How would the world be today if the government pulled all the brightest engineers off working on optimizing advertising tech at FAANG companies and paid them equally to solve these larger societal problems such as homelessness, reversing climate change/pollution, solving cancer, creating unlimited nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels, terraforming Mars for the humans, etc? I can only wonder... Thoughts?
Not significantly different to how it is today. Potentially much worse. It's solipsistic to think that more engineers and software developers would help with some of these social problems.
Sociology, economics and politics are difficult, valuable and all too often completely overlooked by people who have the luxury of being able to solve for x in their day job.
I suspect you'd make more progress on those particular problems by funneling the same amount of money into paying all the lobbyists to stay home and play Fortnite.
You'd be better off redirecting a portion of the funding that supports their work to people with actual expertise in the fields you mentioned. Particularly when it comes to solving social problems, many of which we have answers for that aren't implemented because their expense is politically untenable.
Social problems are best solved from a grassroots perspective, and they require negotiation, compromise, and HN hates this one, wait for it... politics (both official politics, and everyday interpersonal politics.)
Most people don't want to live on Mars. But they do like soap operas. If only people would donate their Netflix money to cancer research and donate the time saved from not using Facebook to do voluntary work.
It would be... dystopian. A lot of the work we do at FAANGs or similar startups is designing (i.e. manipulating) people into doing what we want them do. Imagine Obama or Trump having all those people and technology working to advance their agenda. That’s not a country I’d want to live in, even though I voted for one of those people.
