Is making an AJAXified tool or toy that will likely be used by less than 1% of the people in the richest country in the world the absolute best use of your time and talents right now? Honestly?

This is a good question. Here are some thoughts about the answer in a general sense:

Why do people make ajax websites like that? To get money, mostly. (It's also fun because programming is fun.) How do you get rich making a website? You make something that people want. This is capitalism at its finest. It's selfless. It's practically altruistic. You don't think about your idea of what makes the world a good place, you just make what other people want, and you trade it to them at a price they are happy with (which can be as cheap as just some ads on the side). Another way to put it is that you are cooperating with most of society. This is much better than nothing, it's a good thing. There might be something better, but we can think of it as starting point.

It's better than that, actually. There is an idea that the richest country doesn't need more help, doesn't need further luxury. This is a misconception. We are the richest country because we have the most productive people. If you give the most productive people more of what they want, you get the best return on investment in terms of worldwide increase in productivity. More precisely, if someone creates a million dollars of wealth per year, then if you can make him happier, make his life more convenient, etc, and increase his productivity by 1%, that's 10k per year. If you help someone who only makes a thousand dollars of stuff per year, if you can double his productivity that's only 1k per year. So targeting a rich country for who to help is not fundamentally a bad thing. And the richer we are, the easier and less costly it is for us to help others, and also the better science, medicine, etc we have to help with, so it really does improve the whole world to improve the USA.

So, making what other people want (even if they are rich), like fancy web 2.0 websites, is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But is it ideal? Not necessarily. Sure "most people" in aggregate are productive, and make the world better over time. But if you are exceptional, you can have a larger effect by working on your own idea about how the world should be. This is harder because if you don't flow with the mainstream you have less people to cooperate with. And it's riskier because new ideas are often mistakes. So I wouldn't push people towards attitudes like this. Most people are too arrogant already and think they understand more than they do.

And also if someone doesn't realize they should be doing something better, it's very possible it's because they aren't that exceptional after all. Perhaps much better than average, but not inspired and brilliant -- and courageous and bold -- enough to see important problems they should be facing and to face them.

You mention medicine. It's quite possible more people should be working on medicine; I think that is the case. But I wouldn't guess programming is where they should come from! I'm sure there are individuals who would be well suited to switch. But there are plenty of bad fields that cater to bad things people want, but shouldn't want; let's loot those for talent ;p. Programming is a field that's very important and really could use some better people.

Even for narrowly focussed programmers there are big important problems one can work on. In a lot of ways the field is a total mess. The popular languages have huge flaws (including even Ruby and common lisp, not that they are very popular). Maybe Arc will solve this, we'll see. Ajax and current browsers could be vastly improved (no, I don't know the answer). And if they were, all the average programmers would be saved a ton of pain b/c they'd work on a better designed platform. Or saving all the java programmers by giving them better ways to solve their 'enterprise' problems -- and making it straightforward enough they can do it -- would have a huge impact. The man hours wasted because no super smart person has gone and fixed these things yet is ... hard to estimate ... 500k programmers * 400 hrs a year? Probably more than that :( It is very, very hard to fix these things. There is a lot of momentum behind the way things are done now. And a lot of thought and evolution went into them. I don't mean to put down all the people who haven't vastly improved the status quo. I'm just saying there are ways one can make a very large impact without doing medicine. And there are lots of more medium sized, approachable programming problems to be solved that would have a much larger impact than a new calendar with slightly better ajax, so maybe we should encourage people to look for those.

Hope that was interesting and helpful.

PS I have an idea for saving the world (nothing to do with the above, or with medicine, actually) that you might be interested in, but I don't want to post about it in public. My email is curi@curi.us Email me or post your email and I'll tell you.