This is a response to the video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8) in which Steve Yeagge quit his position at Google live while giving a talk.
The reason: he didn’t want to work on another “cat-picture-project”, rather do something of the likes of helping to decode the genome and find a cure for cancer.
TL;TR: The higher number of people you impact, the higher the chances are something meaningful will be done with your work. Silicon Valley employees are in such a privileged position, where even a cat-picture-project will improve the world.
Allow me to start with a story of a truly remarkable person, a person long gone and forgotten by history.
A person whose work arguably saved more lives until today than antibiotics, MRI’s and similar technologies ever will. We have no way of finding out more about this “savior of civilizations”, but we can be pretty sure that he, or she, had no idea of the ramifications of this invention.
Most probably this person just tried to get a few bloodstains out of a shirt, or mud of hands. I am talking about the one who has invented soap. Soap is used to clean our hands, kill germs and has therefore saved billions of lives, from the newborn, to the sick, to soldiers, to the elderly.
Now, you might argue that this is an easy example with no connection to “cat-picture-projects” like Google+, or alike. In this case allow me to direct your attention to another individual, someone we know a great deal about. He lives today and a brainchild of him is one of the main factors for revolutions swiping through numerous countries. His work is one of the driving forces overthrowing regimes & dictators who have killed thousands. Yes I am talking about the one who brought to you “What I had for breakfast in 140 characters and less”, Jack Dorsey.
Twitter may be considered to be the most mundane service imaginable, seemingly made to broadcast breakfast and toilet habits to countless spam bots, in 140 characters or less.
As it turns out, twitter might be used by many as a “cat-picture” service, but it can be more, so much more.
In this spirit, the “what is my Ex doing” service (Facebook) helped to save a little boy’s life, the “only reason why imgur.com exists” (reddit) has a surprisingly altruistic community, etc…
Not every cat-picture-project can help overthrow a dictator (there are not enough dictators around). Still they can do great good to the entire human race.
I argue that it is impossible to foresee what your inventions will be used for. The only thing you can hope for is, that your technology will not be used to harm others (Einstein certainly wished for that).
In a perfect scenario your work will not effect most, be harmless to many and improve the life of a handful.
The insane technological & medical advancements in the past decades cannot be attributed to a few ivary-tower scientists, but to hundreds of thousands of profit-oriented companies.
Scientists don’t create much new life changing technologies, for-profit companies do. Scientists then benefit from open-sourced projects.
Edit: a commenter at HN pointed out that the contributions of Science are enormous. I absolutely agree and want to clarify this point.
Fewer life changing technologies can be attributed to Scientists than to for-profit companies. This is due to the higher budgets and bigger number of people working in companies, compared to staff employed by Universities. Furthermore companies are bound to create something people are willing to pay for. Universities don’t have this kind of “restrictions” and can do work on a more abstract level, which may not translate into anything tangible for years to come.
There are 3 distinct ways I can think of on how a seemingly unimportant project can make the world a better place.
- The project is directly used to do good, free a dictator-ridden country, help find a cure for a dying kid, etc.
- You don’t know what your work will be used for. Your project to port features from one programming language to another is somehow used by, or inspired a researcher to find a cure for cancer.
- The third way is very intricate, hidden to almost everyone who did not devote a lot of time and energy in understanding how societies work: You are improving the life quality of people.
Allow me to elaborate on this last point.
Today the life quality of the average person is much higher than the life quality of a king 100 years ago.
We have running hot water wherever we go, every fruit we can imagine available to our delight all time, all year long. Today almost every person in the first world has access to medical care which the richest of the rich 20 years ago could not have dreamed of. Television, Cars, the Internet are all things which make our lives so much better than a king’s 100 years ago.
But this increase in life quality is not just good for people in the first world. Do you remember the really cheap microwave you bought a while back? It was made in China. Somewhere in the south of China in a sweatshop Mrs. Li was working on it, 70 hours a week for 1 $ per hour.
