

Recently Facebook had a drop in daily users for the first time ever and the stock plummeted. Quaranteenies aren't signing up for it and adults are increasingly walking away from it.

It is absolutely not too late, it is never too late.

[mtVessel]

The absolutely terrifying thing about Kaczynski's manifesto is that much of it is a rational, if utterly cynical, reaction to modernity. How a man who could think so clearly about the implications of our societal choices could conclude that the answer is to mail nail bombs to innocent people both bewilders and scares the bejesus out of me.

On balance, Adams definitely had the more relaxed, froody attitude towards it all.

[noneeeed]

The Hitchhiker's Guide is such a good meditation and exploration on the randomness and ridiculousness of the universe. Personally I would recommend the original radio series rather than the book, I think Adams was a better script writer than author.

[jdrc]

The revolution is over and the result isn't good. Sorry, addicting people to their narcissism is not very positive, no matter how it is spinned

[FridayoLeary]

Only because even worse alternatives have sprung up.

[kornhole]

I have been there too, but then I found solutions, hope, and excitement. Small tech provides alternatives to just about everything being done by big tech. Small tech is run by you or your community using free and open source software. You control it instead of it controlling you.

I have been free of almost all big tech for a long time and love the freedom from surveillance, censorship, and manipulation.

The list of alternatives are long to list here in a post. The challenge is in marketing to get your friends and family onto small tech too. Because these solutions are free and don't take anything from you, they have no multi billion dollar marketing budgets like big tech. You learn about them by following HN, Mastodon, and Reddit.

I am currently building out my own servers from home to host these services using Yunohost which makes it quite easy. I do like learning a lot of new things, but my motivation is to help my friends and family. This can spread one group at a time.

[mynegation]

I hear you and I often have thoughts along the same lines. Here are my (very unorganized) thoughts on this.

First: have faith. Nothing of what you mention is really new under the sky. Many people lost their wealth (and sometimes lives) in tulip mania in 17th century, yet we learned important lessons about how markets work, collective behaviour, boom and bust, financial instruments. We are bound to repeat the same mistakes again, with different things, but that is just how learning works.

Second: look into both sides. Social media, while rightly blamed for feeding the fires of division in the society, brings a lot of good into the world: extended families spread over the world keeping in touch, charity and community organizers using it for outreach, people being informed of what is really happening in closed-off autocracies and dictatorships from the first-hand accounts. Even with all externalities and mistakes, you can reach out to so many people anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds, get any peace of publicly available information without going to the library and sifting through the books and newspapers, or get almost any imaginable product shipped to you in a matter of days and sometimes same day.

As to what can be done: tools are also well-known and have been working for a long time. Education and teaching critical thinking. Creating wealth and spreading it around. Reducing inequality. Elimination of menial labour. Finding new solutions in energy and raw materials, so that some countries having those resources and ruled by oppressive leaders are not able to exercise undue influence. Cheaper energy. Inventing new materials. Creating new tools. And yes, applying regulation and better legislation, where needs be - it worked for alcohol and tobacco, workplace safety, fire safety... We are still trying to figure things out as is the case with war on drugs, but there is no reason regulation would not work for social media or "web3".

[gloriana]

>people being informed of what is really happening in closed-off autocracies and dictatorships from the first-hand accounts

This extends to democratic systems as well. It seems as if a veil has been lifted on the workings of governments and corporations because information and reporting is no longer processed and packaged by a compact, semi-corrupt media system or fourth estate. No one is going to believe a Weapons of Mass Destruction lie anymore, few are buying into the Ukraine crisis etc, multiple government dissenting views on Covid have proven to be accurate despite censorship and banning. Time scales are shortened, information leakage is everywhere, distribution avenues are many orders of magnitude larger than they used to be, and people really do have a lot more time to look at and think about things. It seems like we are just now more aware of the crap that is happening at large corps/govs.

There is a fifth estate now – a formidable alternative to legacy media, of small and independent, more numerous and interesting, analysts and interpreters of the world and human affairs. This is enabled by more easily usable social media – it is twitter/YouTube/podcasts. This is special and new and I am thankful for it. Now, we have to diminish the negative addiction and consumption effects that these same systems can have.

