Does computing make the world better?

https://www.brandons.me/blog/is-software-good

by brundolf • 6 years ago

47 60 6 years ago

brandons.me

tomrod• 6 years ago

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.

eat_veggies5• 6 years ago

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/

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

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

empath75• 6 years ago

Tragedy of the commons really. Makes the world worse over all while making the lives of people who know how to use computers better.

TheSpiceIsLife2• 6 years ago

like any means of production

I don’t think this is necessarily the case.

It’s not the means of production in and of themselves that are the issue.

It’s the historio-socio-cultural-political framework, or zeitgeist, within which we find ourselves, and the decision we make, continue to make, and tolerate.

A lack of leadership in any real sense of the word.

There is, as you say, a mutual recursion, but the tools are only doing what we’re making them do, and in that sense they are amplifying our poor choices.

Blaming the tools seeks to externalise responsibility.

jariel3• 6 years ago

"Computers, like any means of production, are only furthering inequality in the world"

1) 'Means of production' do not arbitrarily further inequality. The Industrial Revolution, which we may very well be still living through (ask a historian in 500 years ...) smashed the old class systems and enabled standards of living unheard of before.

2) 'Tech' is in its infancy, the measured surpluses i.e profits are going into the hands of the 0.1% but consumer surpluses are huge. The value of the things we can buy today are immensely greater than before. I play a free video game that has provided me with countless hours of entertainment. From 'older tech': I get this amazing stuff called 'electricity' out of my walls and literally fresh water (hot and cold!) for literally pennies - this is revolutionary. You can live better than a Roman Emperor by shopping exclusively at Walmart.

3) A few billion people have come out of 'extreme poverty' in the last 40 years, as basic material prosperity reaches every corner of the planet. Computing has been part of that. Despite our own ugly inequality, and all the ugly externalities (pollution etc.) - we shouldn't denigrate this fact: having 'a roof, food, the ability to communicate with people at a distance, basic medicine/healthcare, basic rule of law' ... this is heaven compared to any situation their ancestors would have lived in.

Computing is as worthwhile as we want to make it, much like most other things.

umvi• 6 years ago

we shouldn't denigrate this fact: having 'a roof, food, the ability to communicate with people at a distance, basic medicine/healthcare, basic rule of law' ... this is heaven compared to any situation their ancestors would have lived in.

It's only heaven compared to how it was before. If you are born under the current system, you don't know what it's like to have lived in a worse time. So while our ancestors are probably astounded at our prosperity, having tasted the before/after, someone born now will not be grateful, because they don't have a hellish alternative to compare it to (besides people in other countries).

This "relativity" extends to other areas too, not just poverty. For example... torture. For our ancestors, torture meant having your spine stretch until it broke or being stuck in an iron box filled with spikes or being starved and beaten and stuffed in a tiny locker or any number of horrifically macabre prospects. Now torture is "being alone in a room". I'm not downplaying the psychological damage of solitary confinement, but relative to the torture POWs went through or the torture methods used in medieval times, solitary confinement almost seems like a reward.

The standard by which we gauge poverty, torture, happiness, etc. shifts as society improves.

political_exile2• 6 years ago

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.

eat_veggies5• 6 years ago

Thank you for sharing your experience. I would note that there are not enough FAANG jobs to allow everyone to follow the same path as you did, even if they worked just as hard. Software can surely elevate a select few out of poverty, and at the moment, there is still enough room for a few more people. But what we're seeing in e.g. India is that it's not enough:

https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/

brundolf2• 6 years ago

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?

haram_masala• 6 years ago

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_veggies5• 6 years ago

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?

sandoooo4• 6 years ago

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.

antepodius• 6 years ago

Don't worry, we're heading that way. In 20 years, we'll all be serf-wards of the amazon-google-industrial complex, living of off bezo's benevolence, eating our insects in our shipping container boxes. Nobody has or wants for money- we order allowed goods using cryptographically verified credits distributed by the federal reserve indirectly via stimulus checks to amazon.

