Maybe this thread could be a lifting off point for a startup - in which case I'd consider it a success :)
* Trustworthiness of content (text and soon photo and video) is and will be a fundamental problem. This is the basic attack vector for national and global politics in the last few years. Anyone with a good solution would help the world immeasurably and have their pick of customers.
* fall out from monetary policy in the us and Europe: take your pick, but for example - home prices in urban areas; figuring out how to house families for 1/2 or 1/3 current prices in the United States would have a lasting impact on stability and wealth creation.
* the continued effectiveness of state propaganda; related to my first suggestion above.
* obesity in the us and soon Western Europe.
* data security - fixing large scale data breaches.
* what I call long range to short range : problems too big for people to think about or accept abound, like climate change. Finding one and figuring out how to tie to short term incentives creating a positive feedback loop would be a real game changer. Oil does this all the time but usually not with good long term consequences - cf fracking turns North Dakota into a boom zone — creativity around good not pernicious cycles would be a boon for the world.
I don't buy this. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. are all beholden to a constant growth model - just like every other traded company that's responsible to their own board.
Even in ecommerce (which is primarily my background) the players that "complain" about bots actually love the hell out of them because they eat up risk... I'm thinking about companies like Ticketmaster, Supreme, Nike, etc. They implement anti-bot measures "up to a point", which typically is a breakable CAPTCHA and validating purchase quantities to shipping addresses/payment methods (ex: only allow 4 of this hot item to be purchased with this CC number/shipping addr).
These big players are where the bulk of the misinformation campaigns are happening and they've been effectively sitting on their hands because if they started booting off bad actors (bots, propagandaists, people sharing factually false information) it would hurt their new account sign-up/content creation/interaction numbers, which will eventually hurt the stock price.
Here's why I say all of this... As someone who has done large-scale bot work I feel like there's a huge disconnect with things like Facebook account sign-up where it's effectively always open for someone with the basic capability to bypass a CAPTCHA. Given their resources, I absolutely believe they could easily have a higher barrier of entry when it comes to keeping people with my skillset out - they're just not interested in blocking automated sign-ups and the like.
I'm convinced that the big "FAANG", or "GAFA", or whatever players can't really solve this problem because it'd probably hurt their business to cannibalize their own numbers... even if it's the right thing to do. Leadership would get kicked from boards and stuff. Ergo, the problem keeps on truckin' =(
In terms of investment, it's also clear that they are putting a lot more resources in both engineering and content reviewer heads towards these problems every year.
Agree with the fact that companies "complaining" about bots, actually benefit from them. And even use them. I was looking at huge proxy servers providers and they have those same companies in their client list too.
I think this is over. Our ability to create has an inherent inverse correlation with the ability to validate authenticity. IMO, the best solution is to accept that nothing can be trusted and operate as though "facts" are in a quantum state. Maybe a thing is true, maybe not, what would be sensible to do in both circumstances?
> obesity
Such a good one. I don't believe humanity is going to work together for anything but if we could all look good, that'd be something. Enjoy the lives we have while we have them. At least there'd be less bickering.
A couple I'd like to add: - Absolutely no form of regulation on creating sentient beings (ie spawning fuck trophies). Don't think there should be anything Orwelian, but some form of incentive needs to stop bad parenting from existing. Pretty much all problems can be improved with overall better parenting.
- Becoming more open to sex and touch. The two are totally separate things, but both approached horribly. Touch is good for people and mammals in general. It's like food/water levels of healthy, but for your brain. Similarly, sex is important, and incredibly poorly taught. "Hey high-schoolers, we'll just look the other way and you can go on ahead and fuck yourselves up emotionally, K?" There's a goldmine of human happiness just beyond this threshold of getting over the whole puritan thing. Working on communication and whatnot. Saying something like "air, water, food, shelter, touch, purpose, affection" when talking about needs.
-Mutual self destruction with super powers. Right now they hold all the cards. It should feel like we both have guns to each-others heads.