I suspect these systems do not actually need that much money to operate and manage, and can eventually be treated as water/energy utility type businesses - regulated to fixed profits and with anti-addiction rules. This is no longer advanced technology.

[thenerdhead]

There's a fundamental problem that not many people see. It's our attitude towards time.

This attitude is setup as an unfair game. Instead of just living our lives alongside time, we are actively fighting against the time we have and wanting to make every second count.

We then go to these platforms to find some sort of social validation and compare ourselves to others in the process. This makes us more lonely than ever. That gives us some sense of failure in our own lives as we might not be as successful or as far along in our journey as other people who are publicly sharing theirs. It's a losing game. The house always wins.

It's not about blaming humanity or ourselves for letting it get this bad. It's about taking drastic action today to do your part. Practice digital minimalism and have digital sabbaths on the weekends. Only use technology when it's necessary for you. Find better ways to spend your time on things you're truly passionate for. It's a long journey, but it sure as hell is worth it and makes you happier.

[nanomonkey]

You need better filters, as there are plenty of technologies and social groups that are doing the exact opposite as what you are lamenting. If you put your time and effort into these groups then you will realize that there are whole other ways of living and producing that are convivial.

For example, there are decentralized social medias built on gossip protocols and mesh networks, and ipv6 that are creating participatory platforms and economies.

There are also a variety of alternative fuel, permaculture and solar punk groups creating living environments that are sustainable.

Join up with them. Our physical needs are minimal, our cultural needs are to help one another.

[gostsamo]

When I got into college, I had a professor who was working on how internet can democratize the world. A bit after that the Arab spring erupted and a bit later it turned out that the internet could be used for repression. Being wrong ones, makes me think that we could be wrong again. The doomsday scenarios around social media and ads are like scifi distopias - they won't happen because they show up exactly when the pendulum is about to reverse. To reverse it, we just need more general awareness and a healthy discussion about the goals, problems, and solutions.

[mrozbarry]

A thought I had a few years ago was what sort of technology was in Star Trek (TNG, but any of the series is a reasonable point), and what technology we have now.

Star Trek had a very utopian sense about technology, were tech giants have a much more distopian sense about it. For instance, in both cases, we want an AI that can understand regular language, and give us accurate results for our requests. In Star Trek, every ship has this tech, and it's all used without any thought of privacy concerns or what it means for a computer to be always listening. In fact, as far as I can think, Star Trek never really had self-awareness about what the technology the people of that time used and it's implications (like privacy, but there are likely many more ethical concerns).

This led me to a bit of a split mind on technology. Using speech recognition as the example. Yes, it would be great if I could ask a computer something and it can answer me. No, it would not be great if that information was used to manipulate me or exploit my situation (like suggesting products to buy).

I do think all advancements are a two-edged sword. Is it orwellian? I definitely agree. My phone is always listening (even when there are claims it is not, or it's in standby mode), cameras are small enough to fit in a pocket and be used any time. Outside of living in a cave, you can choose what you participate in. You don't _need_ a smart phone - your emails can be answered when you sit at a computer, your calls can go to voicemail when you're not home. You don't _need_ to be on facebook - get your photos printed, save your videos to DVDs, share them with people when you invite them over.

A popular saying is vote with your wallet, but it can also be vote with your attention, too! Don't use social media if you think it sucks. Just log out, deactivate your account, and live your life. Don't share information on the internet you don't want to be used against you, and that even includes things like purchases on amazon, your address, or anything else.

It's only too late if you're not willing to do anything about it. Don't blame big tech if at the same time, you're logging in and feeding them your attention. It's not up to you how other people waste their time, either, but you can encourage different behaviour by having real-life interactions without technology in the way.

[kingcharles]

I just spent 8 years totally off the grid. No tech. The biggest thing I missed was Wikipedia.

Tech is what you make of it. It was depressing to tune back in and see what a mess the Web was with advertising destroying most sites. Support has gone to the birds. You used to be able to get hold of humans who could help you. Now, you're just fucked, there is no way out.

