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You're off the deep end man. Sure, things could be immeasurably better if you could get everyone to swim in the same direction to solve the big problems. That's not how things work though, we're all in the same boat you are, trying to do the best we can in an imperfect world. This is not a failure of the profession, it's a universal human failing, maybe even more universal than that.

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I only seem off the deep end because the industry has brainwashed itself. The computer no longer exclusively serves humans. Rather, humans now look to the computer to know what to do. Talk about "imperfect worlds" is the same thing irresponsible scientists say about "imperfect information". People think spreading harmful theories is fine because they have "imperfect information". It is the same with software. People have lost touch with the possibility of doing nothing instead of engaging in harmful action. If the economy was in a downturn would you see that as an excuse to turn to the tobacco business? The basic misconception here is that the production of more software overrides problems such as increasingly irreversible dependency on complex systems. I keep hearing the same thing I heard when I was in academia: admissions that people were creating problems along with endless excuses and expressions of career-motivated cowardice. Anyone who criticises the bank bailouts as moral hazard and who is also working to build complex systems today is a hypocrite. Because it is the same heroin addict thinking: that we can fix an addiction by increasing the dosage.

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