Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

[bkmn]

What is 'positive impact', you ask. Well, I'm eager to hear your ideas but I'm thinking software that tackles the big challenges: energy usage, preventing armed conflicts, reducing poverty, STEM training, improving access to sustainable environments, implementing AI, et cetera.

I would argue Wikipedia continues to be a very important software project (albeit with an emphasis on the database on content than the wiki software itself), and Linux as this specific piece of software serves as a platform for many other applications and services.

What do you see?

[perlgeek]

One thing we see over and over again leading to social injustice is the externalization of costs.

Examples:

* burning fossil fuels externalizes the cost of dealing with climate change

* during the housing market crash of 2007, lots of risks were ultimately externalized to the state

* plastic waste ending up in the ocean means somebody[tm] externalized the cost of not properly disposing of / recycling their waste

... and so on, once you think in these terms, you find that pattern nearly everywhere.

If we had some kind of software solution to track externalized costs, that would be a huge step towards reducing it.

I know, this is very abstract, and I don't even know what a software solution for that would look like, but if somebody comes up with a really good of tracking that, it could have a huge impact on society in the long run.

Try to think of a society where nobody could quietly externalize a cost, and we had an effective way of tracking who externalizes how much, and go after the big offenders in a very data-driven way. There could even be general laws that make certain externalizations illegal, in a much broader way than current regulations do.

[yojo]

I’d love to see that software too, but most of the issues you describe (plastics, greenhouse gasses) had impacts that were non-obvious at the outset. Then they were controversial, then no longer controversial but heavily lobbied.

At the start of the industrial revolution no one knew about global warming. Then the science came out but was lobbied against. Now the science is (mostly) accepted, but we still don’t know concretely how expensive global warming is per ton of CO2.

I think these are scientific, social, and legislative problems. There may be a role for software around the edges, but the core is going to require research, public acceptance of research, and ultimately legislation.

[Nicholas_C]

Many companies are very interested in measuring, managing, and reporting their fossil fuel/carbon usage. A few software companies that provide this off the top of my head:

https://iconicair.io/ https://www.sinaitechnologies.com/ https://www.persefoni.com/

[Rastonbury]

The problem you speak of called "tragedy of the commons", even if you could track costs perfectly there needs to be a mechanism to enforce actors to pay for these costs, this is the hard part. There needs to be political will and global coordination. Look at the state of carbon taxes to see why, it's not so much that companies are not being tracked, but there is no will to levy a high country wide tax while other countries sit idle.

[teknopaul]

It's pretty easy to track the lifetime of some equipment. (not yogurt cartons, but Internet conneted equipment is trivial) You can empower users to make the right decisions, by collecting and publishing lifetime information at the point of sale.

This enables consumers to see that one phone is, for example, 50% more expensive but if its reusable (right to repair comes in here) and has a life time twice that of the comparable device. Consumers can make the right decision. Its really important to log the miles and age of cars as they get sold so that consumers don't buy cars that end up being replaced too early. Second hand markets will reflect that knowledge once its collated and published and market forces do the rest. You ought to regulate to ensure that facts once known are presented to consumers by suppliers. In theory, with perfect knowledge, and consumers that care, the market regulates itself. Anything you do to improve consumer knowledge and encourage responsibility helps.

[teknopaul]

One not very good but simple approach is to tax.

If you tax power consumption you let market forces prioritise low power solutions. US is against that for gas, but it works.

As for plàstics you can do the same, tax plastic users presuming it end ups in the ocean and give tax breaks to those that find ways to prevent it and prove they have done so. Again this uses market forces to let individual enterprises find solutions for their own use of plastics. If consumers are price conscious they will chose greener alternatives due to their own cost.

Taxing corps profits is too easy for them to avoid.

Another advantage of using taxation to regulate green issues is that you get a load of money to spend on clean up operations.

There is no need for Software, you need a majority of voters who care enough to be willing to pay for their environmental damage.

[opportune]

This is a great idea. I think you could call something like this “metering.” I don’t think technology can solve externalization but it could at least measure externalized costs, and let the government/other organizations decide what to do with it.

The problem is the business model. If it’s paid for by businesses due to regulation it’s incentivized to undercount and be shitty. If it’s paid for by government then it’s going to be somewhat winner-take-all and you have to go through their procurement. Either way it could be very innovative and cool but due to the business requirements it’d likely end up very enterprisey and crappy

[shafyy]

I guess projects like Our World in Data and Carbonplan track negative externalities. I mean, other organizations track them, but they make them visible and readily understandable. And I agree, their impact is extremely outsized. For example, there only work a dozen+ people at Our World in Data, but what they do has an outsized impact.

https://ourworldindata.org/

https://carbonplan.org/

[gearhart]

This is what Route2 is building.

It's not a pure-play software solution or an external policing force; it depends on large amounts of work done by analysts and cooperation from the companies themselves.

However, the motivation to drive internal actors in companies to care about tracking externalities has always been the hardest part of this problem, and that's starting to be solved for us by society and the market.

Disclaimer: I'm the CTO and we're hiring

[tau5210]

I am rather skeptical it is a matter of software or any tool for that matter with problems like this.

Similar to Paul Grahma's design paradox: " I call it the design paradox. You might think that you could make your products beautiful just by hiring a great designer to design them. But if you yourself don't have good taste, how are you going to recognize a good designer?" (http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)

As long as people (including the business owners, customers, the rest of society, the rest of the world, etc) don't recognize the cost or don't care sufficiently even if they do recognize it, the best tool still won't have any effect nevermind solve. Usually, that's the critical problem, not the tools. And of course, tools won't fix people either. Software is useful only if used by the right people in the right way, which is usually much later.

[contingencies]

If we had some kind of software solution to track externalized costs, that would be a huge step towards reducing it.

Agreed. Supply chain in general is actually a substantial area requiring innovation (see shipageddon/chipageddon/every sales or purchasing department ever). I generalised some thoughts about an actor-transaction-oriented protocol model with features such as risk modeling, arbitrary assets (eg. physical trade) and settlement paths, arbitrary precision, fee/tax/discounts and redundant and multi-hop paths over here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/ifex-protoco... - since then I've moved in to manufacturing and it absolutely would be a godsend. Happy to help someone else pick up a similar line of development.

[simonmic]

This sounds like a recurring dream of mine: ubiquitous eco accounting (energy, resources, pollution, future impact, ...) , becoming a normal mainstream thing everybody does as a matter of course.

As a plain text accounting fan, I usually think of this as the way. Then I think we could do it more easily in spreadsheets, if we wanted to. Then I think spreadsheets don't induce collaboration, education, auditability and persistence the way PTA can.

Then I think more software is rather far from being our biggest need. Building relationship with nature and ourselves is far more impactful. Still, we are complex creatures, capable of doing many things at once..

OP, that's a great question; I see the Cardano project, I think it's one you should take a look at.

[jedharris]

Changing the laws or enforcement will take a while and software won't help directly. But extensive crowd-sourced measurement of externalities would be a big deal and software should help with that.

Actual measurement (and definition) of externalities will be very diverse, so the tracking will have to evolve and expand. Crowd-sourcing can handle that.