The government is indistinguishable from the 10 biggest corporations, as it should be; and all the people need to live and distract themselves to death is provided by heavily automated labour and transport. A few people actually dollarCoins, but you've never seen one. Cash and unregulated cryptocurrencies are illegal, of course, as they aided and abetted terrorists, criminals, pedophiles, the alt-right, and possible alternatives to the powers that be.

Entering your shared containerpartment, you blink away the afterimages from your google glasses as you move to sit down in front of your itechscreen ('smart' was deemed an iq-slur last year, prompting some rebranding.) Your roommate doesn't ask you how the anti-trans-racism protest went; you've never talked to him.

The time between removing your glass and hooking in to the facetube feed is an unpleasant opportunity for your mind to reflect, as you gaze out at the decaying brickwork in the distance before closing the hatch to your cell.

You are free.

Nevermark3• 6 years ago

I don't think a target like "fun, socially beneficial, and lucrative" becomes harmful or worth discarding simply because not everyone achieves it.

For starters, doing something not-fun, but socially beneficial and lucrative seems like a good thing, if that is someone's choice.

Also fun, not socially beneficial, and lucrative (assuming the job is not socially harmful), such as esports doesn't seem like a problem to me.

svara• 6 years ago

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.

sandoooo4• 6 years ago

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.

chacha2• 6 years ago

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

No, we couldn't have. Computing has killed us all.

Good talk I watched the other day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8&feature=youtu.be

walleeee• 6 years ago

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.

fizixer• 6 years ago

Does computing make the world better?

- Define computing

- Define make

- Define world

- Define better

Aboh33• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

Computers are an evolving symbiotic life form.

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

TheSpiceIsLife2• 6 years ago

In what ways are computers alive?

29athrowaway• 6 years ago

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.

fallinghawks2• 6 years ago

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_veggies5• 6 years ago

In the bay area this is not true.

alex_young• 6 years ago

Isn't the gating factor for adding housing in the Bay Area a political issue rather than a computing one?

fallinghawks2• 6 years ago

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.

rgbrenner• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

notriddle• 6 years ago

Computers allow lots of boomboom boomboom boomboom. All of which has made life worse.

austhrow743• 6 years ago

If you take it as a given that stronger economy, more people, and more tech make the world a better place then yeah obviously computers make the world a better place. Any questioning of what the world being a better place means should involve questioning those though.

With other animals we look at them stuck in zoos as being a worse existence than in their natural environment, and zoos are at least intentionally designed for the animals wellbeing. For ourselves the technological progressivist sees moving away from our natural habitat as inherently good.

Electricity, the steam engine, antibiotics, and agriculture all exist. We’ve been through multiple levels of life changing technological advancement yet people in general don’t seem particularly happy nor fulfilled. Better planes, cars, and other devices seems a moot point if those things didn’t get the job done. Hell, those things exist and people still kill themselves, or need a cocktail of antidepressants to make it through the day.

You would think if technological progress improved lives at all then such marvels would have managed to move the needle enough that rich western worlders who never have to directly expend effort on any of their basic needs ever again wouldn't intentionally kill themselves.

froasty6• 6 years ago

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.

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brundolf2• 6 years ago

I guess part of my argument is that, in moderation and with self-awareness, "surrogate activities" can be healthy and beneficial.

In fact I think they're especially beneficial when the "natural" means for getting that fulfillment does in fact cause harm. Or, even when the natural activity simply has no other costs or benefits, the surrogate version might be able to meet the fulfillment more effectively than the real thing.

In some sense, art's very purpose is to produce these surrogate experiences. I think they are essential to being a healthy, functioning human being.

froasty6• 6 years ago

"In moderation and with self-awareness" is the same argument typically used for the licitness of drugs, alcohol, nutritionally devoid food, and dozens of other externality-generating vices.

Yes, they frequently replace deficits in an individual's life with something that would otherwise cause them to disrupt the status quo. The question remains, at what cost? Is it sustainable? Are these activities robbing some humans at the expense of others?

Consider a YouTube video: Water Bottle Flip 2. It's about five minutes long and has been nominally viewed 300 million times, plus change.