SOS HN: Set up live early warning system for spoofed/deep fake news feeds
Fully validated flat earth selfie videos aren’t really any less bad than ones of questionable provenance.
That's kind of dried up now. The latest iterations of smartphones are just minor progressions on previous models. Supposed new frontiers (AR/VR, self driving cars) have largely disappointed. The problems (the real problems) we face today like climate change, growing income inequality, stagnating public transit, aren't really solvable by most of us in tech. In fact, in retrospect I wonder how many problems we were really solving anyway (is Uber just a giant VC investment bubble? Will we look back on it as a distraction from improving public transit?)
...so yeah, I dunno. Feels like we're in a fallow year or few. It's not that problems aren't solvable, it's that they will take wide scale activism and a great deal of human work. A new API or tool isn't going to cut it.
I was thinking recently about the nature of fallow periods in tech and wondering if they're actually tied up with emotional cycling in the general public. It's impossible for millions of people to remain excited forever. Instead, we get bubble years where new innovations are coming out fast and furious, sentiment is rising, people are happy and excited, prosperity will go on forever; hype years, where the public unconsciously knows the innovations being hyped aren't useful but companies still have money to burn; and then we get bust years where everyone gets disillusioned, there are predictions that everything useful has already been invented, much teeth-gnashing about the decline of innovation, and an increased focus on politics, social ills, and gaming or other distractions (none of which ever get solved or go away, we just forget about them during bubble years).
Thinking about tech cycles in my own lifetime, we had bubble (1981-1987, driven by the PC & GUI), hype (1987-1991, driven by AI, 3D graphics, CD-ROMs, speech recognition), bust (1991-1995), bubble (1995-1998, Internet), hype (1998-2001, dot-coms), bust (2001-2004), bubble (2004-2007, Web 2.0), hype (2007-2008, when everybody and their mother had a social network), bust (2009-2010), bubble (2011-2014, mobile), hype (2014-2015: AR/VR, AI, smartwatches, self-driving cars, Theranos, Juicero), bust (2016-present). Bust cycles seem to last 3-4 years, so we're probably nearing the end of this one, but it's still unclear what round of innovations will kick off the next bubble.
I've thought about this before and honestly I can't come up with many things. Telemedicine in terms of speaking to a doctor over video is already very possible over the connections we have today. Bringing that to a wider audience (say, third world countries) is an interesting possibility, but it also requires bringing 5G to third world countries, so I don't think that's going to happen too quickly.
Aside from that, what does 5G really bring us? The same stuff, only faster. I mean, good, sure. But it's not that inspiring.
https://www.cnet.com/news/5g-could-make-self-driving-cars-sm...
There's also the possibility of much faster speeds even in areas without 5g, since the competition will make 3g speeds a really bad look.
They are great, but some use cases quickly hit their limits
The question is this: if the bandwidth of the pipe is expanded to infinity, does the intelligence inhered in the personal owned device remain, or does it wither away... into a rented, datamined, and preternaturally infrastructurally fragile "the cloud"?
Thus far the evidence seems to suggest that "another wave of smartphone and IoT innovation" will fully and finally turn personal devices into dumb terminals administered according to the whim of the Great IBM in the Sky.
The obvious problem is that it's not a glamorous or technically impressive thing to be working on, and isn't going to be remotely interesting to the people who'd be working on it because, well, they already know how to use their smartphones.
How do you take a bag of mixed garbage and perform a fractional distillation of it, pulling out components and recycling and reusing them efficiently, until you are left with a tiny residue, ideally nothing, of true waste? How do you do this in a cost effective manner without relying on absurdly cheap labor and lax health, safety and environmental protection regulations?
And it's like, purely a technical business. If you have a company that can "buy" garbage for $X and sell your outputs for $Y > $X (+costs), you don't need to deal with politics and lobbying and building buzz.