Once externalities can be clearly documented, public opinion will shift and companies will start to change their behavior in response. Then enforcement and laws will follow.

[edgefield]

There are many cradle to grace analyses that include calculations of costs for externalities. In terms of software for this, the big question is who would pay for it?

[VoodooJuJu]

>during the housing market crash of 2007, lots of risks were ultimately externalized to the state

Externalized to individual taxpaying citizens*. The state chose to transfer the perpetrators' would-be loss to unincorporated taxpayers.

[newbamboo]

Or hire an economist. That doesn’t scale the same as software, but if you get your econ students from poorer countries that might be one solution.

[loudmax]

So many communication platforms are proprietary walled gardens these days. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord, and so on. Their incentives do not align with what's best for their users, or society in general. We absolutely need open solutions become the standard dominant medium for communicating.

If Matrix and Mastodon become as easy to use as their proprietary counterparts, they could undo much of the harm done by our culturally divisive "social" networks.

[yodsanklai]

> they could undo much of the harm done by our culturally divisive "social" networks.

Or it could be worse. Meta/Twitter spend a lot of resource to moderate content for a reason. I don't see how a decentralised model could solve the problem of content moderation.

[Bedon292]

Do you not expect people to self select into the same divisive social networks no matter the communication platform that they are using? How does offering yet another platform for them to do so undo any of the harm already caused?

[shafyy]

I agree that this is a big problem.

> If Matrix and Mastodon become as easy to use as their proprietary counterparts

The problem is not primarily about usability, but about network effects and economic incentives. First, it's really hard to break the dominance of existing social media platforms, and they will never voluntarily adopt open standards. Second, I fear that if a platform becomes big enough, they have an incentive to close down their standards because, you guessed it, cash money.

Therefore this needs to be regulated. The EU is taking a good first step with the Digital Markets Act, and just a couple of days ago decided that big messaging services need to open up their APIs. Now, this is not the perfect solution, but a step in the right direction.

[ehnto]

Slack/Discord are just hosted community platforms, I wouldn't put them in the same vein as Facebook/Twitter. Slack/Discord/IRC communities have intentionally curated walls for specific purposes, just as we do in the real world, I think that is fine.

Would love to hear thoughts to the contrary however. It's worth discussing as this is a big problem for an internet hitting critical mass in participation.

[Mandatum]

And they never will for the same reason email, IRC, forums and every other form of commnication gets gobbled up and surpassed by private companies.

Open source software isn't driven by a dictator with a better vision - software projects run by good dictators will always win out against "built and design by committee" open source projects.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

On the contrary, Matrix and Mastodon give more freedom to their users. Which will mean, unfortunately, more fake news, more echo chambers and in general more decoupling of online reality from the real reality.

[jareklupinski]

obligatory "I miss Pidgin"

[nanomonkey]

Conflict-free Replication Data Types (CRDTs) and private cryptographically signed ledgers (not proof of work public blockchains, but similar) are what excites me these days, as they allow for users to own their own data, securely create transactions and collaborate without the overhead of their data being held hostage on one companies servers. IPV6 rides along with this as something I look forward to, only because so much of the hassle of doing P2P networking is NAT traversal.

Gossip protocols like Secure Scuttlebutt allow for each application login to have it's own feed that others can verify through public key encryption, therefore marketplaces and collaborative tools can be built without relying on the servers of one corporation. Ideally something more compact like RSON can be incorporated.

CRDTs allow for consensus building applications were each individual collaborates on designs, documentation, contracts, voting, feedback, etc. Your data is usable without a network connection, backed up on your peer's computers and historically accurate.

[nanomonkey]

This is important to me because I am currently working on an open source Distributed Consensus and Resource Planning tool, where people can build markets, supply chains, feed-back loops for goods and services that they care about in a distributed manner. Imagine an Amazon marketplace or Task Rabbit built on a open gossip protocol. You can start with your own Inventory Management, building up suppliers that you trust, and then build out your own Products and Services to offer up within your network. You follow the companies or individuals you trust, thus sidestepping ad networks, and know the providence of all of the items your purchase, and the reputation of the individuals that you support, filtering out anything that you don't want to be bothered by.

The tool is also flexible enough to be used as a collaborative tool, building organizations to accomplish tasks from your network. The value that each person brings to the table can be tracked, allowing for invisible labor to be surfaced and properly compensated.

[Beltiras]

The term for the ledgers is minted, as opposed to mined.

[teknopaul]

If the right to repair bills get anywhere I think a small amount of new software could have massive environmental impact. É.G. Ability to put a new os on an unsupported phone. That issue will soon apply to cars, which are fabulously expensive to build and to dispose of.

Often it's cheaper in terms of marginal cost in dollars to buy new, but this does not factor in the environmental cost of having built two devices and disposed of one, or the opportunity cost of unused devices.

In the same way that initially Linux enabled users to repuporse old pcs and eventually that tech made it to revolutionize many other areas. I get the feeling that, if right to repair bills had teeth, we would see similar innovation phones, vehicles and other consumer devices.

There is so much underused existing hardware that only a change of law and a few small projects (a consumer/hacker/small business friendly re-installer) could have significant environmental benefit with close to zero environmental cost.

Phones are amazing tech these days but they get thrown away at the same time newer/larger/less powerful single use devices (Alexa/music players/home automation) are purchased new.

Economies rarely measure wealth (because its hard) and target income and profit. For humanity and the planet, wealth and efficient use of that wealth is what matters.

Two clear examples.

Software to re-purpose an unsupported phone into a iot device, voice activated device, media player or back into a working & secure phone.

Software to turn an unsupported self-driving vehicle back into a manually driven vehicle or vehicle with driver assistance.

I think the software required is easily within reach in a five year time frame.

[riidom]

Now I'm not sure about the biggest potential, but let's say, some positive impact, then I'd throw OpenStreetMap into the list as well.

Also, in terms of AI, reducing the energy demand and solving the black box problem.

Not exactly software, but the concept of eco-certified software can surely have a positive impact as well, when it gains traction beside KDE's PDF-viewer Okular.

[dane-pgp]

Someone needs to solve online identity and reputation (in a privacy-preserving way) so that you can accumulate trust on one site/service and carry that over to another. Ideally such a system shouldn't devolve into trusting just a few large American corporations to decide who is and isn't allowed an online existence.

It feels like we can't have nice things because if you want to put a user-editable resource online, you first have to solve the Sybil attack problem. The more valuable the resource is, the more friction you need to put in the way of users to make them prove their humanity and divulge more of their offline identity, and this takes up engineering time which could have been devoted to making the resource itself more useful.

By "resource" I mean anything that accepts and displays user input from the internet, whether that's a wiki or a poll or a form or a multiplayer game or an online review or some completely new type of content that hasn't emerged yet because innovative creators have given up after their first bot raid.

[webmaven]

> Someone needs to solve online identity and reputation (in a privacy-preserving way) so that you can accumulate trust on one site/service and carry that over to another.