AI is starting to get scary, like we might actually make an AGI that destroys us. Even now you can do some fucked up shit using GANS to create fake videos. Take this for instance - we know Tom Cruise is fake, but is Paris a deepfake or real? I cannot tell, and I've worked in CG:

https://www.tiktok.com/@deeptomcruise/video/7060950433082182...

This shit gets better, not yearly, but monthly. Soon it'll be possible to fake anything of anybody. So AI is already taking us towards destruction. Perhaps we can turn it around and AI can be used to save us. I hope that's the end game.

Without tech though I couldn't do some awesome things, like see my loved ones on video chat half a world away. So, it's not all bad...!

[tim333]

In the big picture Facebook etc are a bit of a blip. Tech as in antibiotics, sewers etc have increased life expectancy at birth from 20-40 years to 80 or so, famines are rare, stuff like smallpox gone. Going forward we have AI, uploading, immortality, interplanetary travel and the like. I'd chill out over the current stuff.

Aslo check out stuff like Pinker on war https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_the_surprising_decli... and Ridley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMxe73iJPbo It's easy to think things are getting worse because that's what the press reports because 'horror crash' get's more clicks than 'things not bad really' but if you look at history they are getting better in most ways. For instance as to things getting Orwellian, Orwell was writing after the holocaust, WW2 and communist famines killing tens of millions. Facebook ads are quite mild in comparison.

[paganel]

Nothing of value to add, just to thank you sincerely for putting into words what I had been feeling for the last 3-4 years, but didn’t know how to do it concisely or how not to sound like a Cassandra. My individual solution is to stay employed in an IT job that pays the bills and that’s it, I do not want to change/improve the world through IT, much less so do I want to do something interesting at work. Ellul was right.

[streetcat1]

So maybe the direct effect of those companies is negative, but overall the indirect products, causes multiply revolutions, specially in the field of AI and deep learning.

Most of the open source tools today (e.g. kubernetes, tensorflow, pytorch) are not coming from academia , but from big tech companies.

The problem is not those companies, but rather the consumers do not want to pay for anything online. Hence, the need for advertising, privacy issues, etc.

[lumost]

Perhaps the issue is that consumers lack the choice to pay? We're seeing a proliferation of online services that charge money. I only wish that the standard when I pay for a service is to have an ad-free experience.

[IHLayman]

"Most of the open source tools today (e.g. kubernetes, tensorflow, pytorch) are not coming from academia , but from big tech companies."

The three projects chosen for the argument were started by companies, but let's dig a bit deeper. Kubernetes wouldn't be possible without container technology, enabled by modules contributed to Linux, and Linux did not start in a company, but rather by a student at the University of Helsinki. Pytorch wouldn't exist without Python, which was started at CWI (another research institute) in the Netherlands. Heck, we are having this argument over a protocol developed by CERN. The references seem to indicate a bias towards machine learning, but I can tell you that the researchers working on these tools would still be doing so at a university even if the companies weren't bankrolling the salaries, and even though they are at a company, they still act as if they are in academia.

Thus, I would claim that saying "most of the open source tools today are not coming from academia" is short-sighted at best. The revolutions are happening in academia, where it is safer to do more greenfield research, as opposed to working in a company where you have to have a shorter runway to profitability.

"The problem is not those companies, but rather the consumers do not want to pay for anything online. Hence, the need for advertising, privacy issues, etc."

IMHO, the problem exists on both sides. Yes, someone needs to pay to keep the lights on, and consumers should be expected to pay a nominal fee for some services. But they shouldn't need to pay with their privacy, or by shady manipulation, or by disingenuous EULAs. I don't know the solution, but I do know that cookie tracking isn't it, nor forcing people to watch ads with eye tracking like MoviePass is suggesting, nor surreptitiously spying on people's watching habits to subsidize TVs.

[RickJWagner]

No, it's not that bad. Not at all.

There is some truth in that, but think of the incredible value just in your smart phone. It's a: - weather forecaster - GPS - phone - news source - email client - gigantic resource library - pedometer - entertainment provider. Music, videos, etc. - and on and on.

All this in a little device owned by even people of modest means. It's a miracle!

