
Does computing make the world better? - brundolf
https://www.brandonsmith.ninja/blog/is-software-good
======
eat_veggies
I've written similar thoughts before on computing's mutual recursion with the
offline world, and the software engineer's place as code-reader and code-
writer-hallucinator [0]. Computers, like any means of production in modernity,
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 it 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 alive, 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/](https://blog.jse.li/posts/software/)

[1] [https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-
app/](https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/)

[2] [https://www.nycmesh.net/](https://www.nycmesh.net/)

~~~
political_exile
I made this throwaway to reply to this.

I'm the son of political exiles from a third-world communist country who
taught myself programming through reading the web. Everyone around me,
including my family, insisted I was wasting my life with software and didn't
support that erudition. They would joke I would be watching porn all day. But
because it was available online, they couldn't stop me.

By the time I was in my early 20s, I made it to FAANG to the most expensive
city in the world, and made three times what my family household had made.
Everyone else from my socio-economic class in my birth city remains in that
city without exception; I even had offered to teach my friends programming in
middle school but they refused.

In that regards, I don't care about this abstract objective of equality,
that's certainly worth eschewing to increase income mobility and move people
from poverty. Concern for financial equality over welfare just inspires
disgust in me.

~~~
brundolf
I will admit that it's a privileged position to even have the opportunity to
think about broader inequality. My personal needs are thoroughly met, and
that's why I'm in a position to make personal decisions based on this stuff.
Lots of people's needs aren't being met, and I'd never blame them for putting
those above abstract ideals.

But it sounds like inequality and the abuse of power are the very things you
escaped, no? Surely you at least sympathize with those still in that
situation, whether your current circumstances allow you to take any action on
it or not?

~~~
political_exile
I escaped very low welfare not inequality. I choose welfare over equality any
day, equality is an abstract objective that doesn't have any meaningful
effect. If inequality is what it takes to increase welfare, then I openly
welcome that beneficial status quo.

------
beambot
I suspect that computing (generally), computer-aided advances (generally), and
access to information (specifically) have substantially improved average
quality of life -- with major improvements on a large number of axes, even if
other axes have suffered. To do a proper analysis on quality of life, we'd
need to consider a worldwide population of 7 billion people with today's
technology vs the technology of the 1940s. It's probably pretty obvious...

As a specific data point, we have a dramatically lower fraction of extreme
poverty today than any time in the recorded history of humanity. Not causal
per se, but a big inflection occurs around the advent of computers:

[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-
extre...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extreme-
poverty-absolute)

This seems like a reasonable framework to address the title question in
general.

------
svara
The Covid19 lockdown and distancing measures would be much harder on society
and on the economy without modern means of remote work and communication. So
much so in fact, that they may otherwise have been impossible.

Therefore, computing may just have saved millions of lives.

~~~
sandoooo
Computing saves millions of lives on a regular basis. Can't run modern
agriculture or medicine or government without it.

Griping about the evils of the current gripeable is a lot of fun, though. One
may even argue it's the more important of the two.

~~~
walleeee
The second sentence - perhaps paraphrased as "we can't feed or organize
ourselves without precarious levels of technology" \- sort of tempers the
enthusiasm in the first.

------
froasty
If you're making useless things, you have a surrogate activity. We use the
term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an
artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some
goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the “fulfillment”
that they get from pursuing the goal.

Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities. Given
a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask
yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying
his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and
mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously
deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the
person’s pursuit of goal X is a surrogate activity.

Computing is a surrogate activity _factory_. Social media makes people's lives
_more_ hollow, less connected, _less human_ , but in exchange, gives them the
illusion that they are living principled, meaningful lives, living in caves,
like brains in a jar.

At root, it's not about "making the world better", it's about professionals
looting the commons to live in fancy bubbles where the only competition is
staying ahead of others in the bubble. Hacker News is not the place to say
this, as it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it.

Here's the situation on the ground for the working class and the supposed
social good of the Internet: Every _single_ one of my family members, parents
included, is both a precariat and on Facebook all day, every day. They don't
have social lives. They don't have stable employment. They don't have careers.
They don't know how to cook, how to learn, how to _grow_ as humans. They don't
know how to think for themselves, let alone interpret what they read, see, or
watch. They hate what the screen tells them to hate; they like what the screen
tells them to like. They've been singularly paralyzed in development, despite
every effort to free them from their bondage from people outside the process.

Every day, the memory of being a living, breathing human becomes more and more
remote to them, and there's no stopping it, because the entire process is
_autocephalous_.

Don't forget to click to subscribe! If you want more content like this, don't
forget to check out my podcast! Premium articles if you donate to my Patreon!
Check me out on Twitch. Join my Discord! #firstworldproblems
#ihavenomouthandimustscream

