alt Hacker NewsDo All Problems Have Technical Fixes?
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A lot of problems do. But sometimes the problem is people related. You can work around those problems with technology but you can't fix them.
In terms of real world problems: climate change, food scarcity, poverty, water quality and access, health care, etc. a lot of the solutions are technical. And a lot of those solutions are directly or indirectly about making energy cheaper and cleaner. With cheap clean energy, you can address climate change. You can desalinate water (at scale). If you have clean water, you can address food scarcity (e.g. irrigate desserts). You can also address sanitation. Cheap energy also enables transport, having light in people's home (education). so that addresses poverty. And so on. All that comes from just a handful of technical solutions that make energy cheap and clean. Anyone working on those things is accomplishing more than decades worth of well intentioned but not very effective activism, charity, diplomacy, etc. I'm sure AI has a role to play here as well.
The point is moot anyway. We're not going to turn into Luddites and competition continuously drives us to do better. Which means people keep on figuring out technical solutions to challenges around them. Technology isn't inherently good or evil. But it can be very effective sometimes. And of course there is a lot of not so effective or misguided stuff as well. Part of the journey.
It all hinges on how far you are wiling to go. If you are OK with being a supervillain, you could use a radiotherapy machine and FMRI to nuke the specific neural paths that are creating your pesky people-related problems.
The patients will object, of course, but that part of their brains can also be nuked.
Perhaps the title should be "why do tech leaders believe all problems have technical fixes?" To that question, isn't the author analyzing too much into a salesman's pitch? They profit from selling technical solutions, so of course they'll say everyone can use one.
Our proclivity to believing that all problems have technical solutions is what has largely lead us into out current cultural cul-de-sac. Namely the idea that AI will somehow "save us". I can't think of anything more patently stupid. As stated here in another comment, technology is neutral, but is also a multiplier of force. Many of our technologies simply multiply the force of the already powerful, against the power of the powerless.
My gripe with titles like this is that problems as a class are much bigger than technical problems.
For example:
Many people on HN seems to have dating problems. Whenever an article on dating is in the front page, I see those issues in the comments. In most cases, that class of problem requires people to work on themselves. Online dating for sure as hell isn’t solving it.
Some of my comments outlined how to solve dating problems for cis heterosexual males. Most of the partial solutions are non-technical in nature. Some are technical if it concerns online dating.
If nothing else, getting people to accept a technical fix is a social problem.
On the other hand, yes, some social problems have had technical solutions. Remember when “You just can’t get good help these days!” was a truism? It isn’t said as much anymore because the underlying problem was obviated: Time was, middle-class households were becoming unmanageable due to young women no longer wanting to be servants, such as maids; not even the Great Depression could shift the problem. Ultimately, the whole thing was rendered obsolete by the rise of home conveniences such as dishwashers and vacuum cleaners, allowing middle-class women to do their own housework.
Those technical solutions still required a social shift away from expecting maids to be part of any well-run middle-class household, but the technical and the social went hand-in-hand.
https://daily.jstor.org/how-america-tried-and-failed-to-solv...
Side note:
> the Naturalisitic Fallacy that “ought” can be derived from “is.”
What's the name for the fallacy that “is” can be derived from “ought”?
As the sysadmin/ops dude who has always been on the practical end of things, most problems are leadership and not technical imho.
No, say you're on a team of five with two consistently poor performers that not only fail to achieve limited tasks, but constantly draw off support from the rest of the team.
There's no technical fix for that. The nuclear option of getting them sacked and replaced dents team morale and probably wouldn't let the team back up to speed for three or four months with all the onboarding required.
Coaching in areas where they should be self-learning consumes the focus of others on the team or in the business.
Ignoring them and ploughing ahead without assigning them work drastically reduces team effectiveness.
Not much in the way of a technical fix in sight - unless copilot suddenly becomes really really good.
The answer is definitely NO. Technology is always neutral, It has no notion of good and evil. It will never has the ability to fix the problem orchestrated by evil.
Worldcoin’s WorldID could be one of the examples,detail below.
Without True Authority, WorldID or anything technical achievement Could Become a Hoax: Concerns Amplified by Worldcoin Ban on X
Link here: https://kindkang.medium.com/without-true-authority-worldid-c...
