
The weird criticism that Big Tech is too digital - buboard
https://theweek.com/articles-amp/885308/weird-criticism-that-big-tech-digital
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snowedin
I think there are real improvements made by the tech industry. For example
cellular and smart phones are brand new and overall have improved quality of
life and productivity.

But on the whole I think most of the "gains" made through big tech are
marginal. Marginal specifically because either:

A.) New tech companies create products primarily to make the tech industry
more productive at building/maintaining/deploying systems

B.) New tech companies provide a small amount of value over a preexisting
industry and transfer the industry into the tech sector (e.g. Uber/Lyft)
through "disruption"

As a result, the industry has provided less overall growth and improvement to
society than its raw potential, and at the same time has consolidated wealth
as much as it has created it.

Uber was originally supposed to be a commute-sharing app that reduced heavy
reliance on vehicles, making a dramatically more efficient use of resources
and time. When it came around to executing on this, the real value-making
proposition was to transfer and capture an existing market (ride-hailing/taxi
services).

My prescription for a fix would be to emphasize computer literacy in the
school system, encouraging the entire 12K public school system to introduce
the idea of self-automation as a problem solving pattern for the general
population.

In two generations, every sector of the economy will apply automation within
their own ranks to eek out efficiency, rather than relying on software
developers in California to understand their day-to-day and make an app to
"disrupt" their industry.

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shantly
I have a suspicion that most application of computing and Internet technology,
even in business, has in fact been neutral or somewhat negative in terms of
productivity and, for humans, also for happiness, but some minority of the
applications yield such huge gains (on both fronts) that it's an improvement
overall and one can be fooled into thinking it's _usually_ good, rather than
usually bad but sometimes _very_ good.

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RodgerTheGreat
You can't make an MVP of a cure for cancer.

You can't "crush code" and build a space elevator in a hackathon.

You can't hustle your way through a robot that collects, folds, and stores all
your dirty laundry.

You can't build an O'Neill cylinder with a 2-year horizon of profitability.

Some problems are hard, expensive, and do not lead to fame or fortune in the
short term. Startups are not structurally equipped to solve these problems,
and perhaps public corporations aren't either. As it turns out, it is much
easier to make money by solving (or inventing!) easy problems, and our culture
currently views making money as a proxy for creating value for society. If you
want a more exciting and ambitious future, we will all need to think further
ahead than the next quarterly earnings report.

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egfx
”You can't make an MVP of a cure for cancer”

That’s linear thinking. Yes you can.

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RodgerTheGreat
It is possible to tackle any of the engineering challenges I listed in an
incremental fashion. That isn't the point.

The context of a "Minimum Viable Product" is a mental model of products,
markets, and profitability. There is a fundamental difference between the goal
"cure cancer" and the goal "make money from a cancer cure". The perverse
incentives and loopholes of the latter are a serious impediment to the former.

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egfx
You don't think you can make money from a cancer cure and cure cancer at the
same time?

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ohithereyou
Not OP, but no - the profit motive is the main perverter of the pharmaceutical
industry. By talking a profit you ensure that your cancer treatment will not
cure cancer - too few people will have access to cure the disease and millions
will still suffer and die needlessly. I guess a few rich, first worlders would
live, so it's not all bad.

People celebrate Jonahs Salk because not only did he develop the polio vaccine
but he rejected his opportunity to massively profit from it because it was
more important that patients have access.