The problem is that most of the existing ways of transferring reputation (or the appearance of it) between contexts result in opportunities for arbitrage: celebrity endorsements, scientists supporting theories outside of their field, con artists leveraging social proof escalation, phishing, etc.

We've seen some of the strictest mechanisms of reputational transference leveraged for illicit purposes:

https://cromwell-intl.com/cybersecurity/pki-failures.html

Everything that makes reputation and trust transfers useful and convenient for users creates a huge attractive nuisance for illicit actors, from state level APTs on down to 419 scammers and everyone in between.

[mg]

I think that aggregating medical research studies could lead to a significant improvement of the worlds health situation.

There are tens of millions of medical studies available online. But no system to look at the data in an aggregated way.

I have been doing data analysis and aggregation in several fields. Every once in a while, I dabble with the concept and implementation of a tool to do it for medical studies. It would need quite a bit of effort to get it right. But the potential is epic.

[notacoward]

Closely related, but not quite the same: personal genomics. If everybody could get completely personalized nutrition and medication (including preventive) we could be a lot healthier for a lot less expense. AIUI most of the fundamental technologies are here or close, but there needs to be a way to make that information more accessible/usable on the "front line" of patient care and that's where software comes into it.

[andix]

Even more interesting would be, to automatically link patients medical history with studies, and show the doctor some suggestions: did you consider rare disease X?; there is not enough data, do test Y&Z because then we know much more

[beardedetim]

I know one of the programmers that built Origami for ORNL and the DoH

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/913790

seems to go down this path. It is doable and they were able to beat IBM Watson to find some thing or another (_can't find the article off hand_) and won an R&D 100. But as you can tell, no one actually wants to use it.

[nus07]

I agree and for a start since most medical data come from hospital and outpatient systems -there is a very desperate need for something more modern and useable than a painful 'Epic' or 'Cerner' systems. Honestly how has silicon valley and newer tech not replaced those companies and their way of doing things?

[aabajian]

I think adult education needs reform. We prioritize childhood education, but kids don't choose their parents. Affluent kids have access to better education, and there's no later-in-life educational safety net for adults without those early childhood benefits. If you went to a crap high school because of where you lived, you have limited options after graduating, and even less if you dropped-out.

Your current options as an adult are to take a course online, take a course at a community college, or buy books and watch YouTube videos all on your own. The problem with these approaches is that all motivation must come from within. There's no requirement that you learn. As soon as you get bored, you can quit. A large majority of kids, even stellar students, study because they are required to do so, out of a fear of the consequences imposed by their parents, by their teachers and even by their peers.

Imagine if you had to learn a subject outside your comfort zone. How attentive would you be to an online classes? Even basic courses like algebra are very uncomfortable to adults with minimal mathematics knowledge. It's not enough to hope adults who enroll will 'do their best', you have to motivate them to stay and push them to excel.

Now...I don't know what such a system would look like or even if it's possible to implement on a large scale.

[nonrandomstring]

You're absolutely right that education is broken. It's been captured and commodified by a cult of testing, shallow training, exclusion, competition and normativity that cripples maturation, creative thought human development.

Can technology help with that?

Maybe. Look at what Wikipedia, Internet Archive, YouTube, Vimeo and other sites have done. We've never had access to more high quality learning materials in history. That is a form of profound freedom.

There are many very successful self-educated people in the world.

The internet did more for education in a decade than in the millenia between Aristotle and Thomas Mann.

On the other hand technologies like Turnitin, proctoring software, and the march of big-tech like Microsoft and Google into our educational institutions is a disaster for freedom, diversity and opportunity. It may be that the internet has been a spearhead that ushers in an era of thought control and "epistemological management" unseen in history.

The universities need an enema.

To fix education we need technologies that address the monopolies/centralisation of reputation, certificate issuance, commercial hiring practices, student debt, paying teachers, access to specialised research equipment and much more. I know people like Peter Theil have said the've given up on education reform, but I'm still optimistic the institutions can be rescued.

[thephyber]

There is nothing in this post specific to adult education. The same exact issues interfere with exercise, diet, sleep, relationships, career advancement, etc.

In a world where adults are given freedom, the government doesn’t generally take part in motivating them to do anything outside of paying taxes, avoid breaking laws, participation in military conscription. Nearly everything else has always been up to the individual or their social circle to generate motivation.

[Cilvic]

At www.eidu.com we are working on education but starting with pre-schooler and the absolute basics (Foundational Literacy and Numeracy, FLN). The UN SDF 4 "education for all" points out the 600m learners who are "education poor". So it will be a long while before we touch adult education, but one can dream.

[emptysongglass]

I never got the all-American college experience despite hailing from the States. I want to go to university courses on lisp dialects then go to a frat kegger, maybe rediscover acid for the first time falling into polycules of love.

[metta2uall]

Maybe a social network that prioritizes high-quality content rather than fresh content. High-quality content (in terms of being e.g. persuasive & informative) may have a better chance of creating positive change than one's typical posts..

I'm working on an experiment at https://toplists.app/ that tries to leverage existing social networks, but this would probably work much better if e.g. Twitter expanded its "pinned" posts so that the UX would be seamless.

Also - perhaps software that improves visibility/transparency/understanding of energy usage, the lives of people in poverty, victims of human rights abuses, farmed animals, political votes, the impact of donations (Effective Altruism), etc

[samtho]

> Maybe a social network that prioritizes high-quality content rather than fresh content. High-quality content (in terms of being e.g. persuasive & informative) may have a better chance of creating positive change than one's typical posts..

One could argue this exists in some way through forums that rank posts through a voting system like HN or Reddit, so my question would be around what would a “2.0” version of this sort of forum look like? How can good behavior be incentivized, I.e positing high quality, original content without allowing older top posts from being reposted by spam bots in order to karma farm?

Much of what happens on mainstream and default subreddits is bot generated, in the sense that they pick popular things and repost them at optimal times of day for as many upvotes as possible.

[jslakro]

I have noticed all these years that many social networks falls easily in a descending spiral of garbage content "just" because is what our lazy brain seems to enjoy on small doses. Monetary motivations are not aligned to good content all the time also

[visarga]

Hugging Face for their ease of use and large collection of trained models. They can be applied to a variety of tasks or fine-tuned for new ones.

HF could power a grassroots revolution in search, translation, question answering and other NLP tasks. How cool would it be to be able to search without disclosing your keywords, or filter your content based on your rules and not theirs?

[pikrzyszto]

I'd recommend you to have a look at https://80000hours.org/ or at least their job boards: https://80000hours.org/job-board/

They focus on the very problem you're asking about.

[mikewarot]

I think that computer security causes a lot of other issues, like the Walled gardens, and the constant thread of cyber-attacks. A solid OS that is microkernel based, and ends up with a track record of stability is one of the most important things we need right now.

With out it, people have to use the walled gardens to stay safe. Software innovation is stifled, and it's always there as an possible trigger for overbearing legislative answers to a technical problem.

[chakkepolja]

Walled gardens are popular due to comfort & financial viability, It has nothing to do with security.

