Comments on: The problems in our world aren’t technical, but social https://lifeboat.com/blog/2010/09/the-problems-in-our-world-arent-technical-but-social Safeguarding Humanity Mon, 17 Apr 2017 05:27:43 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.3 By: Tim https://lifeboat.com/blog/2010/09/the-problems-in-our-world-arent-technical-but-social#comment-77800 Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:40:46 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=1246#comment-77800 You know, I don’t disagree with the observations here about Linux/Wiki/etc. We’d have benefited greatly from more and earlier such efforts. But this —

“If the WW II generation was The Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers were The Worst. … And while he has the potential to do a lot for the world by giving away his money to other people … I see that the proprietary development model Gates’s generation adopted has stifled the progress of technology they should have provided to us. ”

— I find it really amusing to see a single paragraph that both touts the Boomers as the worst generation (no argument here) and yet also seems to embody such a grandiose sense of entitlement. I don’t think it was intentional, but that doesn’t make it any less striking. Sure, perhaps any number of billionaires and IT types could have showered us with all sorts of wonderful things out of the kindness of their hearts, from money to technology, but ultimately it’s their call. The singularity is coming, proprietary software or not, and when individuals don’t have any choice in what happens to the results of their work, someone or other is going to turn the Great Filter into a brick wall.

The problem really does boil down to motivation. I think that in the end, “it works” will be enough. Proprietary software might be a dead end, but so is a social system where people aren’t allowed to find that out for themselves.

]]>
By: Debug the World https://lifeboat.com/blog/2010/09/the-problems-in-our-world-arent-technical-but-social#comment-70284 Mon, 04 Oct 2010 20:27:03 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=1246#comment-70284 If you are right, the question is, how to generate a motivation for the research community to work on common code bases, accepting the open source philosophy.

The big obstacle is probably the need to decide on a common platform and design an architecture acceptable for all (and this for every domain).

]]>
By: robomoon https://lifeboat.com/blog/2010/09/the-problems-in-our-world-arent-technical-but-social#comment-69902 Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:44:07 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=1246#comment-69902 Of cause, it’s important for leaders and the obedient masses who follow them to leverage the potential of culture. They will integrate social components into free products and leave the development and distribution of technologies to the true chosen masters of science. Leading components the industry and consumers highly depend upon, including microprocessors plus commercial operating systems for personal computers, energy sources for water, land, and air transportation, incl. the commercial production of electricity, etc., will be safely under control by those chosen investors who control more than only the half of each of such dominating technologies worldwide.

]]>