
Tech companies are misusing creativity in their quest to change the world - uyoakaoma
https://qz.com/1101430/a-nobel-prize-winner-says-tech-companies-are-misusing-creativity-in-their-quest-to-change-the-world/
======
jondubois
>> One example is Endless, a computer company founded by a young Californian
named Matt Dalio. I know his father, Ray Dalio, a successful businessman who
became very interested in my ideas and my work

This is the real root problem - People are helping their already rich friends
too much. Companies shouldn't be about the CEO and their friends, it should be
about the product and the customers. Promoting the children of your rich
friends in your news articles doesn't help balance out wealth equality.

There are thousands of other (poorer, more determined) entrepreneurs like
'Matt Dalio' who probably deserve the attention even more.

>> Dalio did not give up.

Yeah that totally deserves its own paragraph; not giving up is a huge
achievement when daddy is a billionaire. It's almost like the author's
subconscious is trying to tell us something.

~~~
TrinaryWorksToo
Rich people can take risks. Poor people can't.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
> Rich people may take risks. Poor people must.

This seems more accurate and realistic about the source of the discrepancy:

Rich people have the luxury to choose which risks they take and make
calculated endeavors, but are never forced to take a risk and have great
ability to manage their total exposure to risk.

Poor people are inundated with being forced to take bad risks and manage the
danger between them constantly, such that they can't properly gather resources
to take on additional voluntary risks (even when they have an expected reward)
because it poses too much systemic danger with the additional risk.

That said, once you count in drug sales, the poorest 10% of people I know have
a higher per capita entrepreneurship rate than the richest 10%. So in
practice, poor people _are_ actually taking on business risk at a higher rate
as well, though it's again motivated by necessity.

The biggest discrepancy is, of course, access to capital and explain the vast
majority of the discrepancy in outcome.

~~~
mc32
Anecdotally, I knew drug dealers in high school. It was not out of necessity,
but greed. I'm sure some are out of necessity, but not all.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
I think you have the implication reversed:

I'm not saying drug dealer -> poverty.

I'm saying poverty -> necessity to try _something_ to escape a slow death.

(And for cultural reasons, the latter often appears as greed when successfully
applied, rather than desperate necessity. Look at the motivation for the
hustle, not the outcome. A fear of a very real death to poverty is usually the
motivating factor.)

This means that you end up with a lot of people having some kind of hustle,
which the statistics also reflect once you remember that drug dealers (and
other criminals) are a form of business. So you find an unusual amount of
businesses per capita, again remembering to include drug operations and
similar activities.

~~~
stefco_
> (And for cultural reasons, the latter often appears as greed when
> successfully applied, rather than desperate necessity. Look at the
> motivation for the hustle, not the outcome. A fear of a very real death to
> poverty is usually the motivating factor.)

Totally agree. Also depends where you go to school, though. There are drug
dealers who are poor and do it because it's one of the more attractive (if
risky) job options, and there are well-off student drug dealers who know that
they can get away with being caught because of their socioeconomic status.

In either case, it's not a totally unreasonable risk-reward evaluation,
especially (as with everything) if the dealer knows how to execute (i.e. be
careful). I knew several people in the latter camp, and I wouldn't necessarily
call them "greedy". Though I suppose I generally dislike the term "greedy"
because it's usually pejorative without giving _any definition_ of what greed
is or why it is bad.

------
jezclaremurugan
Profit - rather the Willingness to Pay - indicates the true preferences of
society/individuals. While we may claim otherwise, at the end of the day, we
sometimes value pleasure over health.

And if society truly cared about quality of life for the poorest/weakest, the
market would re-align itself, and the direction of creativity would be self
corrected.

I feel capitalism and profits are working just fine, we just don't want to
admit what our true preferences are.

~~~
Barraketh
That's not quite accurate. Willingness to Pay indicates the true preferences
of _people who have money_. If you try to take it as a metric of the
preferences of society you will get the preferences of individuals weighted by
their net worth.

~~~
hueving
That's not quite accurate, otherwise there wouldn't be a wide variety of
things to choose with lower incomes.

You forget that the market responds to the total volume of buyers at various
levels. There are a lot more people in the 0-150k bracket than the people in
the 150k+ bracket and when you count the total spending in dollars by each
category as a whole, the first group is significantly more powerful.

The most successful companies sell to the masses (McDonald's, Walmart, Google,
Facebook). The rich have a much smaller influence on the market than you would
like to think.

~~~
nicoburns
The rich surely have influence in proportion to the total amount of wealth
that they have. Wealth is unevenly distributed enough (a quick google says top
1% have control of 38% of wealth) for this to be a significant skewing factor
away from an ideal market.