For some components of "garbage", simple mechanical separation may be sufficient, and there may already be buyers happy to buy your product if you can reach a sufficient level of purity and offer it at a sufficiently low cost.
Simply separating out those components of garbage efficiently enough is one huge unsolved problem, and once you have solved that, you can get to work on the fun part, which is how to further refine every unwanted component until you have broken it down or built it up into something someone wants.
Similarly, I want to work remotely but can't because of company culture. I am willing to negotiate but they are not. Even if I could work remotely, other countries won't let me stay for more than a month or without me arbitrarily flying out and then flying back in.
These are all problems that I'm having in my life right now, and they aren't really tech problems compared to people ones. Influential people need to be the ones to solve these problems, but none of them have taken action.
I hope this can be fixed somehow. In the 2010s, I went from not being able to text my international friends on my phone to it being trivial and near-zero in price (thanks Whatsapp!).
I hope something big changes in 2020.
is not an answer to "I want to travel" or "I happen to be born in the 'wrong' country and now I'm not allowed to travel"
Point is, cities could be building a lot more housing, but typically can't because of zoning regulations and NIMBY activism. It's a shame.
The true solution to the housing problem is to remove the laws that are allowing supply constraint in "liveable" areas like NY, CA, MA, etc.
The local government there in charge of housing policy prevents people from adding more liveable legal units to their land. So for example if you wanted to remodel your land to have 2 houses on it instead of one, or to be 4 floors tall with apartments, or to have only a very small energy efficent house on it, the local government will tell you "haha sorry no."
This is a really big problem because land is in finite supply and as a result if you have a very dense area of office buildings with 20,000 workers and only 1,000 houses are in a commutable distance, then you have 19,000+ workers who are either going to be renting illegally, sleeping in their car, commuting 50 miles, or paying through the nose for a house.
I much prefer it out here.
Affordable container ship that is electric.
A personal finance software that solves upper-middle class issues (eg. primary income, side business, rentals, etc.).
A product/service that makes CROs obsolete in drug development (CROs = 25% of cost of drugs; admin overhead)
Idk, those are some that immediately come to my mind.
Like a giant kit of Lego, maybe?
Also, we need to standardize GDPR and cookie consent forms, so i can use a blocker for them , they are seriously messing my productivity
Maybe this exists somewhere??? But if someone can make an app to help me keep track of my food intake in an organized, managed (only one big mac when I search big mac and maybe options to add/remove toppings), fashion I would be slightly less insane counting my protein intake.
Yes, this is a difficult task with how much food is out there and thus it has great value if someone does it extremely well.
If you have any other ideas/requests I'd love to hear them. I can be reached at "michal at bite.ai"
It is hard to maintain the habit of typing everything in however, over time.
A while ago one of their career advice blog posts gained traction and it read absolutely as advice for someone who doesn't have to worry about money at all. One of the pieces of advice was something like "don't make long term plans" and there was no advice at all about compensation.
E:
Found the blog post: https://80000hours.org/2019/04/career-advice-i-wish-id-been-...
It includes advice such as "Don’t focus too much on long-term plans" and "Crowdsource your career decisions".
That assumption is probably the most toxic element contributing to the demise of intelligent public discourse and disagreement in the last decade.
I see no problem in refusing to argue with someone who is ranting against established science and refuses to look at the evidence or to reproduce the scientific results themselves.
I.e. climate denialism is usually an expression of anti-establishmentarianism married with a fear of downward mobility.
And, in fact, someone who genuinely considers that all viewpoints have equivalent value should be more willing to consider different viewpoints, not less.
Some time ago I talked to a software developer who was both impressed by non-profit efforts by NGOs to combat Ebola in Sierra Leone and depressed at the same time because he thought that as a software developer (and not a medical professional, for instance) he couldn't contribute anything to such efforts.
I told him that a huge part of that specific effort in Sierra Leone was a piece of EMR software that allowed physicians and nurses to efficiently capture and retrieve patient data without being able to depend on a reliable local network infrastructure.
