UK to award £1 million for world's biggest problem solution | Hacker News Reader

UK to award £1 million for world's biggest problem solution

bbc.co.uk

21 pointsjwdunne51 comments

Anyone capable of making the "next penicillin" or "a carbon-free plane" is going to do so without the need for a £1m prize. The implementation would make them hundreds of times more.

£1m is 0.00014% of the UK government's annual budget. This sort of "motivation" is nothing more than a ridiculous platitude that enables the government to pretend they're supporting technology and innovation with practically no cost to them. Frankly, it's an insult to anyone remotely entrepreneurial. 100 prizes of £10,000 would very likely do a lot more for industry, encourage people to get behind something imaginative, and perhaps would be enough of a start to someone who could eventually solve one of these problems.

It's the capitalist mindset - capitalism is based upon the idea that money is a universal motivator. The idea that people can be productive for other reasons, such as pride, passion, joy, or compassion, is incompatible and would lead to the idea that systems other than capitalism could be successful on a grand scale.

The point (as I read it) isn't that money is not a good motivator. However, if you are talking about something like the next penicillin, then your potential to monetize dwarfs the million dollar reward. That money would be better spent to incentive things that would not otherwise make the person rich.

This is a publicity stunt sure.

But a lot of people develop amazing things that make a lot of money, without actually benefiting from that money.

For instance, if you work for GSK, and lead a team that discovers the next Penicillin, GSK makes a lot of money. Your pay goes from 100K per year to 200K per year, and you get a big promotion. But you don't get a true share of the reward, because you did not truly share the risk (GSK funded a lot of projects that did not work out).

Similarly, someone working in Academia as an employee might make a brilliant discovery. The organization would get the license money, and they would be able to get a cushy tenured professor job wherever they liked. But they wouldn't get a true share of the reward.

Amazing discoveries are likely to be made by an employee, because large organizations are able to fund high risk/high reward projects. I think it's important, even as a token gesture, to reward them for being lucky enough to get results.

No, prices are not stupid. You didn't think through the whole problem.

The issue of cost and incentive with this kind of revolutionary innovation is real. The problem is simple. When you innovate, you bear alone the fixed cost of development while your competitors can copy and bear only the marginal cost. That's the reason the patent system exists and normally that's fine.

But, for a revolutionary invention, patents might not be feasible. Imagine you find a cure to cancer. Do you really think every governments and public opinion are going to let you be the sole producer for 30 years while people are dying ? Impossible. This creates a disincentive to push money towards a cure for private investor. Now, the idea behind a price is that if you find the cure, the price is going to cover your fixed cost (ideally more) thus investing is competitive again. Technically, as it fosters competition and you will only reimburse the finder, it supposed to generate more research than just spending the price money. Putting money aside for this kind of price was one of the main goal of the Bill and Monica Gates Foundation when it was founded (I think, they went back a bit because people wrongly assume its wasted money).

>Imagine you find a cure to cancer. Do you really think every governments and public opinion are going to let you be the sole producer for 30 years while people are dying ?

Isn't this the way medical patents work currently?

You are right. But the problem that institutions face is that as the sums of money gets smaller, the relative cost of doing due diligence on the idea/team gets significantly larger.

It's almost as if he's looking to be able to claim he's driving innovation in the face of any real growth policy and grab a few cheap headlines in the process.

But that couldn't be it, could it?

Of course they wouldn't do something like, certainly not after the rip-roaring success of the TechCity initiative.

In my opinion, the "biggest problem of our time" is oversized government and excessive lobbying of politicians to serve corporate interests rather than the needs of the people. Unfortunately the powers that be are not going to reward that which undermines their own reason for existing...

Or maybe oversized corporations and excessive lobbying of politicians to serve their interests. ..depending on your biases.

Surely if you look at the root causes, the biggest issue is the failings of capitalism in that it creates a artificial scarcity on a grand scale in order to make people in other countries desperate enough to make things for us for pittance?