People will still use Android or iOS even if you build a state of art mobile OS based on SeL4 completely written in Rust & ATS, with more features and customizability than Android or iOS. Because it doesn't come preinstalled on their devices, and does not have popular apps.

I am afraid walled gardens are logical conclusion of the field, for the things industry tends to optimize.

[fsflover]

> constant thread of cyber-attacks. A solid OS that is microkernel based

Not microkernel-based, but hardware virtualization based, which is even more secure: https://qubes-os.org.

[nabaraz]

Websites for non-technical people. I don't think this is a solved problem.

We have a lot of choices with WordPress, Wix, etc., but the drawbacks are too much. 1) You don’t own the domain. 2) Personalization is limited, so you end up with a generic page. 3) They cost too much.

I think something like Gatsby+<some CMS>+Github Actions+Azure Static Apps in one tool.

Everyone should have a personalized web page that they own.

[midiguy]

It comes down to the inherent tradeoff of flexibility vs ease of use. Wix is easy to use because it does not offer much customizability. If you made it flexible enough to create any layout, theme, etc, you would probably end up with a GUI that is straight up harder to learn and still less flexible than code (remember Dreamweaver?)

For what it's worth, most musicians, small business owners, etc. I know are pretty happy with things like Wix and don't care much about technicalities like owning domains as long as they can choose what shows up in the URL. Those that have more custom needs usually just want to delegate to someone else.

[sleepycatgirl]

Lets see... I believe Mainlining effort of android phones + Pinephone/Mobian is big for positive impact, at least in phone area. No more being stuck on old insecure kernel and outdated software!

And second one, even a bit more niche, And its a bit more of positivity in terms of usage. Distros like Fedora Silverblue and NixOS. Confidence in that, even if update breaks something, you can just boot back into previous setup, and have working system, not bothered by breakage for the time being.

[ComradePhil]

> Confidence in that, even if update breaks something, you can just boot back into previous setup, and have working system, not bothered by breakage for the time being.

This was the goal of Ubuntu distro called snappy Ubuntu core [1]. Does anyone know whatever happened to it?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlcTDz9ogug

[akavel]

<crazy-fanboi mode="on">

Oh, easy - https://enso.org, of course!

[impjohn]

This looks amazing. I always imagine my scripts and programs like this in my head, can't wait to play with this

[martin_a]

Something like YouTube for learning videos, only.

Spreading _solid_ knowledge about everything all over the world and people will be able to improve their societies, no matter where they are. That will probably have a huge impact.

[rocgf]

I believe there are already such instances, I believe https://nebula.app/ is one of them.

The problem is that this does not change the dynamic of what people want to watch. The problem is not necessarily a lack of ways to find and filter such content, but rather that this is not appealing for broad audiences.

[chakkepolja]

I am thinking more like a self-hostable coursera, which institutions and companies can use to provide open education resources in form of courses.

[enjoyitasus]

The things you mentioned are directionally in line with the movement called "Effective Altruism".

They concern themselves with finding things that empirically would have the biggest impact, or if we don't do it, we have the biggest consequences.

https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/

[ghoward]

While my current projects are a little less ambitious than what you are asking for, and focused only on improving software, I'll say them anyway.

* An implementation of Nix's ideas for mere mortals.

* Version Control for non-technical users and for any kind of binary files.

The last one is interesting because most users will just see it as a more powerful undo/redo system.

[juliushuijnk]

non-profits need to write all sort of reports to stakeholders to justify their funding, etc.

Software that would make this easy, or otherwise make that problem go away or smaller on a global scale, should have huge positive impact:

- increase positive impact of all non-profits. - improved feebackloop should also make quality better (less funds to bad non-profits that write great documents).

Seems to be a problem where software can be part of the solution.

[mxuribe]

Having worked for a non-profit myself, I agree that there are plenty of areas to optimize...and what you noted is only one of them. At least at the non-profit where i worked, there are tons of people who do it for good of humanity, but who are...let me state as kindly as i can: not very efficient. They're intelligent people and who have big hearts, but often get in their own way to achieving their goals. So, yeah, making better software tools and systems for many aspects for non-profits will certainly (100%!) help make a more positive impact on the world.

[frozenlettuce]

Recently the city that I live was hit by pretty bad landslides and floods - some folks organized how to distribute donations to support centers, but as there was no tool for that they used a public google sheet. At some points there were dozens of people using it at the same time. Luckily no one vandalized it

[anotherhue]

Android implementing ad tracking limitations.

EU tackling big tech because the US sure won't.

Greater role out of automatic breaking systems.

Greater role out of demand management (energy).

Remote work decentralising our cities. I expect to see new cities being built.

[ethbr0]

> Greater role out of demand management (energy).

Would be curious hearing from someone in the space how open or closed the existing solutions are, in the sense of being able to make future changes or drive them from new systems?

Is it a world of vendor-locked black boxes? Or pretty reasonable for future evolution, without gut-and-replace?

(Presumably we're talking about the entire generator-utility-consumer loop here?)

[fsflover]

> Android implementing ad tracking limitations.

Google will not fight against itself. GNU/Linux phones already provide this functionality.

[kaetemi]

An imaginary power user build of Windows that doesn't include all the builtin cloud nonsense and other useless distractions. And custom themes support instead of forced white menu bars that override the system pallette because some designer thinks they're clever.

[mxuribe]

As @fsflover noted, there is Linux as an option...But i'll do you one slightl;y better: try Ubuntu Mate. This is a specific "type" of Linux. This is a distribution of Linux named Ubuntu with a desktop environment named Mate...And the Mate desktop environment allows for a layout - named Redmond - that resembles the typical Windows UI: https://guide.ubuntu-mate.org/#panel-layouts-redmond

In other words, you get more power (and yes, freedom but i won;t dive into that aspect now) but the look-and-feel resembles Windows that it sounds like you are familiar with/prefer. Full disclosure: i am a diehard linux user, so am biased in favor of linux. I invite you to explore Ubuntu Mate (or any other distribution of linux)! Enjoy!

[fsflover]

Did you hear about Linux?

[ComradePhil]

> power user build of Windows that doesn't include all the builtin cloud nonsense and other useless distractions.

Windows Server?

[emptysongglass]

What you're looking for is Windows LTSC.

[huhtenberg]

Near complete erosion of personal privacy and absolutely astounding levels of ignorance of that in general populace is a massive issue that continues to reshape the society is very alarming ways. Courtesy of Google and Facebook.

So both technical and non-technical counter-measures are dearly needed. From federated messaging systems to the privacy-oriented legislation, every little thing will help.

It is an uphill battle though. This much is obvious.

[simne]

I'm not sure about biggest, but on of the biggest sure.

Two problems.

1. DNA sequencing, now is two part process (I simplify a lot, sure) - at first stage, target DNA divided for small pieces, and those pieces sequenced to digital codes and saved to database. Than in second part, computer cluster works few months, to connect those pieces to one chain. And this is very expensive process even considering few gigabytes storage to store all these data for few months.

The problem is that currently used algorithms are very naive, even in some projects used Perl implementation, not C or some other fast language. So exist opportunity, to create new special algorithm/software, or may be also some hardware support, so this will be at least 5 times faster, and if costs will drop under 100$ for one human DNA, this will lead to very new type of medicine - genetic checks of everything.