I'm certain similar opportunities exist with climate change, too.
Fake news and media credibility. In the 21st centurty it's become hard to trust content, especially viral content shared on social media like WhatsApp. Hopefully we make progress on this front.
Sustainable funding models for the fourth estate in developing nations. The lack of sustainable funding leads to slashing of investigative journalism in developing countries which makes corruption more rampant. Solving this issue will help unearth fraud and keep the government in check.
Climate Change discourse and discourse for the masses. It's difficult to convey facts to the masses today in a reliable manner.
There's a lot of work on VTOL electric aircraft and hybrid aircraft. There's a lot of capturing low-hanging fruit by trying to electrify existing airframes. On the higher end, there's a lot of work on enabling lithium-air or lithium-sulfur or solid state lithium or metal electrode lithium ion batteries. However, there's not a lot of work on combining extremely high efficiency airframes (i.e. glider-like) with extremely high performance batteries (and high battery mass fraction, i.e. 60%, not 25%). Often one or the other is the focus, but a combination is essential to enable decent range (1000km) with existing batteries and long-haul range (at 4000-10,000km) with advanced chemistries (lithium air).
Another issue is low capital cost hydrogen production. There has been a lot of work on reducing the cost-per-watt of solar and wind power and fuel cells, but progress on cost-per-watt on hydrogen production (i.e. electrolysis) has been lacking. That means it's not financially viable to produce hydrogen from excess intermittent renewable energy, in spite of the clear potential (if the cost-per-watt of your electrolysis equipment is much higher than the cost-per-watt of wind or solar, you need to run near constantly to make your capital investment make sense... hydrogen doesn't work as a flexible demand source if the capital cost is so high the plant has to run all the time).
Microbiome modification to reduce methane emissions from ruminants (cows and sheep and goats).
Liquid hydrogen powered container ships or long-haul aircraft (and a method of dealing with the water emissions so as not to release water vapor at high altitudes).
High efficiency deep cryogenic liquefaction of hydrogen.
Battery-electric long haul locomotives (perhaps with intermittent charging via catenary).
Extremely cheap Level 1 or 2 electric charging outlets. Literally an outdoor outlet with a relay controlled by an app that can be deployed at just ~$30 extra beyond a regular outdoor outlet. Could enable mass deployment of electric car infrastructure at very little cost (possibly even self-funding due to a small fee).
Carbonfree (or carbon negative) steel, aluminum, and cement production.
Fake chips have been a problem too, polluting the supply space. All the more reason to protect and verify IP. There's new tech for that. Maybe the next big thing. Hardware verified. Authenticity.
I'm a firm believer in real-time payment systems and its ability to quickly address issues vital issues like the above, and related issues like climate change. Markets operate in real-time, and the current banking infrastructure - which creates an artificial bottleneck via ACH delays - is an old and dying dinosaur. I imagine a world of daily paychecks is just a few years in the future.
You could do something like meshing with HAM or other radios (or combine a lot of messing networks together depending on the hop distance). We can already communicate globally with HAM.
The question to me is how do we advance this more for higher reliability, better speeds, and create tools that everyone can use (essentially a zero, or low, knowledge system, like a cellphone). The major factor I see is reliability, so that it is difficult for an oppressive regime to shut it down (would also serve as an extremely reliable method when other systems fail during things like natural disasters. You can probably see more advantages to this backbone network). So we could have an open alternative to the segmenting internet that is currently happening. I honestly believe global communication is one of the fundamental necessities to achieving a more peaceful world.
- climate change.
- vigorous enforcement of international law guaranteeing human rights for refugees.
- closure of industrial-grade CO2 emission sites like coal power plants.
Remove money from politics and many of those issues will resolve themselves.
Make it so politicians may never become lobbyists, and in fact make it so lobbyists can't give money to campaigns, politicians, or PACS and Super PACS. Make it super hard to raise money except via grass roots and small donors.
This may cause some career politicians to throw in the towel and retire and make way for fresh ideas.