~~~
amasad
First, I think it's super important for anyone working in technology to read,
understand, and think really hard about Kaczynski-style arguments like this
one.

> If you're making useless things, you have a surrogate activity. We use the
> term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward
> an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have
> some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the
> “fulfillment” that they get from pursuing the goal.

The concept of "surrogate activity" breaks down once you understand human
action. Whether in pre-historic African savanna or in modern-day NYC, people
_always_ act to improve their present conditions. Humans are different from
animals in that we can initiate voluntary conscious action.

Kaczynski doesn't differentiate between involuntary (animal) action in
response to stimuli, and purposeful human action, which is not and never was
about mere "biological needs."

> At root, it's not about "making the world better", it's about professionals
> looting the commons to live in fancy bubbles where the only competition is
> staying ahead of others in the bubble. Hacker News is not the place to say
> this, as it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
> salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Because humans prefer wealth to poverty, much of human action is about
creating wealth. You can create wealth without "looting" others. In fact, it's
a lot easier to corporate with others, trade, and help each other build wealth
than it is to steal.

~~~
incompatible
Humans will work first to obtain their basic needs, such as food and shelter.
Some may complain that there are people on welfare, who have these basic needs
provided, so that they no longer need to make an effort for these things. But
for these people, how would they provide for their basic needs, if they were
forced to? They can't just go out and grow food, because they don't own any
land. They can't build a house, because they don't own land or have access to
building materials, skills, or the right government permits. Their only option
would be to go out and get a job, but what if they don't have the right
background, training, experience, and nobody wants to employ them?

In any case, once humans have satisfied their basic needs, one way or another,
they can then do what they want. Some will want luxuries, like expensive and
visible possessions or travel and fancy meals. Others will accumulate wealth
to try to obtain power and control over others, or at least financial
independence for themselves so they can opt out of employment. Some will just
relax and play games all day, or follow other hobbies or sports as they
prefer. The latter are what you are classifying as "surrogate activity", but I
don't know if there's really any harm in it.

~~~
amasad
No that's not what's meant by "surrogate activity," not in the way OP quoting
Ted Kaczynski meant to mean. They define anything other than the most basic,
like hunting and gathering, as a surrogate activity. So anything that we call
a career today where you can work, make progress, and maybe even enjoy is, in
their opinion, a "surrogate activity." I suggest reading TK, it's a very
cynical worldview, but there is some truth to some of the arguments, and
definitely something worth taking seriously.

~~~
incompatible
Human populations are too large today to rely on hunting and gathering, but
perhaps you could replace it with subsistence agriculture. But in the modern
economy, it shouldn't really require anybody to work more than 10 or 15 hours
a week to satisfy basic needs such as food and accommodation: otherwise, they
are likely being swindled. So it leaves the problem of what to do for the rest
of the time.

Of course there are movements that say science, technology, industrialisation
are things to be avoided, such as the Amish or primitivist anarchists.

------
julianeon
I think part of the problem is that we are confused by the language around
these things, too.

Rhetorically, theoretically, we are building tools that allow people to build.
That opens the door to all kinds of positive ideas, and press: freedom,
expressiveness, creativity, etc.

In practice though, we seem to have passed a point where things that enable
that truthfully gain traction.

My go-to example is the Firefox phone. For what it was it was 'effin amazing:
a way for anyone using HTML and CSS to directly program their phone, and make
apps knowing little more than what you'd see in a w3schools tutorial. Everyone
could be an app developer! It was such a leap from where we are today that it
was incredible.

So, here you had an inexpensive tool that actually manifested the values we
claim to care about: openness, creativity for all, a balance of simplicity and
DIY.

But when it was released, what happened? Nobody cared.

A few hobbyists did, but nowhere near the numbers you would expect, based on
the ideals above.

So it died, and was buried as an embarrassing failure. In my experience, most
projects with similar aims die pretty quickly too, or stay within very, very
tiny hobbyist circles.

The digital world we really live in, in 2020, seems to be mostly about fun-
and-ez flashy entertainment. So maybe you make an app that makes it easier to
share video; that may take over the world. Maybe it gamifies something usually
boring: that may have productivity benefits, and do some good.

I do think the small, elite class of developers will continue to exist, and
we'll make further improvements with the languages we use today, and things in
that sense will get incrementally better. It's just not a quantum leap. The
FaceBook-ization of the world will continue, even if FaceBook dies and is
replaced. Basically, digital entertainment will expand and continue to gobble
up the economy. It'll keep people employed.

But when that's digital technology's actual purpose, it's unsurprising that
the outcomes are pretty uninspired, too.

------
haram_masala
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.