2. connected to 1st problem - find protein folding structures from DNA, and how they interact with other proteins, with drugs and with chemical molecules. As I know, this now solved in similar way as 1st problem, but in partially 3d space - programs try to calculate some positions, in which parts of structures are attracted to each other and calculate power of attraction. This way for example, calculated probability of drugs, which will attract to spike protein of Covid and neutralize it. Also this way calculated effects of new drugs, like interaction with proteins in human organism, etc.

In ideal world, possible, that for example for cancer, 1st will create fast DNA of cancer cells of some human, and 2nd will create DNA code of artificial protein, which will be printed on DNA-printer and inhibit cancer, but will not affect normal cells, and all this will be done in just few weeks.

[jhallenworld]

The is an interesting related opportunity: given a existing desired protein, find its sequence- needed so that you can determine the corresponding genetic sequence so that your custom organism can synthesize the protein.

Protein sequencing is not so easy... very basically you can do it one amino acid at a time based on the fact that amino acids are "sided", meaning side A of each can only connect to side B of the next one. So you attach the end of the protein to some kind of substrate (which can only attach "A" sides), then cut off each amino acid one at a time.

There are some companies in this space:

https://www.quantum-si.com/

[pmags]

1) I'm afraid you're about 15 years out of date with your perception of how genome sequencing and assembly works. Nobody is assembling PacBio, MinION or other long-read data (or short read illumina data for that matter) with slow aligners in Perl.

2) see AlphaFold2 and other related methods -- the protein folding problem is still a big challenge but the field is moving in leaps and bounds

[Randolf_Scott]

As far anything that humanity develops, I would say in the software arena would only be for educational purposes. This would not be advantageous to immediate returns, but would be the best way to develop something with the smallest amount of collateral negatives. Basically create software that teaches reading, writing and arithmetic. If humans can learn those, then other educational pursuits would be allowed. Things such as [science and history], [Engineering and Technology] Once they are competent in these, then things like psychology, philosophy, religion, sociology would be unlocked. Basically software should be centered around focusing the human toward educating themselves in a way that mitigates presumptions and self-destructive tendencies. Or any combination of the cores: reading, writing and math combined with a soft-science. Honestly, I can't figure out a way to mitigate humanities need for laws. People always prefer to be bad than to be good if they can get away with it.

[fsflover]

1. https://qubes-os.org, security-focused operating system, relying on hardware virtualizaton.

2. Various mobile operating systems targeting GNU/Linux phones, e.g., Mobian and PureOS. They have convergence by design (running desktop apps) and absolute freedom without walled gardens for the user.

[gavanwilhite]

Coordination technology to connect people who “want to help” with good ways to “actually help”.

Right now it is very difficult for people to figure out good ways to help causes they care about. Whether in big ways, like career shifts, or small ways, like writing a letter on behalf of a divestment initiative.

(This is a biased answer since I am working on this)

[phaedrus]

I think there's a huge potential for Software Archeology. Maybe not 5 years but within 50 years this will be huge.

You could come at it from two fronts. Bottom up there's a need for tools that better help you investigate "what the hell is all this, what's in it, and where is it?" for software artifacts. Top down there's a need for an interactive dashboard executives could use to get a view (on their terms not the programmers') what the software that runs their business actually does.

If I knew how to implement this I'd quit my job tomorrow to work on it. Unfortunately I have no idea. I can only see in vague terms what it might look like and the hole in our current way of interacting with software that drives this need.

Or I could be wrong: in general other people consistently don't care about the things I think they obviously should care about.

[wcerfgba]

Software archaeology is discussed in the Vernor Vinge novel "A Deepness in the Sky":

> Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.

> So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.

> “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.

> “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation.

> “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.”

> Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.”

> “Almost precisely.”

[dmitriid]

I'll be a skeptic and will say: none.

There's no current tech that will have a marked positive impact in the next five years.

[maxthegeek1]

AlphaFold, and to be honest, most of the software/research coming out of DeepMind. For better or worse, they're the Bell Labs of the modern era.

[solarkraft]

Reproducible builds. There is no (!) other way to trust binaries you download from the web. And the best E2EE is worthless when your client is compromised.

Nix. Makes dependency management kind of magic (but requires so much more development to make it practical for common people).

Data being a liability. Stuff like data breaches being adequately punished to make overreaching tracking unprofitable and encourage E2EE everywhere.

Open platforms. Apple being forced to allow running software on iOS devices.

Federation. Imagine the E-Mail model for everything. Matrix and Mastodon are leading the new bunch, but still have quite some adoption gains to make by improving the UX.

GUI programming. Think Blockly, but for real work. This will first be used to extend end user application with scripting and eventually make its way into general programming. A lot of tooling potential can be unleashed when you stop forcing the semantics of code into a linear text representation.

Traditional SaaS ceasing to be a viable business model. Ok, this is just a wish, but you can’t depend on something that can change or completely go away at any time. The JetBrains model is reasonable.

Explicitly not mentioned: Distributed databases (blockchain), VR.

[tjansen]

I think Unikernels like NanoVMs (https://nanos.org/) will become more important. They are more efficient and more secure than than full operating systems. Right now, I think there are no good monitoring solutions available (or at least I am not aware of any). You can't just ssh to your server, so if something goes wrong, it can be hard to debug. And they are certainly not integrated into bigger monitoring solutions like Dynatrace. But once the infrastructure is available, I would expect a large percentage of Linux servers to be replaced with unikernels.

[idontwantthis]

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

Actually take a dent out of cyber attacks by unifying cyber, physical, and personnel security all in a single program that can record every type of incident and automate responses ahead of time.

[ericfrazier]

Right now, government holds corporations accountable. I think the people themselves should hold corporations accountable and stop relying on the state, which is owned by the corporations. Consumers need to be conscious of where their money is going and what causes it supports. If a person believes in trans-person's rights they probably shouldn't be eating at Chick-Fil-A. There's no faster feedback for bad corporate behavior than direct and instant consumer action. Software that addresses this need to make the consumer more knowledgeable will benefit the future most.

[rfrec0n]

> Right now, government holds corporations accountable I know that you meant that the role of government is that they are supposed to hold corporation's accountable but as you said, when the same people that run the government are the same people that run the large corporations, that will never be possible. We need to find a new way for everyone to be able to hold them accountable. However I don't think that consumers really have any influence with their wallets nowadays. Consumers have very little financial influence in the grand scheme of things because as long as other corporations or the government is willing to continue doing business with the targeted corporation, it's profits will never be significantly damaged.

[1270018080]

Like an app where you input your opinion on an issue, and you can find businesses with leadership or lobbying efforts that don't oppose you? You'd run out of places to shop pretty quickly with 5 corporations run by oligarchs that own basically all consumer products in America.

[mrfusion]

I think tutoring software designed on a tictoc like platform. It would hit all your dopamine centers and keep you engaged but actually teaches you a whole field in micro lessons.

