I do think a lot of good minds are being wasted on pretty meaningless endeavors - simply to make investors happy. But that is capitalism in a nutshell. Money talks, everything else walks. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing capitalism, everything has it's pros and cons. That said, I personally feel that only certain aspects of medicine are a good investment.
OTOH, just because you don't have a career in a basic science doesn't mean you can't change the world. IMO, the biggest challenges facing us are in the field of computer science and computer/electrical engineering.
We need to make computers more efficient and we need to find a way to power the future expansion of data centers around the globe. Less than half of the world's population is taking part in the information economy, and already our data centers are using about 2% of the electrical supply. And all we are doing with those is Siri, Maps, and facebook.
If we want our cloud computing resources to do the heavy lifting in the future, we are going to need massive amounts of computing power and a way to supply electricity to that.
OTOH, just because you don't have a career in a basic science doesn't mean you can't change the world. IMO, the biggest challenges facing us are in the field of computer science and computer/electrical engineering.
We need to make computers more efficient and we need to find a way to power the future expansion of data centers around the globe. Less than half of the world's population is taking part in the information economy, and already our data centers are using about 2% of the electrical supply. And all we are doing with those is Siri, Maps, and facebook.
If we want our cloud computing resources to do the heavy lifting in the future, we are going to need massive amounts of computing power and a way to supply electricity to that.