~~~
eat_veggies
The obvious solution to this is to make "lucrative" a non-goal for _anything_
, including computing, so that we pick "fun & socially beneficial" every time.
This will require some major societal restructuring. Are we up for it?

~~~
sandoooo
last few times we tried this lots of people starved to death. Let us know if
you figure out how to do it properly without that happening.

~~~
eat_veggies
Even if I figured it out, I trust that CIA would suicide me if my ideas ever
gained traction. America benefits too much from the world's subjugation. I'll
stick to building web apps for SaaS companies.

~~~
sandoooo
Part of figuring it out is figuring out how to implement it starting with the
limited resources you have. Nobody gets an unlimited budget.

------
Aboh33
I think over time computing actually reprograms minds in not so great ways and
no one knows for certain how long-term this plays out

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Computers are an evolving symbiotic life form.

It's not hard to guess how this plays out.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
In what ways are computers _alive_?

~~~
Nevermark
Using "living" to mean "changing", "improving", "not static" and "beneficial
to their own reproduction", I think computers are at least as living as the
first reproducing chemical metabolisms.

In that case an energy gradient presumably allowed clusters of chemicals to
reinforce each other's production, and we know how that turned out ...
centralization into fully independent forms (cells) and an explosion of new
forms that could colonize and customize environments far beyond their origin.

In this case, we have energy gradients vastly easier to tap into via diverse
and deep economic gradients between supply and demand in the environment, i.e.
us for now.

A very friendly place for a new form of life!

------
mattigames
"Does science makes the world better?" "Does engineering makes the world
better?" And then you realize they are all tools and it completely depends of
the beings using it, and of course it also depends what you exactly mean by
"better" (better to who?, and all the other questions)

>Last week I was talking with my sister about how people in our society have
gotten so toxic and tribal over the past decade,

False, there is even a famous meme of a fake book cover about it that is
pretty spot on: "The world was always awful, a guide to world history for
people who romanticize the past"

------
picometer
Can we make any comparison between programmers' "useless inventions" and the
scientific endeavor? As Marie Curie puts it:

> The story of radiology in war offers a striking example of the unsuspected
> amplitude that the application of purely scientific discoveries can take
> under certain conditions. X rays had had only a limited usefulness up to the
> time of the war. The great catastrophe which was let loose upon humanity,
> accumulating its victims in terrifying numbers, brought up by reaction the
> ardent desire to save everything that could be saved and to exploit every
> means of sparing and protecting human life. > At once there appeared an
> effort to make the X ray yield its maximum of service. What had seemed
> difficult became easy and received an immediate solution. The material and
> the personnel were multiplied as if by enchantment. All those who did not
> understand gave in or accepted; those who did not know learned; those who
> had been indifferent became devoted. Thus the scientific discovery achieved
> the conquest of its natural field of action. A similar evolution took place
> in radium therapy, or the medical application of radiations emitted by the
> radio elements. > What are we to conclude from this unhoped-for development
> shared between the new radiations revealed to us by science at the end of
> the nineteenth century? It seems that they must make our confidence in
> disinterested research more alive and increase our reverence and admiration
> for it.