(Feel free to steal this idea)

[xuki]

You might find this interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly

> Musical.ly Inc. was founded by long time friends Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang in Shanghai, China.[7][8] Before launching Musical.ly, Zhu and Yang teamed up to build an education social network app, through which users could both teach and learn different subjects through short-form videos (3–5 minutes long).

[Qem]

Software for automated transversal of the chemical reactions graph. Basically a CAD for synthetic chemists. See for example: https://www.cell.com/chem/pdf/S2451-9294(18)30085-8.pdf and https://www.patreon.com/posts/founder-of-four-20493205

[logicallee]

>Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

sentiment analysis and nudging, when people are angry with each other it is easy for AI to analyze; likewise if people are being tricky, defrauding, etc, it could be analyzed from their interactions facial expressions etc. These behaviors are a drain on the economy and within a few years AI could help solve it. Basically, five years from now when someone gets a "you've just won x", "paid thank you", or even "congratulations you've been hired" AI could ensure there is not someone on the other side of the transaction who is actively tricking them. Something like, "looks like you're trying to defraud or steal from someone. Here are some coursera courses that are a better path for you".

I feel like these things are a real drain on the economy, and lead to mistrust or markets that fail. Successful economies need trust, it is a prerequisite, and lawsuits or law enforcement are a poor substitute. I feel like AI could be used for productive purposes to increase trust in the world. At the limit, imagine if everyone had a helpful friend, who was also friends with everyone else. Within five years, AI could be that friend.

[bakuninsbart]

Two fields I'm quite hyped about:

There are tons of cool companies and non-profits driving the digitalisation of the medical sector, and a lot needs to be done to truly realize the potential of all the data we are gathering currently. Aggregating medical research, data mining actual operations, and leveraging smart devices to personalize therapy are all just beginning to transform the sector.

The second thing would be the digitalisation of Africa, especially in banking and healthcare. Same as above, tons of startups and non-profits are engaging with this now on very promising paths. Already, millions of people gain access to banking and healthcare through these platforms beevry year, and it is transforming lives and economies at large.

Maybe it is just my limited perception, but while I realize that efforts in both of these topics have been going on for well over 20 years, I feel like it has been accelerating greatly in the last couple of years, and is beginning to show real tangible differences.

[ISL]

A keybase equivalent that gains widespread layperson adoption.

If you extend from five years to fifty, then the answer will be climate-related.

[dimatter]

>A keybase equivalent that gains widespread layperson adoption. signal?

[huqedato]

Any software with application to the field of energy (generation, resources, exploitation, storage, research). The "energy problem" will become more acute in the short/medium term. I would invest in a startup that creates software in this domain.

[mysore]

self driving cars could save the world from millions of deaths per year and reduce stress and wasted time from sitting in traffic in cities like LA/NYC

[pjerem]

Interestingly, I thought like you some years ago. But since then, I realized that, nah, we just need to make cities that don't require cars at all.

I'm not against self driving cars, they'll totally save millions of lives. But we must not make the mistake to build our society around the fact that self driving cars are a thing. We must build our future around the fact that any city should be livable without a car.

[Cthulhu_]

It's a solution to a problem, but said problem is not the root cause. Reduce the need for driving in the first place; normalize public transit within city limits, improve city designs by putting shops and work closer by, redesign cities to be more pedestrian and cyclist-friendly (and I'm aware cyclists get plenty of accidents too, I live in a cyclist country), etc. These are not easy things to fix, because especially in the US where I believe this is about, cities aren't designed like this in the first place and can't be redone easily.

First, if drivers make mistake, make them more accountable; require better training, enforce laws more strictly, etc. What are the causes behind traffic accidents? I'm confident the majority is from reckless driving, disregarding other drivers, speeding, impatience, alcohol / drugs, etc. Another percentage will be from unsafe driving conditions, which self-driving cars won't fix because they'll refuse to work in those conditions.

[cbetti]

I think you're spot on. Self driving software seems to me like it will handle the vast majority of driving situations much better than humans could within the 5 year horizon OP is asking about.

[logicalmonster]

There are some real positives to self-driving cars, but the negatives concern me far more.

A lot of people who have great trust in the system probably won't see this as an issue until its too late, but one of the things that greatly concerns me about this notion of self-driving cars is its possible negative impact on human freedom.

To some extent, a car represents freedom because its a tool that lets you go anywhere you want to go without requesting permission from anybody. Particularly for cars with internal combustion engines, the ability to quickly fuel up and travel anywhere affords you some measure of control over your life and choices, particularly in an emergency.

A car that's run on software is effectively no longer yours and cannot be relied on as a tool to ensure control over your own fate. And electric cars (at least current versions) cannot quickly be refueled in the same way.

A corporation decides to demand extra payments for some software that lets you travel on highways? What can you do about it when your new car is maxed out the wazoo with DRM?

Government decides that it doesn't want its subjects to travel too far? Software update refuses to take you anywhere besides approved destinations and alerts authorities. This is no longer dystopian speculation or some distant past authoritarian experience: we've seen in modern western democratic countries in very recent experience that it was made illegal to travel too far from your house.

I love a lot of the tech behind Teslas and electric cars, but I don't trust the scenario where my car can be manipulated entirely by software and there's no absolute fully physical manual override that ensures a human can control it.

[w10-1]

Anything that gets people to really see beyond their limited scope.

7B people now, another 20B in our children's lifetime.

We're attuned to what bothers us (software introspection, social network garbage). 10 days of just sitting will show you your emotional concerns are meaningless delusions.

Meanwhile, the forces that determine actual lives - availability of food, housing, health care, transportation, energy; education, rights and corruption, political capture; cultural goodwill and compassion - go largely unseen, mainly driven by people seeking power.

The doomsday clock is mono-dimensional. We need a world dashboard we can all agree upon and fight over. Once it's measured, people can optimize it.

[tashbarg]

> 7B people now, another 20B in our children's lifetime.

The UN projects ~11B total by 2100 [1]. Most of the growth currently is and will be because of people surviving birth and living long. Global fertility rate is already down to 2.4 (from almost 5 in the 50s) and very likely will keep going down. That's why projections even see a decline of total population after 2100 as likely.

[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...

[olau]

Open-source, collaboratively developed software that makes governments/societies more efficient, and where standardization helps.

For instance, software for implementing national ID systems, so people can submit their taxes, get health care, etc. and that banks and similar requirements for know you customer (anti money laundering) can tap into.

Or cheaper payment systems, like VISA/Mastercard, but in an open system with more operators, perhaps even national.

I think this is fruitful area because governments, like big corporations, struggle with developing effective software and they struggle with cooperation. You could make a real impact on millions of people.

You need to be able to navigate the politics, though.

[andix]

Easy mode for Kubernetes

[Cthulhu_]

Isn't that just running your own server? Just say "we are at capacity, sorry" if it starts to give issues from load.

[jka]

Nice idea - I wonder whether a Duolingo-style gradual-progression approach to learning Kubernetes would make for an effective educational environment.