------
chasedehan
The title of the article should really get rid of "tech". This is an inherent
feature(or bug depending on perspective) of a capitalistic system wherein
companies are designed for profit and will target markets where there is more
potential profit.

This is true of many other industries, not just tech, although tech has been
capturing much of the interest and ire of not being different. Any time a
company accepts outside money, they have a fiduciary duty to build their
business in a manner that will lead to the highest return - "maximizing
shareholder value."

Now, this is not inherently bad to maximize value as we have seen the largest
growth the world has ever seen (not just at the top end, but for the poor as
well) because of the innovation and creativity that has occurred due to
chasing profits.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I really don't think tech companies truly are in a
"quest to change the world" unless you believe every word spoken at demo day.
Should be retitled: "Companies are using creativity to chase profits" because
that is what they are doing and is what they should be doing in the current
economic system.

I completely agree that incentives and structures should be changed to
dramatically reduce the income and wealth disparities. The struggle is the
will to voluntarily forego profits.

------
empath75
This reminds me of one laptop per child and this is similarly misguided. Poor
people don’t want this and can’t make much use of it.

What poor people want is clean water, a stable source of food, security,
health care, honest government, etc, etc. They’ll be happy to have a cell
phone, but it’s not going to change their life.

The problem of poverty isn’t the result of lack of access to information.

~~~
codingdave
The successful people I've talked to who came from poverty would disagree.
They all have stories of some specific program that gave them some additional
tools to help educate them, inspire them, and give them the ability and drive
to lift themselves out of their original situation. Now, these individuals
almost universally are putting at least some of their energy back into similar
programs to help others. So no, giving out laptops won't magically eliminate
poverty... but it might create the person who devises the solution that does.

~~~
Helmet
I know this is all anecdotal so my input is ultimately useless and not
applicable to society at large, but I grew up poor and am now "successful" (by
conventional standards).

There was no specific program that inspired me or gave me a leg up - what
worked was the fact that my parents were strict and absolute hard-asses who
didn't put up with any of my bullshit growing up. I resented them for a long
time, but have come to see that they were mostly right.

But hey, you may very well be correct in that a social program works for
others.

------
nestorherre
GREAT article. It definitely reflects the current state of society, and most
important, people. Selfishness is the standard, money is our god. We need to
open our eyes and start acting, otherwise the results will keep being the same
and nothing will change.

Capitalism should be reformed and a new economic system - based on sharing
economy, but in the real sense - should arise.

------
nebabyte
> It is interesting to note that new technology products are never launched in
> the poor segment of the market and then gradually adapted to higher-level
> markets

Inclined to disagree. Plenty of wealthy people see the "market potential" of
starting in poorer places ( _cough_ Africa) and 'locking up' marketshare.

hell, zuckerberg and others tried pushing through the precedent of zero-rated
internet for proprietary services in india and other countries as a way to
lock up precedent for when they'd bring the same tech to america. (Not that
the latter has needed any help being complacent with zero rating - apparently
india beat us on that front)

------
0xCMP
Technology is already changing the world in the way he wants and profit is
only part of the reason, but still an important part. Many people have, for
non-profit and profit reasons, attempted to fix the issues of computers not
being wide spread or fix connectivity problems in developing countries.

The two groups that seem most likely to solve the connectivity problem(s) have
profit incentives behind it: Facebook and Google.

There are almost certainly others as well.

------
jamesrcole
> _The more we advance in technology, improve our infrastructure, spread
> globalization, and bring efficiency to the economic system, the more
> intensely global corporations focus their strategies on competing to serve
> the wealthiest and the middle class_

A question: is it actually true that these things are correlated? I don't
know, but on the surface of it, it's not clear to me that they are.

------
feelin_googley
"But statistics show that we only consume a fraction of what is actually
available online."

"In practical terms, it is actually possible to take all of the images and
data from every website the average person visits in a lifetime, compress
them, and fit them onto a single 2-terabyte (TB) hard drive inside a
computer."

These are among the many "unspoken truths" of the web, viz. that right now on
your person or nearby you have enough storage space to hold every bit of
information you will ever need in your lifetime.

I would like to see the statistics.

Obviously, companies like Google are not going to embrace truths like these.

When a user can search a database of downloaded data ("data dump") locally,
even without a connection, how would a search engine track the user's queries?

Right now, public information, from academic research to user-generated
content, is being hoarded by a few companies and used to collect information
about those who wish to access it, which is then used to sell ads.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon and is not necessary.