That's similar to the sudden usefulness of video conferencing software to
continue critical business (healthcare, education) during the pandemic. But
video software hasn't been a "useless invention" \- its use has been obvious
ever since Doug Engelbart demo'd it.

Developers, to the extent that we _do_ enjoy making useless things and
designing useless abstractions, lack a north star akin to scientists' pursuit
of "truth". Optimization and elegance come to mind, but they aren't
established as ends-in-themselves in the same way that truth or knowledge is.

My gut (a programmer's gut) tells me that the comparison _could_ hold up,
especially if we adjusted our north star.

[0]
[https://history.aip.org/history/exhibits/curie/curie.pdf](https://history.aip.org/history/exhibits/curie/curie.pdf)

------
fallinghawks
It's a tool. You take a hammer, you can use it to build a house or you can
bash in someone's skull. I estimate more houses have been built than skulls
bashed in.

~~~
eat_veggies
In the bay area this is not true.

~~~
fallinghawks
This comes down to your metrics. If you're suggesting that quality of life
here is lower because of computers I would argue that it's tech companies that
chose to establish themselves here, which increased the number of highly paid
people wanting to live here, which drove up housing prices, traffic, and
income disparity. The computers themselves are not the cause. It would be the
case with any industry where there is one major physical center, such as Milan
and art/fashion. As we've learned with the COVID-19 pandemic, work from home
could allow tech companies to headquarter themselves elsewhere, or employees
could live where they want.

As it is, I wouldn't mind seeing some level of tech exodus since I live in the
area of one of the shittier Bay Area commutes. But computers tell me when
traffic is especially bad and gives me alternate routes.

------
tomrod
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.

------
rgbrenner
The title can't be serious... Computers allow designs for planes, cars, and
other devices to be modeled and understood better than was ever possible by
hand. Progress on fusion reactors relies on computer modeling of plasma flows
that was impossible to do by hand. Weather forecasting saves lives and uses
computers to model weather patterns, uses satellites (that have computers in
them) to collect weather data. From medical devices, to communication, to
industrial applications... computers are used throughout the entire economy.

I think this article should really be: web developer wonders if there's more
to computers than websites. Because I guarantee the scientist that used a
computer to model disease and create a vaccine is not wondering if computers
make the world better.

~~~
EvanAnderson
That's nearly exactly what I came to write.

The OP should read-up on what "computers" were in the the early 20th century,
and the error-prone toil that "automatic computers" sought to replace. There's
so much that couldn't ever exist today if not for automatic computation.

------
minimuffins
It's a mistaken construction to try and think about what computing does,
whether it's good or bad. There is not some fundamental nature that lies at
the heart of something called "computing." Computing, or science or technology
or whatever, are not mystical forces with their own animating spirit and
nature.

Computing, like every human activity, is subject to the gravitational forces
of capitalist markets. Computing does whatever people who can make money with
computing decide computing does.

There is a better question to ask than, "Is computing helpful or harmful?" It
is, "Who gets to decide what gets researched, built, invented, and how it will
all be used?"

------
raincom
You can use science(knowledge) to advance the world better; you can also use
it to abuse. For instance, one can use nuclear energy to reduce pollution and
betterment of people. Or one can use it to destroy others.

Same thing with computing: Democracies around the world can use computing to
spy on their people in order to suppress any political dissent.

------
jariel
Computing is like energy, it's power, and it depends on what we do with it.

Most of the 'negative' stuff really is derived from 'communication' I wouldn't
put it on 'computing' so much.

------
29athrowaway
If surveillance was oriented towards the right things, like corruption, the
world could be a better place.

Unfortunately in some societies it is now oriented towards augmenting evil.
Like the Chinese Social score system.

------
fizixer
> Does computing make the world better?

\- Define computing

\- Define make

\- Define world

\- Define better