I suspect there's a correlation between how likely someone is to answer "yes" and how recently they entered the software engineering workforce. At any rate, it's definitely changed for me since starting out.
I strong recommend the book The Wizard and The Prophet. We are all here enjoying over abundance of food thanks the third agricultural revolution. Technology defeated COVID. Our technology wizards keep scoring big points. The prophets claim that our wizards no only are not averting the global collapse of civilization, they are accelerating it.
Nobody needs a microwave oven but who can wait a few minutes to warm up their food?
No, there are problems that are societal loadcaring and can not be fixed in the short term without widespread chaos and lawlessness ensuing. There can be local optima of minimal suffering approached, but every flower throws a shade and kills another flower.
Problems in this world are of 2 types. Technical and political.
Do all "technical" problems have technical fixes. A very sound YES!
What about political problems? Sometime they can be fixed with a technical fix but ALL of them can be fixed with assassination.
Sometimes what is needed is not to solve or explain, but to acknowledge a problem. To name it. And to have the restraint and patience and trust that its understanding, alone, will take care of most of it.
It sort of bugs me when people who claim that a problem cannot be solved with technology act like that problem was caused by technology. You get both or neither, you can't have just one.
One way or another, there must be solutions. I always think about companies sending rockets to Mars. So what's stopping us from fixing a few bugs
And the not asked often enough corollary: just because there exists a technical solution to a problem, does that mean it's the right solution?
All problems except the problem of too much abstraction
Sounds like a question for discrete math professors.
Obviously, no.
But it's simpler than all the things the article goes in to.
Tech "leaders" get rich(er) if they can convince a bunch of people they have the solutions to their problems. There are various ways to accomplish this and any specific tech and even tech itself is practically incidental.
Each hype wave is just another opportunity to do so. I think tech is generally popular among the people trying to get rich(er) because it's changing pretty fast which provides a regular series of hype waves with regular opportunities to convince people you have the solution they need. (You even get fresh opportunities to convince people they have brand new kinds of problems, which, of course, you have the solution to. Tech is very flexible.)
Not all problems have technical fixes, but all fixes are technical. Technology is the application of knowledge to solve problems. Some technologies fall outside of what typically comes to mind when the word is brought up, for example languages and currency and tax codes are all technologies. Anything that actually fixes a problem is going to wind up being technical. There is a long and ever growing list of problems solved by technology. It is arguably the hallmark of our species to look for technical solutions to problems, and we will continue to do so until we go extinct.
There are problems that don't have solutions. Some people want to do A, some people want to do B, you can not do both, and doing neither will piss off everyone - no matter what someone is going to be unhappy. You might find better "solutions" or solve adjacent problems, like "we'll do A today and B tomorrow" but the core issue is intractable. It is the human condition that we will always have some such problems, but they are few and generally affect the upper levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. For the lower level stuff - typically anything involving material needs - technical solutions exist.
The problem with this article and the many others like it is that it fails to distinguish between the search for genuine technical solutions to problems and tech bros proposing bad technical solutions to problems. That a problem theoretically has a technical solution obviously does not mean your slight twist on a note taking app is such a solution. Why these narratives are pushed is reasonably easy to understand - it boosts the ego of the person who developed the proposed "solution" and asserts a value of the product to both potential customers and investors. In particular, the phenomenon is heavily fueled by entrepreneurs with little understanding of the underlying problem pitching solutions to investors who have equally little understanding of the underlying problem.
I'm fine with calling out dumb ideas, but going further to this narrative of "some proposed technical fixes wouldn't work therefore technical fixes don't work and anyone looking for a technical fix is delusional" leads to a defeatist attitude. For every solvable problem a technical solution does exist, it's just really unlikely you'll stumble upon such a solution after watching a few hours of videos on the latest tech fad.
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I feel like the framing in the article is wrong. Tech startups are desperately searching for solutions that will generate value.
When a "new hammer" is developed or discovered (lets say, radiation) there's a natural inflection point. People will try marketing radioactive medicines, radioactive soft drinks, radioactive toys, radioactive jewelry.... etc etc. Everything will be thrown at the wall to see what sticks. There's no broader intellectual movement in play.
This process is more like "product darwinism" than technological determinism.