This is supposed to be the Information Age. We can all access public
information in large quantities at high speeds without constant monitoring in
the name of pillaging advertising budgets.

While it may not be possible to save _every_ piece of information one needs in
advance, certainly _much_ of the piecemeal access to static data that we do
today could be averted. (Personally I have been doing this with DNS data for
many years, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.)

Why is piecemeal access something anyone would want to avert? Matters of cost,
reliablity and inefficiency aside, it is piecemeal access, one query at a
time, each and every one traveling over a insecure network, logged and
analyzed 24/7 by myriad third parties all desperate for cash, that gives rise
to memes like "You are the product".

It is the gratuitous use of an insecure, invasively monitored network to query
information which could be stored locally that is the root cause for many of
the complaints that internet users have today. This type of use enables the
practices by third parties that users complain about.

------
GrumpyNl
Greed and war has always been the best motivators.

------
aloisdg
Capitalism is an economic system and an ideology based on private ownership of
the means of production and their operation for profit. You want creativity?
Leave capitalism.

~~~
matt4077
> Capitalism is an economic system and an ideology

That's the problem right there: Capitalism has proven to be excellent at
organising an economy. It's excellent! It works with human nature. The largest
problems automatically provide the largest reward for solving! It locates
decisions at the lowest possible level!

The problem is when people use it as an _ideology_ , i. e. as an end to
itself. Intellectual property, for example, with its zero marginal costs,
isn't as good a fit for capitalism as wheat: When you're charging $10 for a
movie, many people will not watch it because it's only worth $5 to them.
That's an inefficiency as glaring as communism ever produced, because it is
value lost as a tribute to keeping the structure intact, even though no work
would be required for it at all.

There are many more inefficiencies of capitalism that we conveniently ignore.
The complete finance sector is nothing but the bureaucracy needed to organise
capitalism. Competition is a great method to get better results, but it also
involves a lot of duplicated efforts. Advertisement is–and this is the usual
argument of people defending it-neccessary for the functioning of capitalism
because it spreads information the market needs. The inequality needed to
serve as motivation breeds unhappiness and crime.

These aren't arguments to abandon capitalism, because it quite obviously is
the best system we've found so far. But that shouldn't preclude us from trying
alternatives, especially in niches that are so different that the outcomes may
be different from the traditional production of physical goods.

~~~
ameister14
I don't think you described capitalism as an ideology. You seem to simply be
talking about inefficiencies in capitalist execution.

Capitalism as ideology is a bit different. For example, if someone is rich,
they are higher status, but not only that - they are assumed to have innate
characteristics that make them better, such as discipline and intelligence.
We've created, and this predates capitalism and allowed for its spread, a
social system that equates wealth with social power.

That's a part of capitalism as an ideology. Another part is that people
automatically view things in terms of cost. They weigh choices in monetary
terms, as opposed to social, moral or physical.

I disagree with your example of capitalist inefficiency, as well - you've
chosen a price equilibrium inefficiency but you're using that example to
illustrate that a product is ill-suited for capitalism. It isn't; if the movie
was priced correctly, the inefficiency would disappear. Plus, as you pointed
out, there are negligible costs for distribution (it's not really zero, but
who cares) so profits on a product like that would be significant. That seems
to me to be a better product for capitalist exploitation than wheat.

~~~
matt4077
> I don't think you described capitalism as an ideology

I wasn't trying to. I was saying that it works well as a means of
organisation, before pointing out its weaknesses. Ideology is when you ignore
those weaknesses, and try to shoehorn everything within the framework of
capitalism.

> If the movie was priced correctly, the inefficiency would disappear

The problem is that it's hard to price it efficiently, because the value is
different for different people. You can try price-separation, i. e. by
geography, or the cascade of movie theatre to download to broadcast TV. But
there's still a loss of welfare. As another example: I will never pay for a
subscription to the WSJ, or to Adobe Creative Cloud, or to NGINX Plus. But my
life would be marginally better if I had access to these products. And the
only reason I don't is because there's no way to allow people like me access,
without also allowing those free access that are currently paying.

~~~
ameister14
Ideology isn't when you ignore something's weaknesses and shoehorn everything
within its framework. Blind adherence to an ideology can cause that, but it's
not what the word means.

------
ThomPete
Creativity for its own sake isn't better as a model for society than profit.

Furthermore having the richest pay for development of new technologies which
are then later on distributed to the poorer is in my view the right direction
it basically indirectly taxes the rich first.

Tesla would never have been successful if they started with cars for everyone.
The fact that they made it a desirable item, to begin with, worked to their
advantage. A better place is an example of the wrong strategy.

To me, this reads more like a PR piece than anything else.

