Better than adtech, anyway. Or nukes. Lots of things, really. (I would have said weapons, last year.)
The only really defensible tech activity these days is things to help get off carbon-emitting processes. Making factories to make electrolysers. Making wind turbines better. Adapting airliners to carry liquid hydrogen in underwing nacelles. Making robots to put up solar fences on farms and pastures. Banking energy for nighttime without lithium. Making ammonia on tropical solar farms for export to high latitudes.
It's even money whether we can get it done before civilization collapses. I guess we will need plenty of liquidity...
Other problems are also worthwhile to solve. I agree that zero-sum HFT and negative-sum adtech and arms races are not the most prominent ones.
10% of all deaths each year are due to air pollution. There's pretty much no place on earth where unfiltered rainwater is still safe to drink. Ocean acidification is accelerating and killing off the organisms that are both the biggest producers of oxygen and the biggest sequesterers of carbon.
Rainwater harvesting risks seem to be primarily due to birds pooping on your roof and other fecal contamination, and they can be adequately mitigated by boiling or chemical sterilization: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-019-0030-5.
Climate change very likely would collapse your civilization, given enough time, but that isn't what is happening now.
Alphabet's yearly revenue is US$258 billion, some of which is earned from things like Google Play, Google Cloud, and Google Workspace, and some of which has been spent on things like Makani, Verily Life Sciences, DeepMind, and Google Fiber. Meta's revenue is US$118 billion.
https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/internet-services-t... says, "Google earned nearly 81% of its total revenues in 2021 from advertisements," and it's talking about that US$258B number, not some smaller number that excludes other Alphabet companies.
We can maybe estimate the whole adtech spend, generously, at US$400 billion per year [edited: was US$300 billion]: most of Alphabet, all of Meta, plus a handful of smaller fish. (I say this is "generous" because it's counting all the effort that goes into running Google Search, YouTube, Instagram, and Android development as "adtech", because it's monetized through ads, even though most of the people working on those projects are not directly concerned with ads; if you omit that, you might size adtech at only US$50 billion.) And maybe US$200 billion per year goes into the renewables transition. I'm not convinced that doubling that to US$400 billion per year would guarantee a win, particularly when the humans are going around bombing each other's power plants, snarling up power plant construction and energy-efficient housing in red tape, and publishing disinformation that "debunks" global warming.
These are of course very rough estimates, but how would you estimate these numbers?
As far as I know, there aren't any invaders the humans are fighting; they're only fighting other humans, plus the occasional rogue elephant.
Invasion is an activity, not an identity. Those so engaged could stop anytime. Many will.
Apparently it has not had that effect in Romania, yet. But they are by report still happy with their Canadian CANDU reactors.
People program computers to exchange messages furiously, to no external effect besides power consumed. Then they go buy yachts. It's all perfectly legal, of course.
As a society, we like to reward people who do things that are useful: feed, house, clothe, warm, transport, educate, protect, medicate, lately amuse people, and get money that may be exchanged for those services, or yachts.
HFT traders provide none of those, nor anything comparable, but get yachts anyway.
Ah, so you lack a basic understanding of how the stock market works, but think you're qualified to make very strong statements about it.
Btw, you need to be careful, because people might still race to be the last (or first) to contribute to a batch.
They'd race to be the first, if tied prices within a batch are resolved in favour of the earlier bird. Otherwise, they would race to be the last, so they have the most information available when deciding on their price (and so that they can change their mind until the last nano-second.)
Granted traders can play other games, but their primary benefit to others is significant
You must be lucky, not everywhere in the sector that’d be remotely close to true unfortunately…
Stock traders forced a lot of advances onto software. Random examples of high-perf stuff from that space include the new garbage collector in the JVM with a minimal pause time and LMAX Disruptor. Multi-threaded GUIs are relatively common in that space as well, to ensure that one hung control or window won't stop anything else.
The prototypical nerd would happily work on building a nuke capable of destroying a continent if that entailed letting him work on “hard problems”.
Missiles don't really need GC or RAII. They have their own special resource clean up.
But I've also seen productionized jupyter notebooks written by just out of school data scientists and 1000 lines long SQL queries that encoded important business logic and weren't version controlled.
This is why I love working in fintech. The engineering is paramount. Customers will not accept slow or buggy software.
I get to solve hard problems, and really build systems from the ground up. My managers understand that it is better to push back a deadline than to ship something that isn't up to standard.