
Ask HN: Why do you think what you are doing is worthwhile? - bittired
Serious question: while there are some obvious benefits to technology, why do you think specifically what you are doing and have done will really matter? I&#x27;m not just talking about making money for yourself or your family, but how will what you are doing make the world better over the short-term and the long-term?<p>This question started killing me after about 5-6 years of working in IT and development and I&#x27;ve not been able to overcome it. It gets worse and worse.
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mindcrime
Good question. I've been struggling with that a bit lately as well. I mean, I
enjoy what I' doing and I think we're building some cool stuff, but when I
look around and think about problems like "lack of clean water" and "prevalent
infectious disease", and "hunger / lack of food" and "homelessness", etc. in
various parts of the world, I sometimes feel a pang of doubt and sort of a
"shouldn't I be doing something more important?" moment.

So how do I stay sane? Well... a couple of ways. For one, as a very pro-
capitalist Libertarian type, I have a strong belief in entrepreneurship and
small business as a way of improving the standard of living for people. And I
believe that democratizing access to powerful software tools (via creating
Open Source products) ultimately has second-order (or 3rd-order, whatever)
effects of promoting business and economic growth. I look to the day when a
small coffee farm in Africa or South America may use our products (for free,
even) to help build their business.

But looking beyond even that, something dawned on me recently. When Douglas
Engelbart passed away recently, all of the stories about his death prompted me
to go back and read more of his writings (and some of his peers) and I sort of
re-discovered something I used to think about a lot, but had forgotten: The
idea of "intelligence augmentation"[1] and the implication that computers
_should_ serve to make us effectively smarter, both individually and
collectively, and should enable us to come up with better (and faster) answers
to hard problems... things like "lack of fresh water" and "lack of food", etc.

When I first started my professional programming career, I thought about
things in those terms a lot (even if I didn't know the exact phrase
"Intelligence Augmentation"), but I have drifted away from that mindset over
the years. But now I think that was a mistake, and I'm trying to rediscover
how to focus on building technology that has the effect of "making us smarter
so we can solve hard problems".

So, in the case of Fogbeam Labs specifically, we were already going down the
path of developing / researching / building / promoting stuff around the
Semantic Web vision, we were just coming at it from a fairly simplistic "how
can we make money by helping customers with this stuff?" mindset. Now I'm
pushing to adopt more of a "will promoting this kind of technology make the
world better for everybody, and, if not, what will?" mindset.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_augmentation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_augmentation)

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munimkazia
I think my expertise will be able to reduce overheads and costs to companies.
It will solve new problems and old problems in a better way. It will automate
things and make communication easier and make people more productive and more
informed with better data. That is about it really. Not thinking of world
peace or anything at the moment.

