I agree that it’s valuable to recognize the downstream impact that making the world a better place can have on your own livelihood. However, the feedback cycle is likely to be decades or longer, and might be hard to use as motivation on a daily basis. In my experience it’s valuable to have more immediate motivators, such as the welfare you might be creating directly with a job focused on making the world a better place, the team you might be working with, or a passion for the technology or product you are working on itself.
Technology is surely a mechanism for reducing poverty (think of the industrial revolution, green revolution, vaccines and drugs). However, a large chunk of our technological output also goes towards marginal quality of life improvements for the already-rich.
Welcome! And thanks for posting this.
I agree that it’s valuable to recognize the downstream impact that making the world a better place can have on your own livelihood. However, the feedback cycle is likely to be decades or longer, and might be hard to use as motivation on a daily basis. In my experience it’s valuable to have more immediate motivators, such as the welfare you might be creating directly with a job focused on making the world a better place, the team you might be working with, or a passion for the technology or product you are working on itself.
Technology is surely a mechanism for reducing poverty (think of the industrial revolution, green revolution, vaccines and drugs). However, a large chunk of our technological output also goes towards marginal quality of life improvements for the already-rich.