Replacing these career politicians opens the way for fresh ideas on Climate change, voters rights, etc... I see nothing so wrong as our corrupt political apparatus. It's not just us though, it's all politics everywhere, but it's definitely blatant in America.
This is basically the only problem in the world that matters.
There is a national debate on the outcome of the Adani coal mine which in oversimplified terms is willing to risk X0,000 tourism industry jobs to save X00 resources jobs.
"Australians are good at two things, digging things up out of the ground and selling property to each other"
"16M Americans will vote on hackable paperless machines" https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614148/16-million-america...
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20759306
NB: Ben Adida is one person who has been thinking about and working on this problem for years https://ben.adida.net/
Controlling this adaptivity is usually done in an ad hoc fashion by writing code surrounding the adaptive component, usually a ml model
This yields many problems ranging from "artificial stupidity" to problems with safety and degraded power of users.
By integrating control into adaptive systems, we might get the best of both worlds: tell the program what (not) to do where you know this upfront and let it figure out how to act by itself elsewhere
I just installed Windows 10 for the first time, and the number of things I had to turn off just to get to a sub-totalitarian level of monitoring my activities was ridiculous. The kicker was that Windows Home edition doesn't have disk encryption, so anyone who steals my laptop can help themselves to my private information too.
This probably isn't solvable by technology in and of itself, but consumer education and consumer action against tech companies might make a dent.
Economies need to switch to steady state instead of growth. We need to reduce the total output.
Plastics - the oceans are filling up with them. Stuff is not getting recycled despite people putting things in blue bins. Some research in material science to make something that breaks down faster would be huge
Some reference/data to back up your claim would be nice.
Overpopulation
Climate change
War
U.S. congress transferring its powers to the executive branch.
Global dependence on cheap oil
Global food unsecurity
Dwindling access to drinkable water and breathable air, or more broadly: pollution
Every thing in computing is modular and multiple levels of modules and has coupling and dependencies between modules.
It's the hottest and hardest problem in real world computing... it's nicely representable in a graph theoretic framework.... but graph theorists aren't looking at it.
If you look at real code, often the main reason why this routine was added to this file... was that the programmer worked in this file last.
Is that a Good Reason? No it's a bloody awful reason.
An automated tool should be able to look at the network of declarations, definitions and references and work out which module each thing should be in.
It's a pretty great datastructure for writing code, you get automatic refactor everywhere.
If you're interested to take a look ping me, would love fresh eyes
Thinking of the latter instead of the former often results in "playing house" ideas that sound like startup ideas but aren't actually. At least this is what happens to me when I follow the thought process you are laying out.
That would imply that girls overwhelmingly don't do the same, which is not the case.
Maybe it's online dating
https://www.icoderzsolutions.com/blog/facebook-online-dating...
I mean it sounds like a black mirror episode but, there could come a day where nobody leaves the house and everything is done in a VR world, including relationships and sex. Of course that might be healthier than what's going on now, at least there's some actual socializing, not sure if it's a healthy alternative to the real thing.
My point though is it seems a lot of 'incel' behavior is driven by reddit/4chan (the seedier side of reddit, there are some good parts), so I think maybe 4chan/reddit culture plays some role. Probably also group think as there are groups devoted to incels and giving voice to their anger that no women want them.
The graph of OP suggests so
* The housing crisis.
* Our cities and how they relate to the environment.
* The education system in the US (I'm quite stumped by this one).
Also stock markets getting fully automated to remain open 24x7.
Being able to drop into a call with somebody without them having to pick up.
Having an indicator that shows if people are afk or not.
- loss of topsoil in agricultural areas
- loss of biodiversity
- reducing dependence on cars in the US/Canada
- bringing down cost of infrastructure
- anxiety epidemic
- loneliness epidemic
* more poetry overall!
Sam Harris’s has a scary podcast recently with the author of the book by that name. Preventing the superbug future would be world changing