No company that develops a cancer cure these days would do that. Their
shareholders would revolt, their boards would fire their exeutives, their
stock prices would plunge, and their competitors would pile on.

~~~
perl4ever
What to do if you have a cure is an imaginary problem. Regulators set minimum
standards for efficacy which involve a treatment being just _barely_
statistically significant. The problem is not burying cures, because playing
the game of "make believe a treatment is better than placebo" is infinitely
simpler than coming up with a cure. The cures people believe in are like the
infamous 200 mpg carburetor.

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manfredo
What even _is_ "Big Tech"? I feel like it's a buzzword coined by news outlets
to vilify the tech industry. "Big Tech" companies like Apple, Amazon, Netflix,
and Facebook are in entirely different industries: Electronic hardware
products, online retail, video media, and social platforms. The article
mentions how "Big Tech" is centered on advertising but only 1 out of those
three derive their main source of revenue from advertising. Heck, depending on
how you define "Big Tech" arguably the majority of "Big Tech" does not rely on
advertising: Facebook and Google do while Microsoft (bing is trivial), Apple,
Netflix, and Amazon do not.

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Barrin92
I don't think the article successfully argues against Thiel's criticism.
Clearly there is an opportunity cost to putting highly trained individuals to
work on some issue vs another. If you look for example at the number of PhD
physicists in finance it seems obvious to me that if these people were working
on biotech or materials or infrastructure or process optimisation there would
at least be some more progress than there currently is.

Digital tech giants barely interact with other sectors of the economy in
meaningful ways, the lack of economic or productivity growth after the
computer era is well documented, and there would be tangible benefits from
aiming resources and talent at sectors that interact with the material world
and the economy at large.

The article also brings up Europe as an example that the lack of digital
giants doesn't result in more progress, but that's actually not true.
Infrastructure costs in Europe are significantly lower than in the US. One
only needs to look at the transport sector in Germany or France and compare it
to California's attempt to build high-speed rail. The US trails not only
Europe but even countries like China in some key sectors.

Now building high-speed transport infrastructure for the masses might not make
it into the next Pivot podcast or on the frontpage of techcrunch, but for the
long term health of the economy and the general surplus for society is
probably larger than more smartphone apps.

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vorpalhex
> One only needs to look at the transport sector in Germany or France and
> compare it to California's attempt to build high-speed rail

California is about the same size as Germany and less than half the
population. Germany has several existing, historical train systems.
California, less so. There's a lot going on in that case beyond just
California having a lot of digital tech folks.

~~~
dragonwriter
> California is about the same size as Germany and less than half the
> population.

California is about 20% larger than Germany, in terms of land area, much
longer when you look at the longest dimension. Germany is both substantially
smaller and more compact for it's land area.

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buboard
The author may be right for the reason that, the criticism is based on linear
extrapolations of what people wanted in the past decades. Perhaps they don't
want flying cars, but instead the ability to tele-work and telecommunicate.
Perhaps flying cars are the "faster horses" of our time , which will be
overtaken by some yet-unknown tech in the future. Physical infrastructure is
good, if there is going to be a lot of use for it. With industrial production
shifting to china and then africa, there's little incentive to build new
roads. There is a case to be made however about "weird" overregulation in
biotech/medicine. As populations are aging we will be forced to remove
barriers and move faster there.

The author's conclusion "Silicon Valley will almost certainly keep playing a
big role in them" is not well justified imho. Silicon Valley has failed in
most its major promises in 2010s: VR, IoT, blockchain, Selfdriving robots (and
soon satellite internet). Instead, the advertising money that is fueling its
economy, is being recycled through SaaS/Paas companies that make the
developers job ever-so-slightly easier, creating a closed, inward looking
economy. IMHO , the real failure is the lack of ambitious consumer-facing tech

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patrickwalton
Working on a hardware startup, I'm seeing that hardware infrastructure is way
behind software infrastructure. Figuring out to test a new iteration in a week
feels like magic, when software companies can deploy iterations in an hour.

I think software infrastructure for hardware development is going to get
better, but one of the biggest barriers is the small size of the open source
hardware movement compared to open source software.

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HorstG
Hardware tooling is bad. Like really lifesuckingly bad. Download yourself some
free Xilinx IDE and try to do some Verilog Hello World on a cheap demo board.
Blink a LED or something. Its so bad you will want to scream: Dog slow
sythesis (~compilation), useless IDE support, ten steps to run something,
badly composed. Errors will land in some arbitrarily named logfile somewhere
between the code. More expensive tools are hardly any better.

I started doing hardware but ran away, I feel it is a waste of developer time
to even consider doing any custom hardware designs. People should be punished
for even thinking about using FPGAs. Just don't do it.

Sorry for the rant, but I feel warning yall is my duty ;)