That! sir, is insightful.

Let's hope that the modern day Harrison isn't forced to personally petition HM The Queen to force Parliament to actually pay out who then has to personally threaten to appear in parliament only to have Harrison die three years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison#Harrison.27s_Fir...

I see the Harrison clock as a brilliant vindication of X-prize development, but I do not think we will solve the big problems through X-Prizes. What we will do is get the equivalent of bi-metallic strips and other engineering enhancements. My totally unscientific view is X-prizes allow unusual approaches to actually leave drawing board and get tried out - I suspect in a manner similar to war.

PS - yes he was "cheated" for decades out of a prize he had won. And given current Prince Charles' public letter campaigns on architecture and farming, I seriously doubt that parliament would be moved by that threat anymore !

It took me a little while to even get what this is. I understand the public votes on "the biggest problem" and then whoever "solves it" (or, I assume, makes significant progress on it) receives £1 million.

The best case is a carefully constructed short list for voting and the whole thing being essentially an orchestrated PR stunt with a winner (probably a known strong candidate even at this announcement stage). The worst case is this quietly fading out until no-one remembers it and there aren't even many real records of it ever having been a thing.

Or perhaps I've got "best" and "worst" the wrong way around there.

We already know what the biggest problem is. Finding a non-polluting energy source.

...and a million pounds isn't going to solve it.

I somewhat disagree. It will disrupt a single complex that's been perpetuated, and yes, it will create and allow for a lot of innovation - however producing product and developing resources into buildings, and other systems, cause tons of pollution and non-renewable destruction of our lands. It will actually be bad IMHO in certain circumstances if non-polluting energy comes too soon to us.

If I follow correctly, you believe that non-polluting energy would loosen constraints on production and the acceleration of growth this would cause would have a net negative environmental effect because the increase in non-energy-creation-related pollution would more than counter balance the savings from non-polluting energy. Is that an accurate summary?

Assuming rules / laws / regulations weren't put in place to counter this, yes. We all know how fast government is to act ... which is why there should be concern.

Bollocks to that. You would prefer we remain hamstrung with expensive finite dire polluting energy sources so we can keep the vast majority of humanity stuck in poverty? A pox on your thought processes.

The biggest problem is people, not technical. Too many of them, and they are too irrational, or uneducated or held captive economically by the current events. Unfortunate this problem is unsolvable in conventional moral and ethical terms, but a working solution would be worth trillions to the remaining rent collecting population.

Nuclear?

Yep, its another vapor-policy.

I had to double check if today was April 1st. I try to avoid "middlebrow dismissal" comments but come on, do they really think £1 million is going to motivate anyone in solving the world's biggest problem? This is borderline insulting.

The X Prize was only for $10m dollars:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Prize_Foundation

This is wrong on so many levels. Among other things:

- The solution isn't hard, it is the implementation of the solution that is hard. Hey, we have electric cars. But getting people to use them requires having electric cars succeed on the open market (which Tesla and others will eventually do, I think). Overpopulation is the problem; educating people to a higher level results in more well-off people having fewer kids. And so on.

The solution is easy! How the hell do we actually get there, as messy, lazy, corrupt humans? That is what the prize should be for.

I agree, apart from the over-population thing which is best explained by Hans Rosling - http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_g...

If we're talking about engineering problems, it isn't enough money.

By modern standards, the R&D problem that John Harrison tackled was low-hanging fruit. Our modern R&D infrastructure, while far from perfect, would not have left such a (relatively) easy and important problem unsolved for so long. These days, lone geniuses of Harrison's calibre have to content themselves with more minor problems like designing the bagless vacuum cleaner.

If you really want good things to happen, you need larger teams and larger prizes. At least £10 million. Think "X-prize".

I'd like to be wrong about this. Can anyone show me that I've missed something important?

The obvious choice is creating Ai, that would solve all solvable problems thereafter.