[leetrout]

The next evolution will be branded "kubeless"

[codethief]

GrapheneOS[0] has been an absolute godsend for me. For the first time in more than ten years I no longer have to distrust my phone and am still able to use pretty much any application (including Google apps) on a modern phone. Moreover, I regularly get updates & fixes – sometimes even several times a month – not just for the OS but also for the built-in apps (e.g. the Google Camera replacement).

I am very excited about the project's future! One thing I look forward to in particular is hardware developed primarily for GrapheneOS.

[0] https://grapheneos.org/

[codethief]

Personally, I'm actually quite excited about Fuchsia (related HN thread -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30827210). Not at all because of its Flutter-based UI but because of its security features. Security on Linux is really lacking and Qubes OS requires too many resources (in particular: battery power), so I'd love to have an OS that has security guarantees at least as strong as Android.

[junon]

There are a number of projects in that space btw. I'm working on one of them. OS development has picked up considerable interest in the last few years for similar reasoning.

[gregable]

Electricity Demand Response / Micro Grids. Right now, most electrical systems, even internet connected ones, don't have any awareness of electrical supply and demand. Most of the grid is designed for power to flow one direction.

As we bring more intermittent power supplies onto the grid, things get harder. The batteries in electric cars are a small, but growing storage capacity that currently can't flow "backwards". Hardware will be a large part of this, but software will be needed too.

[alexashka]

I think the ability to share your expertise in video/audio/text format without any technical know-how will continue to be huge.

Everything else is nice but secondary to people being able to communicate, world-wide. Reason being - I think we've solved the food/clothes/shelter technical problems already. What we haven't solved is the willingness to re-distribute the goodies in a sensible way and the way to get there is, is communication.

[sidcool]

A peer to peer decentralised internet built on top of middle out compression that uses end consumer devices smart fridges etc. to store data.

[contingencies]

A respawn of mobile phones with local mesh networking and a user-oriented security model instead of the manufacturer-owned, carrier-tracked, state-tapped state of affairs we have now. Oh, and upgradeability would be great. We are all walking around with supercomputers in our pockets, and due to software issues we can't use them.

[Tepix]

The ability to crowd fund creators sounds like it will be a positive impact.

Details at https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/139265/avalanche-launche...

[tchock23]

We have this. Patreon, Kickstarter, Wefunder and countless others.

[Artistry121]

I think a project based social network will emerge with some long term planning features and built for easy collaboration by hundreds and thousands of people.

As this grows i imagine we can coordinate large groups of people towards goals Like improving local communities, permaculture, and goals from the effective altruism community.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

Certainly not AI. There are very few applications of AI that do not tip the scale in favor of more powerful against the less powerful. It enables government and big tech surveillance, mass mind control, smart weapons, deepfakes etc.

[blenderdt]

A lot of comments here boil down to one underlying problem: self hosting is very hard (backups, security, and so on).

If self hosting would be as easy as installing an app on your phone the need for a big entity that hosts your service fades away.

[nickd2001]

I would think anything that improves renewable energy, electric transport, energy use. Even something mundane like better intelligent controllers for heat pumps, thus reducing dependence on gas boilers, would help.

[lumannnn]

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

- "Bitcoin & Renewable Energy Transition - Bitcoin Incentivizes Green Energy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SX1eCqwd3Q

- "Can Bitcoin Mining Save the Environment? with Troy Cross" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFYKq5Qe1Bs

- "This Machine Greens" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7dMVcVWgc

[tgv]

The cognitive dissonance is off the charts.

[lumannnn]

- "Bitcoin’s Clean Energy Revolution with Nic Carter & Troy Cross" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu156PvA-NI

[g8oz]

ObservableHQ from the creator of D3....notebooks in javascript make so much sense and I believe will unlock their power for a much larger non-pro community than python based tools will.

[thrower123]

I desperately want Blazor to succeed, so that the entire Javascript-based environment can burn.

I would accept some kind of world where WASM bindings in browsers become usable as an alternative.

[1270018080]

Password-free authentication. Passwords seem so archaic, I'd love to see them fall out of style already. Whether it's biometric or yubikey, I'll take whatever.

[jasfi]

Definitely Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). My own effort: https://lxagi.com/

[lifeplusplus]

Adult education at quality of MIT/Stanford/Wharton available to every person and adult on the planet with the internet in their language...

[sidcool]

AlphaFold. It's very near to cracking the 90% accuracy. And solving protein folding has huge long term benefits for himaniry

[nonrandomstring]

The greatest positive impact we can hope for in digital technology is for more reflection and thought. Moving fast and breaking things isn't working well any more, and may be our undoing.

"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

It ought to be emblazoned in 10ft high letters above the doorway to every university, company and research institution.

We could benefit from a more widespread acceptance of the fundamental utilitarian question "How does this actually make life better for the greatest number, and without inflicting harms as unseen side effects?"

This means careful reflection on human values, and less hubris about what we can achieve.

To see how far from value-neutral your suggestions might be:

> energy usage

Unless stated carefully some people may assume that means "use less". It may well be that the way forward is to use more energy, not less. Renewable non fossil use would seem a better goal.

> preventing armed conflicts

Some with a more hawkish outlook might say of defence, it's actually better to expediently and decisively win conflicts with minimum loss of life.

> reducing poverty

Seems like a universal good. But poverty is relative. To raise the remainder of humanity to the standard of living that most Americans consider "poverty" would be devastating if done with current technology.

> STEM training

Plenty would argue that we have a STEM excess and what is needed is broader application of the arts and humanities to balance life and create a nicer culture.

> improving access to sustainable environments

Most things that start with "improving access" fail to account for the effects of demand on those resources.

> implementing AI

Many, myself included, would caution that a naive pursuit of AI is absolutely catastrophic. Instead we should put more into IA.

And so on.

Now, I am not picking on your values here. If I were to list 10 "bare word values" you'd be able to make similar objections and shoot mine down.

What I am saying is that digital technology has created a "solution trap", where we see things as monotonic linear progress with "fast" ideas that can be made into a product and a company. We see trajectories toward unquestionable good without pausing to consider the cost elsewhere. I recommend reading systems theory (I start my students with Dana Meadows "fishing ecosystem" lecture) and you'll see something frightening.

The trick is not to recoil at the complexity but re-imagine technology as a way to understand it, reflect on it in a less reductionist way.

[simne]

> preventing armed conflicts

Move armed conflicts to virtual ;)

Something like idea of Mortal Combat movie.

[southpawflo]

tackling communications security and privacy:

https://betrusted.io

[stubish]

Skin cancer screening using a smart phone.

[jeffreyrogers]

The way I think about software is it's basically about processing data. Most of the time that data is someone else's, but sometimes it is generated either by the software itself (e.g., CAD or audio applications), sometimes it is free information but just collected in a useful way (e.g. Google), and sometimes it is proprietary stuff that is hard to access in other ways (lots of financial stuff fits in this category).

The market for software ideas is pretty efficient. So most ideas that you can come up with off the top of your head either already exist or didn't work out for some reason that might not be obvious. The way I'd approach this question is to look at what new data sources have become available. One of the comments mentioned OpenStreetMap and that seems pretty reasonable to me. Improvements in facial recognition and object classification are probably enabling new applications (not all of them will be positive though). Biology/medicine is probably the main field that's had major new advances, obviously mRNA vaccines but also things related to genetics. So I'd bet something important would come out of there.