Social media lets you stay in touch with friends and relatives. You can make connections that would be impossible just a few years ago.

Our lives are so much better. Sure, there is some trash, too. But rise above that, open your eyes to all the good. It's a wonderful time to be alive.

[systemvoltage]

Why not include Google, Apple, TikTok and Twitter!?

Apple has funneled $275 Billion to China [1], 10x more than what Intel got to start the Ohio fab. Gutting out American rust belt is one of the key problems in US and no one seems to care. It has brewed a whole political movement and we will suffer for decades.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine...

[EGreg]

You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Facebook’s (sorry, Meta’s) VR, and then Neuralink, used to suck many people into virtual worlds and keep them “engaged” to feed the profit motive of the Wall St quarterly earnings (capitalism requires platforms to extract rents after all)

But why stop at the virtual world?

Ubiquitous cameras and wifi that can easily track everyone by their appearance, gait, heartbeat and other signatures etc. become commonplace.

Artificial intelligence with access to this info is used to predict all kinds of inconvenient gatherings and movements taking place and nip them in the bud, leading to precrime.

Deepfakes that make any sort of video evidence useless, while AI creates plausible “parallel construction” to win court cases against anyone

Drones become cheap to manufacture, and rogue drones can drop grenades anywhere without any way to figure out who launched them

Swarming autonomous slaughterbots that bring down the cost of eliminating anyone, first by governments, then by private actors.

Guns become cheap to 3d-print while replicating biological agents become cheap to release.

Bitcoin mining rewards make it more profitable to spend kilowatt-hours on using Proof of Work to secure those same 7 transactions per second than on air conditioning and brownouts regularly occur worldwide.

Think this is far-fetched or we can somehow solve these problems? How are we doing with the last few decades of problems:

  the anthroposcene

  ecological collapse

  plummeting biodiversity

  (insects, birds, tigers)

  non-biodegradeable plastic

  greenhouse gas effect

Humanity is like a young teenager that lives on a credit card, that future generations have to pay. We think we are so clever and so much smarter than previous generations, because we know the truth revealed by science. But we aren’t wise enough to use it sustainably.

At best, humanity is building a zoo for itself to be run by a benevolent AI, while the rest of the planet is turned into monocultures and factory farms.

At worst, the AI will not understand human needs and we’ll just all be frustrated all the time, or perhaps countries will just nuke the planet. Where is that nuclear clock?

[helloworld11]

>Ubiquitous cameras and wifi that can easily track everyone by their appearance, gait, heartbeat and other signatures etc. become commonplace. >Deepfakes that make any sort of video evidence useless, while AI creates plausible “parallel construction” to win court cases against anyone

I'd say that those two scenarios directly contradict each other in many ways.

[TylerJewell]

I find that it's important to periodically understand the big picture. I ask myself, are we doing better as a whole for society and can technology aid in that?

I get inspired by reviewing the following things: 1. Child mortality rate over time: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality?country=

2. DeepMind’s protein-folding breakthrough signals a promising decade for the science of proteomics. Most directly, being able to predict protein shapes will enable us to discover drugs more rapidly.

3. The cost to produce PV modules: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

4. Advancement of geothermal as a potential energy source. The next generation of the industry, however, is a bunch of scrappy startups manned by folks leaving the oil and gas industry who think with today’s technology they can crack 3.5¢/kWh without being confined to volcanic regions.

5. Space exploration. The Space Shuttle entered service in 1981 and launched successfully 134 times. The payload cost to low-Earth orbit (LEO) was $65,400/kg. Today’s Falcon 9 is at $2,600/kg.

6. The improvement in adult literacy rates over time. So much more to do here, but a literate population is one that is more likely to contribute to our global productivity and success. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literacy-rate-adults?tab=...

7. Quantum computing experiments and trails are doubling the number of qubits every couple of years right now. Quantum computing will cause a re-imagining of security and cryptography of digital assets if it becomes production grade. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59320073

I am sure there are many other examples. Even though I am an enterprise software guy working at Dell, the progress we made in the areas of technology that we get to work in have some contributing impact to all of these trends.