Solve all problems for x, where we hope x is the comfort and continued meaningful existence of humanity and not, say, the maximisation of paperclips.

link for those who didn't get the reference (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer)

"The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."

—Eliezer Yudkowsky

Like Deep Thought designing a massively powerful computer to find the question to the answer '42'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Thought_%28The_Hitchhiker%...

We should get the NIs we already have running on more stable hardware. A mind is a terrible thing to make out of rotting meat.

I tried doing that with the last planet I was on, but it just ended up solving for grey-goo....

This seems like something of a PR stunt, I would much prefer a serious re-investment in science and acknowledgement that the UK economy could be driven by a knowledge economy. Good recap here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/occams-corner/2013/mar/11/...

Compare that to the £500m the UK councils have spent on mass-surevilance with CCTVs, to understand the UK government's priorities.

Although I appreciate this motivational gesture from the Prime Minister, I have reservations as to how much this would be effective. Better would be to foster an environment where people are motivated by inspiration to find solutions to tough problems. Believe it or not, the U.S. is a good example of how to do it.

That sounds like a lot, but it's really nothing.

A million pounds would go far toward advocating Edward Snowden to win the Nobel peace prize?

What bugs the hell out of me is that we know how to solve the biggest problems of the world today. We just don't want to do it. Lets hit three:

1. CO2 emissions.

2. Water scarcity

3. Trade imbalances

(2) Is an agricultural problem. Drip-feed everywhere. (1) has a agricultural solution - stop using livestock in agriculture. (3) Well, this has lots of issues, but start with the easiest. End completely the use of agricultural subsidies in the developed world.

Three things, all pretty much the same solution, all uncosted and not backed up with references, which can be done with no technological inventions, and will drop the big issues of the day by a ridiculous amount.

You could probably also help (2) by stop using livestock in agriculture, since rainforest and jungle are often cleared for animal grazing land, which then lead to flash flooding and drought as the soil can no longer hold the water.

Which is a shame, as from my non-agricultural engineering background, getting people to stop eating meat and livestock-related produce seems like the hardest one to solve, both culturally and nutritionally.

Could we not harness the CO2 emissions and use them to create extremely dense forests (or other plants that need CO2 to grow), then pump the oxygen created by the plants and use it to feed the animals?

I don't think that CO2 is the limiting reactant in plant growth. If I remember my bio/chem right, plants use sunlight to produce sugars using the carbon from CO2. The sugars act as an energy store, and the energy can later be reclaimed by doing the inverse reaction, which involves taking O2 and producing CO2. Providing more CO2 would increase the theoretical capacity for them to store energy, however CO2 is abundant and it would not help with the limiting reactant, sunlight.

Stop using livestock in agriculture? What do you mean?

CO2 emissions for producing enough food to feed someone on a meat-based diet are significantly greater than on a vegetarian diet.

I may be wrong but I think the vegetarian diet needs to be close to vegan (or at least dairy free) to have a major impact though as cattle are a significant part of the issue.

Livestock produce methane which is a greenhouse gas and contributes significantly to global warming.

Tyrannosaurs is basically right - get rid of cattle sheep and pigs (plus assoc others) from our food chain. India has hundreds of millions of people living like this today so it's a viable cultural and agricultural option

It's also more or less guaranteed to slash co2 to the bone, fix enourmous run-on problems and help trade

And frankly will never happen until after we live on mars on a vegan diet and so make it cool and desirable

Basically mandatory vegetarianism?

You will be forced to live on a low cost healthy diet that will extend your lifespan by an average of ten years while at the same time saving the planet from ecological meltdown and the consequent loss of millions of lives.

The Nanny State. It's crap isn't it :-)

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I've been a vegetarian and absolutely hated every minute of it. I love eating meat too much and its substitutes aren't comparable! If I had to cut dairy out too (no butter?!) I'd just stop enjoying food.

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