>> One example is Endless, a computer company founded by a young Californian named Matt Dalio. I know his father, Ray Dalio, a successful businessman who became very interested in my ideas and my work<p>This is the real root problem - People are helping their already rich friends too much. Companies shouldn't be about the CEO and their friends, it should be about the product and the customers. Promoting the children of your rich friends in your news articles doesn't help balance out wealth equality.<p>There are thousands of other (poorer, more determined) entrepreneurs like 'Matt Dalio' who probably deserve the attention even more.<p>>> Dalio did not give up.<p>Yeah that totally deserves its own paragraph; not giving up is a huge achievement when daddy is a billionaire. It's almost like the author's subconscious is trying to tell us something.
Profit - rather the Willingness to Pay - indicates the true preferences of society/individuals. While we may claim otherwise, at the end of the day, we sometimes value pleasure over health.<p>And if society truly cared about quality of life for the poorest/weakest, the market would re-align itself, and the direction of creativity would be self corrected.<p>I feel capitalism and profits are working just fine, we just don't want to admit what our true preferences are.
The title of the article should really get rid of "tech". This is an inherent feature(or bug depending on perspective) of a capitalistic system wherein companies are designed for profit and will target markets where there is more potential profit.<p>This is true of many other industries, not just tech, although tech has been capturing much of the interest and ire of not being different. Any time a company accepts outside money, they have a fiduciary duty to build their business in a manner that will lead to the highest return - "maximizing shareholder value."<p>Now, this is not inherently bad to maximize value as we have seen the largest growth the world has ever seen (not just at the top end, but for the poor as well) because of the innovation and creativity that has occurred due to chasing profits.<p>Maybe I'm cynical, but I really don't think tech companies truly are in a "quest to change the world" unless you believe every word spoken at demo day. Should be retitled: "Companies are using creativity to chase profits" because that is what they are doing and is what they should be doing in the current economic system.<p>I completely agree that incentives and structures should be changed to dramatically reduce the income and wealth disparities. The struggle is the will to voluntarily forego profits.
This reminds me of one laptop per child and this is similarly misguided. Poor people don’t want this and can’t make much use of it.<p>What poor people want is clean water, a stable source of food, security, health care, honest government, etc, etc. They’ll be happy to have a cell phone, but it’s not going to change their life.<p>The problem of poverty isn’t the result of lack of access to information.
GREAT article. It definitely reflects the current state of society, and most important, people. Selfishness is the standard, money is our god. We need to open our eyes and start acting, otherwise the results will keep being the same and nothing will change.<p>Capitalism should be reformed and a new economic system - based on sharing economy, but in the real sense - should arise.
> It is interesting to note that new technology products are never launched in the poor segment of the market and then gradually adapted to higher-level markets<p>Inclined to disagree. Plenty of wealthy people see the "market potential" of starting in poorer places (<i>cough</i> Africa) and 'locking up' marketshare.<p>hell, zuckerberg and others tried pushing through the precedent of zero-rated internet for proprietary services in india and other countries as a way to lock up precedent for when they'd bring the same tech to america. (Not that the latter has needed any help being complacent with zero rating - apparently india beat us on that front)
Technology is already changing the world in the way he wants and profit is only part of the reason, but still an important part. Many people have, for non-profit and profit reasons, attempted to fix the issues of computers not being wide spread or fix connectivity problems in developing countries.<p>The two groups that seem most likely to solve the connectivity problem(s) have profit incentives behind it: Facebook and Google.<p>There are almost certainly others as well.
> <i>The more we advance in technology, improve our infrastructure, spread globalization, and bring efficiency to the economic system, the more intensely global corporations focus their strategies on competing to serve the wealthiest and the middle class</i><p>A question: is it actually true that these things are correlated? I don't know, but on the surface of it, it's not clear to me that they are.
"But statistics show that we only consume a fraction of what is actually available online."<p>"In practical terms, it is actually possible to take all of the images and data from every website the average person visits in a lifetime, compress them, and fit them onto a single 2-terabyte (TB) hard drive inside a computer."<p>These are among the many "unspoken truths" of the web, viz. that right now on your person or nearby you have enough storage space to hold every bit of information you will ever need in your lifetime.<p>I would like to see the statistics.<p>Obviously, companies like Google are not going to embrace truths like these.<p>When a user can search a database of downloaded data ("data dump") locally, even without a connection, how would a search engine track the user's queries?<p>Right now, public information, from academic research to user-generated content, is being hoarded by a few companies and used to collect information about those who wish to access it, which is then used to sell ads.<p>This is a relatively recent phenomenon and is not necessary.<p>This is supposed to be the Information Age. We can all access public information in large quantities at high speeds without constant monitoring in the name of pillaging advertising budgets.<p>While it may not be possible to save <i>every</i> piece of information one needs in advance, certainly <i>much</i> of the piecemeal access to static data that we do today could be averted. (Personally I have been doing this with DNS data for many years, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.)<p>Why is piecemeal access something anyone would want to avert?
Matters of cost, reliablity and inefficiency aside, it is piecemeal access, one query at a time, each and every one traveling over a insecure network, logged and analyzed 24/7 by myriad third parties all desperate for cash, that gives rise to memes like "You are the product".<p>It is the gratuitous use of an insecure, invasively monitored network to query information which could be stored locally that is the root cause for many of the complaints that internet users have today. This type of use enables the practices by third parties that users complain about.
Capitalism is an economic system and an ideology based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. You want creativity? Leave capitalism.
Creativity for its own sake isn't better as a model for society than profit.<p>Furthermore having the richest pay for development of new technologies which are then later on distributed to the poorer is in my view the right direction it basically indirectly taxes the rich first.<p>Tesla would never have been successful if they started with cars for everyone. The fact that they made it a desirable item, to begin with, worked to their advantage. A better place is an example of the wrong strategy.<p>To me, this reads more like a PR piece than anything else.