I'm skeptical that software will have a major impact on things like energy usage or preventing armed conflict, etc. Those are more political/economic problems.

[olau]

A decent, really easy forum system to allow groups based on existing organizations to flourish, with multiple operators so that you are not beholden to something like Facebook.

Most organizations, and I'm using the word here to describe the local stamp collector club of a dozen people too, need some way of communicating effectively. With GDPR, Facebook is out of the question in the EU.

I've enjoyed phpbb forums in the past - but it needs to be easier to start using, and probably easier to run.

[tyronehed]

You're asking people to give away their billion-dollar startup ideas...

[m12k]

Saving the world very seldom makes you a billionaire - if it did, a lot more effort would be going into it.

[impjohn]

It's ok, they'll keep the trillion-dollar startup ideas to themselves:)

[RankingMember]

more powerful "no code" software development tools

[sydthrowaway]

The lack of fresh ideas in this thread is discouraging.

[hvl2]

The plethora of solid ideas in this thread is encouraging.

[jonpo]

Software that tackles russian trolls would be great.

[rootsudo]

Microsoft Excel.

[mistrial9]

Google Earth Engine for earth sciences

[brailsafe]

macOS and GDAL. macOS because it gets out of the way and helps people generally get their work done faster, so they can do much more important things than their work sooner and more often. GDAL because it's the most powerful mapping toolkit I'm aware of. Anything that fills that space is going to be the most critical bit of any impactful software for the next 10 years.

[chimprich]

One of the biggest problems of our age, even more so than previous ages, is misinformation. This includes wrong information passed through ignorance, and deliberate lies spread by bad actors.

Many of our other biggest problems, including climate change, disease, and wars become much easier to tackle if we could make a substantial improvement in the quality of information being shared.

[danlugo92]

Bitcoin, no question.

[metageneralist]

zero trust, homomorphic encryption, biometrics

[gadders]

Adblockers.

[Cthulhu_]

I'm going to be cynical.

Energy usage: Software can't fix this; rewriting your workload more efficiently doesn't matter if during that rewrite, a hundred companies wrote workloads that cost a hundred times more power did. The issue is that electricity is too cheap. Raise the cost of electricity and it will force the big consumers of electricity to use it more efficiently. Also ban proof-of-work blockchain technology.

Software cannot prevent armed conflicts, that's a political problem. That can be solved by voting or assassinations, to be blunt. Politics is broken, and software cannot fix that, revolutions can. It doesn't matter that you can vote remotely on the blockchain if you're in a two-party system where your vote is for the lesser evil. Ban nukes. Stop voting for oligarchs, authoritarians, and fuckwits.

Poverty is a political problem too. The free market didn't work. Raise the minimum wage, give people money if they can't work or are between jobs, give everyone an education for free (it pays itself back within a few years through income taxes no problem), give people health care (and control the prices). Yes it's totalitarian, but we tried the free market and the illusion of free choice and it didn't work. We're rich enough to give everyone a happy life but we refuse to because "I got mine".

STEM training, see above. Make it free for anyone to attend.

AI is not needed, it's used to sell you more stuff. I've yet to see a beneficial application for AI. I hope it can be used for medical science at least but a lot of it is gimmicky.

[loudmax]

Paying for universal education, health care, and basic income via taxation is not totalitarian. With sensible regulation all of these can be accomplished without giving up on the free market. That is, the free market as understood by Keynes, not necessarily by Ayn Rand.

If you take an extremist definition of the free market, where healthcare mandates equal socialism and taxation equals theft, then yeah, that version of the free market doesn't work. (Where "work" means having leading to the general benefit to society as a whole.) Believing that any economic regulation is incompatible with a free market is equivalent to believing that any law is incompatible with freedom. Just as anarchy won't lead to freedom, a complete absence of economic regulation will not lead to a free market.

[Bedon292]

I guess it depends on what OP means by Energy usage. I thought it was more about clean energy than about the energy usage of individual workloads. And there are certainly opportunities for software in clean energy. Things like improving site selection, grid optimizations, and the like. Although a lot of it is probably going to be hardware side.

[gameswithgo]

I see Rust with a lot of potential, especially if/when it moves into domains like aerospace and other control of critical physical hardware. These are places where a reduction of bugs saves lives and/or huge amounts of money.

Machine learning definitely has potential, if we have another surge of breakthroughs in the future amazing things will become possible

Something I would like to see is a movement for software user rights. Between hardware that locks you into to the manufacturers store, and software that is constantly interrupting you and pushing ads at you instead of allowing you to do your work, some kind of social movement to push back against these UI dark patterns is sorely needed. Using computers is absolutely horrible compared to what it could be because of these issues.

[kapsteur]

Ethereum ?

[timeon]

Is it still PoW?

[ramboldio]

Democratic Government Backbones

[FWKevents]

Software to quickly and easily determine the tax implications of crypto purchases and trades.

[floodle]

How does this lead to positive impact?

[GartzenDeHaes]

There's an existing interstate tax system called streamlined sales tax that could be used [1]. This is the system that computes and pays state sales tax on internet purchases and was implemented around 2008.

1. https://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/

[benjaminwootton]

I know crypto will be a controversial one, but in terms of potential surely even a skeptic would acknowledge it.

Decentralised Finance in particular could take a huge chunk out of retail banking, investment banking and insurance.

[Cthulhu_]

Could, but it's not going to while the people pushing it are in it for the money.

At least retail banking is controlled and guaranteed by national and international governments and banks. If a crypto exchange goes fucky for whatever reason, you're fucked. If the value of your cryptocurrency of choice varies, you're fucked.

I mean how much did a pizza cost 10 years ago vs today in BTC vs USD. In BTC it was a few BTC, now it's 0.00025. In USD it was $10, now it's $10.

There is nothing wrong with retail / traditional banking, investment and insurance. Cryptocurrencies / blockchain technology does not solve a problem.

[latexr]

OP gave a handful of examples regarding what they consider “positive impact”. You don’t even need to get past the first one (energy usage) for cryptocurrencies to be on the actively negative side of the scale.

[_benj]

Idk why this is being so downvoted but how open the crypto ecosystem is, how much access to data, how DIY it is… to me it looks like open source financials vs proprietary government issued money.

I think we have challenges with its exorbitant use of energy, but giving more access to more people regarding is a positive IMHO.

[FWKevents]

Software that would be attached to your crypto exchange, and would easily and quickly figure out the tax reporting and implications of each trade or purchase for you personally. Also - Parth Balla here on YC already has this - a nickname feature for your crypto wallet to make sending money more certain and less of a hold-your-breath and hope you didn't get a number wrong moment

[Cthulhu_]

It'd be convenient for cryptobros, but I'm not really seeing how pushing crypto will have "positive impact" in the OP's definition. It's a libertarian capitalist concept, and I'm not open to debate about it because I've yet to see anyone use crypto for anything but a way to make money.