- Obtain enough computing capacity
- Stay within the electrical power limits of our data centers
Somehow it feels like the world is so backwards. Here you have all these smart hard working people with billions of dollars of resources at their disposal and they made a load of kooky videos that people could 'like'.
The videos I'm sure are cool, and I realise that it was quite an achievement, but still, our priorities as a Hunan race are pretty much fucked up.
Food for everyone, diversify our habitable planets portfolio, higher education en masse, stop killing each other, prevention of diseases, keeping up with the Kardashians, a few others as well...
Engineers figure out ways to make this sort of thing cheaper, easy to do, and scalable. Most of all, the end result is something tangible, interesting to individuals, and a product of a lot of data that the engineers already had laying around.
Then that code and how it was created circulates to other orgs (hopefully through open source), then it's picked up by researchers and grad students who start to apply it to more important research. Maybe also privately funded or state-sponsored aid types read about how it was done and they apply those principles to the high-minded projects that you want to see.
Blaming society for having "fucked up" priorities is a very college freshman view of the world. There is no way that even the most talented engineers would also have the wherewithal, experience, connections, and local knowledge to produce sustainable projects that would, I don't know what you were imagining, lower poverty or increase literacy rates.
The videos I'm sure are cool, and I realise that it was quite an achievement, but still, our priorities as a Hunan race are pretty much fucked up.