Hello everyone,
As many of the students today will be heading into the tech industry, I think it is important for us to think about how we would spend our life’s work. Many peopIe desire to go into fancy tech jobs, however, when I hear this I can’t help but be reminded of the Netflix documentary “the social dilemma”.
The revelation of recent trends from adults to young kids show us that we are spending more and more of our limited time looking at screens. My biggest gripe with this is that it’s usually not time well spent. I have on many occasions also fallen into the habit of waking up only to open youtube and then realize two hours later that two hours have in fact passed.
It appears to me antiproductive that we have our best engineers spending their working lives on trying to get people addicted to their phones or screens, which is synonymous with trying to get people to waste their time. Sure within limits, it is good to connect and it can provide value to people, but we are clearly way beyond any sort of reasonable limitations. Imagine instead, for these past 15 or so years, our engineers were working solely on things that actually helped people, for example, engineering better healthcare technologies that make a material difference.
I always imagine a scanning system like the one on the movie Elysium. It could also be as simple as daily blood scanners that give you blood test results in your own house. Eventually we can also have robotic limbs or perhaps 3d printed organs that solve most kinds of health issues.
A drive to these longshot technolgies is what ends up making them possible, and I would encourage everyone to seek them out if at all possible as it seems a much better use of human resources.
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