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A post that Ido Shacham, a good friend of mine, recently posted on his blog (in Hebrew… Sorry!) opened a discussion about the place technology should have in our lives. Technology, he argues, allows us to accomplish the super-natural – we can send a message in the speed of light, and we can look for a phrase in millions of text pages – but it is mainly used for communication and entertainment.

Technology should improve our lives and the environment, even though technology is mainly developed by businesses for economical reasons. Are hi-tech companies improving our lives beyond paying their employees fine salaries?  Should businesses save the world?!

I tend to agree with Ido. It would have been hard for me to work in an organization whose sole purpose is making money. I am proud to be working in a company which makes money while positively changing the lives of many. Our technology – video conferencing – doesn’t just allow for better collaboration between colleagues. It makes the world greener, it helps the deaf and hard of hearing communicate, and it can narrow financial gaps whilst fighting poverty.

Despite all the good that comes of technology, Ido remains skeptical. He claims that these are just “side-effects” of the technology which are not very substantial, and the bottom line is that Video Conferencing is a business/financial product. After all, people in the “real world” can still meet, and there are alternative means of communication when meeting face to face is not possible. Even the “greenness” of the technology doesn’t impress him, as bandwidth consumption has an environmental impact as well (and we all know video conferencing takes lots of bandwidth…).

“Capitalism” in MoMA. (CC)

Should Businesses Save The World?

One thing I can’t argue with is that RADVISION is a business. Therefore, it develops technologies and products in order to gain revenue and become profitable. That may sound like “pure” capitalism, but if I may borrow from Bill Gates, I believe capitalism can become creative.

Technologies developed by companies can solve the key problems, and they have been doing so successfully over the past few decades. Gates writes:

The genius of capitalism lies in its ability to make self-interest serve the wider interest. The potential of a big financial return for innovation unleashes a broad set of talented people in pursuit of many different discoveries. This system driven by self-interest is responsible for the great innovations that have improved the lives of billions.

The problem is that businesses develop technologies to meet demand, and if there’s no demand, there will be no technological development. ALS, for instance, has no cure, and there is hardly any research going on, as “only” 30,000 Americans are diagnosed with the disease which is not enough demand to get a big pharmaceutical company involved.

Capitalism harnesses self-interest on behalf of those who can pay. Governments and philanthropists are taking care of those who can’t. But we all know that the resources are much smaller than necessary.

Bill Gates on Creative Capitalism, Davos, November 2008.

Creative Capitalism to the Rescue

Gates suggests solving this with “Creative Capitalism“, in which governments, businesses and non-profit organizations “help” market forces so that people will make a profit and/or gain recognition doing work that helps with the world’s problems.

Many claim that improving the world is the job of governments, not corporations. As Milton Friedman argued, the social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits. However, by looking around us, one can see that governments fail. And if we leave it to them, we may continue to wait for them to come up with solutions for many years to come.

If Gates’ Microsoft has developed a text-free interface which enables illiterate people to use a PC, I am not really interested in the business case behind it. In the same way, if video conferencing can connect the deaf to the hearing world I can be proud of this technology. Like many technologies, we CAN go on living without video conferencing. But I am confident the world will be a better place when it is massively deployed.

It’s a very noble dream to research and develop technologies and products solely for the benefit of human kind. Nevertheless, you can count these altruist ventures in the palm of your hand, and they are often times funded by people with a self serving interest. ALS research, for instance, has been greatly increased since Dov Lautman, one of the most successful business men in Israel and a Lifetime Achievement Prize winner, who is also diagnosed with ALS, joined IsrA.L.S, an Israeli organization researching the disease – there are 15 researchers in Israel that working on a cure, funded by the organization.

As much as I would like to one day work in such a place, I believe that the world can greatly benefit from capitalism, whether it is “creative” or not. This is true even though having all the money in the world can’t save us if the planet were to self-destruct from manmade or natural disaster. Side-effects or not, if technologies coming out of enterprises will one day save us, I am all for capitalism.

PS – Regarding the amount of carbon dioxide emitted when you search Google (or consume any kind of bandwidth for that matter), not to add to the general confusion regarding this, I tend to agree with Om Malik that “if Google is a polluter, at least it’s doing something about it” :

“It’s not about Google, it’s about us… We waste a lot of energy… We are blissfully ignorant of the waste we create”.