Now you might fear you are exploiting Ms. Li, but she might disagree. She saved up most of the money she earned and send it back home. Her village has electricity. Her mother saw the first TV show in her life. Soon Ms. Li might save enough to buy an old tractor.
Yeah, nice story, but how on earth will a “cat-picture-project” make the lives of anyone better? This is where the layers of society show their delicate nature. In order to connect them, one has to understand the mysterious workings of the human brain.
This, right there, is where the life quality improved.
Now it is hard to ague how a king 100 years ago was worse off, having a lower supply of cat pictures, than people today, but think from the standpoint of an adolescent. People get a lot of joy out of cat pictures, so much that they might not feel the need to go down to the bar and get drunk. And they are willing to pay for it, not directly, but indirectly, via advertisements. See, right next to all those pictures there was a little ad showing a really cheap microwave and inspired by it, the adolescent decided to spend the booze budget of a week on a cheap microwave, with regards to Ms. Li.
This is obviously just one example on how the story might play out, 99.99% of the times you don’t buy a microwave, but something else. Innovation improves our life in very little incremental steps. It might give us more joy, more functionality, or lower the price. This makes more of our disposable income available to acquire constantly better and better products.
All of this adds up.
It adds up so much that today we don’t live like kings, we live like gods. Average people fly half way around the globe, while looking at cat pictures. Tell that to a person 100 or 200 years ago, they might ask you what a “picture” is.
Of course not every project is good for the society. Take the health system as an example. Companies earn more money, the more sick people there are. We need hospitals and medication without a question, but we are incentivizing the wrong behavior. Doctors should get rich the healthier you are and the quicker you get healthy again, not the other way around.
So as long as you are not an insurance salesmen, or investment banker your work is making the word a better place. The more people you impact, the more effect you have on the wellbeing of the planet. Oh, patent lawyers; they are pretty evil as well, if you are one, you are most likely hindering the world on advancing.
I would kindly ask you to give the last point some additional thought. The more people you impact, the more of an impact you have. Who could have claimed 100 years ago to influence millions? Only kings, queens and a hand full of highly esteemed individuals to the likes of Guttenberg & Luther could have claimed that. If you are working at Google, Facebook, or one of the other Silicon Valley heavy-weights you can claim to influence the life of thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of people every day. Yes your work will most likely be used to share cat-pictures, but this is what people love doing and they do it 90% of their time.
But know just this, of all the people to use your service, if only 1% use it to help each others, or learn new things, you are doing more good than the average citizen ever could. Not many have the immense privilege to touch on the lives of more of a few hundred people, even in the first world, today.
To all those Googlers and other Silicon Valley employees who worry that they don’t provide enough good to the world. Pleas stop worrying! As long as you are producing something, innovating, inventing you are part of the most important community in the word. The internet changes lives, it changes nations, you are at the pulsating center of it all. Be proud of yourselves, you lucky bastards.
In the case you don’t like your current job, quit it. Life is too short to do something you don’t like. Chances are, if you do the thing which makes you happy, you are much better at it anyway. Much better translates into much more productive equals more good for the world.
Another comment at HN stated:
There is a fundamental flaw in this argument.
People choose to spend a lot of time watching nyan cat. I don’t believe that their quality of life is actually improved by this.
Zynga is very good at delivering games that cause compulsive over-playing. I don’t think that Farmville has improved the world.
Going back farther, a lot of people choose to smoke, yet are very clear that they would be happier if they could make the opposite choice.
Just because people choose to do X does not mean that X is good for those people.
I agree with “Just because people choose to do X does not mean that X is good for those people.” To clarify I would like to add:
Lets say you take all decisions of people in their life and at the very end of it added it up. Smoking, drinking, the second mortgage on the house to go on holiday, brushing your teeth every morning, buying a newer car, everything. One can only guess what we would find, but my guess is: on average the people tend to do what is good for them.
I argue, by looking at the big picture, on average, over decades, people tend to make the decisions that are good for them.
As a provider of tools, this is all you can hope for, again, Einstein certainly did