That's approaching 3000 years of human time spent for a single video on a single service. The audience was probably entertained for that period but at what cost? What could have been in that lacunae? What else could have been accomplished or learned with that 3,000 years? What was the opportunity cost? For the countless children who watch it, what part of the pre-Internet childhood shared by all human history is being sacrificed for it? What part was sacrificed for the 23,000 years spent on Baby Shark?

I don't disagree that there is a place for moderation and art, but what we're seeing on a grand scale is that the ascendancy of cultural forms that enable moderation are themselves being consumed or otherwise blanketed out with dopamine levers that are the first thing many people touch in the morning and the last thing they touch at night. That's not playing guitar, restoring vintage computers, or collecting Magic cards. That's a massive undiagnosed public health crisis.

p2t2p• 6 years ago

You forgot the attribution.

Uncle Ted aka unabomber.

froasty6• 6 years ago

Ted Kaczynski got the bulk of his ideas from Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society. Ellul was emphatically a pacifist, an anarchist, and a well-respected intellectual.

sandoooo4• 6 years ago

Civilization is a surrogate activity factory. Language and literature 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[1], like brains in a jar.

[1]: figuratively speaking. Technically it's what got them out of living in caves, but bear with me here.

ausbah• 6 years ago

quoting the unabomber, wow

http://xahlee.org/p/um/um-s06.html

as a countering antecode, everyone I know uses the utilities of the internet to no major ill effect. and like you can point to many valid criticisms of modern tech and it's usage, but painting entertainment sources like discord and social media platforms like Facebook as "destroying the very notion of being human" sounds a tad exaggerated

beambot3• 6 years ago

They (family members, parents included) don't know how to cook, how to learn, how to grow as humans.

Guessing about their age, your parents' development likely predated mass computing. Their inability to do these things is not caused by computers...

froasty6• 6 years ago

Would you be any more charitable or engaging with the entire argument if I replaced "don't know how to", an implicitly ambiguous phrase that entertains both forgetting and lack of mastery, with an explicitly cumbersome variant? "My parents and siblings have forgotten how to cook, how to learn, how to grow as humans, where my nieces and nephews never learned"?

amasad2• 6 years ago

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.

incompatible2• 6 years ago

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.

froasty6• 6 years ago

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.

Have you read Jacques Ellul (i.e. the ur-"Kaczynski-style" argument)? Ellul defines technique as "[..] the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity." I don't think you can reasonably state that Ellul nor Kaczynski fail to "understand human action".

In this case, the problem isn't that people are maximizing their own self-interest. The problem is that they aren't. Yes, they're making a "voluntary" "choice" to use an addictive technology and a liberal, market-based society is providing individuals with what they actually "want" rather than what they think they want. What those people without antibodies "want" are Skinner Boxes and the market is happily providing them, all up and down the line. This does not seem to be resulting in a functional civic society.

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."

Where is the evidence that there is such a thing as "voluntary conscious" or "purposeful" action" and not "mere biological needs"? If there were a difference in principle between the two, how exactly does that invalidate the argument that "voluntary conscious action" is not triggered when people aren't bored and have meaningful hurdles to overcome in their own lives?

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.

I'm sure that some members of every society that reached an equilibrium with their environment that was later disrupted by the intrusions of foreign markets would disagree. "Staying competitive" is a more compelling explanation for as to why "humans" "prefer" "wealth" rather than that all humans are naturally materialistic and acquisitive. If you don't run faster than the slowest member, you will be eaten. If you don't think faster than the slowest member of the tribe, you will be sacrificed. If you don't adopt, you will be enslaved by those who do. That's a great way to optimally allocate resources, but once again, this dynamic and addictive technology does not seem to be creating a functional civic society.

mattigames• 6 years ago

"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"

jariel3• 6 years ago

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.

minimuffins• 6 years ago

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?"

julianeon• 6 years ago

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.

raincom• 6 years ago

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.

picometer• 6 years ago

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

beambot3• 6 years ago

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...

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

Does computing make the world better?

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