You can’t solve social problems with technological solutions. This seems like it should be obvious, but in many circles it is far from obvious. That’s understandable, we want technology to save us from ourselves, but in the end technology is just tools and the knowledge to use them. We have to save us from ourselves, and having great tools and the knowledge to use them is a big help, but it isn’t the solution because technology alone will not tell you what problem to work on or why. Technology will only ever be an outcome of knowledge, not an outcome of wisdom.
Social problems require social solutions. You may find that using technology makes implementing those social solutions easier, cheaper, faster, etc., but that’s it.
If you insist on solving problems with technology, you’ll be forever relegated to infrastructure and plumbing-style problems; important but not world-changing, not sexy, and certainly not popular. And they are typically expensive, so you get to solve fewer of them.
Over time what is viewed as infrastructure evolves, the set gets bigger, the oldest things fade away, and it feels like you are solving social problems, but only because those social problems have gone unsolved so long that we have collectively moved on and given up hope they will be solved, and so those parts of the problem that we cannot live without have become infrastructure that needs to be maintained but the problem itself is now viewed as intractable or endemic and our solution is that we will just, “live with it”. Any possible solution to them is going to have to overcome being born as a commodity, not as a valuable.
