Environment, people, technology are changing rapidly. What are some worthwhile problems or ideas that you think would be important to solve or work on by end of the decade.
We have an aging population and many places have a flat birthrate. We need to solve how to deal with this consequences.
Who will care for these people? How will we deal with the consequences of flat population growth? How will we deal with the stock market's expectations of perpetual growth when the underlying population itself is not growing (and especially since productivity has also been relatively flat)?
This aging topic is very important. Re: stock markets, economies need to shift from eternal $ growth to share holder wallets, to providing equitable outcomes for all people and the planet - that will be very interesting to watch, i can’t see it going well.
> We need to solve how to deal with this consequences.
I'm hoping that we start to see an increase in pro-family policies. A couple rough ideas to look into would be decreasing taxation (or giving refunds/payments) based on how many children a productive family has, providing financial support so families can buy homes, and promoting wage increases so a single income can support a family to allow one to work and the other to focus on raising the children.
If you check the recordings, some sessions were directly focused on connecting problem experts, data access, computing resources and people with skills or idea or passion. The opportunities span from students or researchers, up to what will take innovative companies or bigtech to solve, or government and international organizations.
It was also the place were a lot of discussions about AI regulation took place. The discussions and the decisions that will follow from that meeting will shape the world to come IMHO.
The SDGs are really the defining issues of this century that need to be solved. I think if a company truly wants to make the world a better place™ then they should start at looking at them.
The biggest problem domain worth pursuing is figuring out fusion. If we can unlock what is effectively limitless power a lot of problems become far more tractable. Everything else is a distraction. We need cheaper and more available power.
Every physicist and engineer in the world should probably try dedicating at least one or two month of their life to figuring out fusion.
If humanity could pay a trillion dollars to instantly unlock fusion it would still be considered a bargain. And yet we don't treat research into that field as something with such a potentially massive impact.
We are living a mass extinction right now (that's not a prediction for a future risk, that's a fact that we can observe now). The reason of this mass extinction is cheap, abundant energy: habitat loss comes from there.
Fusion would be great to finish making life on Earth look like surviving on Mars. Is that what you want?
What we need (and will most likely face anyway) is to do less with less. Organise society to live the forced degrowth that is coming, and survive the climate changes that we started and cannot possibly change anymore.
D-T fusion is not as clean as is touted, and the economics just aren't ever going to make it viable compared to ever-cheaper solar, wind, batteries/energy storage, etc.
Better fission designs OTOH are worth pursuing, and also deep geothermal, and maybe one or two of the CCS options though they seem a bit greenwashy.
learned about the Wendelstein X-7 this weekend (and stellarators in general) and they've accomplished some pretty impressive acheivements... i think there are many breakthroughs and things to be done in this space
What's the biggest problem with fission that fusion solves?
My understanding is that that raw materials are a low % of total cost for fission, waste disposal is not that hard, and that it's technically more complicated and expensive to build a fusion plan than a fission plant.
Based on your requirements, this is already solved. Pull more oil out of the ground. Burn more trees.
AND, throwing money at a problem will definitely solve fusion.
Give people cheap energy and people will use it up. Just look at cryptomining. Then you are back to needing more energy. People will do just fine with expensive energy. They will adapt.
Unpopular opinion: One of the biggest challenges facing humanity in the next 2 decades is avoiding a catastrophic "Great Simplification" as we run out of oil. If this were allowed to happen, we'd suddenly be unable to practice industrial scale agriculture, and I'd estimate 90% of humanity would starve to death.
The US produces large amounts of oil via fracking, which requires more resources to drill and produce than previous methods. At the same time, the wells tend to decline at 40% per year. These wells are making up a larger percentage of our fossil fuel production as time goes by. At some point the energy and resources required to drill a well will match the possible production, and new wells won't make sense, leading to collapse.
Without fossil fuels for transportation, and especially as chemical feedstock to creating fertilizers, food shortages would quickly appear world-wide.
We need to transition away from fossil fuels to avoid this fate. In doing so, we'll also help reduce, and perhaps eliminate the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which is a far more immediate concern in the minds of many.
The globe is absolutely nowhere near facing dwindling oil supplies in 2 decades. We won't even hit our proven reserves in that time, and companies frequently spend $ to find more reserves on an as-needed basis. Current usage trajectory of oil is roughly a century. Oil's problem is the CO2 emissions causing climate change.
YES! Peak of conventional oil was in 2008, Europe feels it economically. Global peak oil is around now. We are facing a big energy problem, and we don't have any viable alternatives (renewables are just not up to the task, even nuclear is not).
> We need to transition away from fossil fuels to avoid this fate.
Yes, IMHO that involves degrowth: do less with less. Doesn't mean living like in the Middle Age, but make technology that helps degrowth. That's a big technical challenge that is not in fashion (because we love to jump on ChatGPT APIs and feel like we are productive making prototypes using it).
> At some point the energy and resources required to drill a well will match the possible production, and new wells won't make sense, leading to collapse.
The world thought this around 2005 or so and then fracing technology changed everything. Every year new tech is being invented that makes previously uneconomic wells profitable to drill.
Further, there is still so much oil out there.
You are right about society collapsing and everyone dying without oil though, but I don’t think that will happen.
Unpopular opinion: Secure general purpose computing isn't available for the masses. In fact, most people here on HN don't have access to it either. Our current crop of widely used operating systems all share the same flaw, the ambient authority granted to any program that is run to access anything that the user account is permitted to access.
This causes a host of problems, and almost nobody is aware of them, or incorrectly assigns them to other causes. This results in a patchwork of "solutions" like virus scanners, signatures on executables, and a need for users to be exceedingly cautious about what they do with their computers. Because of this need for caution, users don't feel free to experiment with novel programs or web sites, lest their computer be infected with malware, etc.
Imagine your house without circuit breakers, or fuses. Imagine that there were no widespread use of them. The first shorted cord could potentially take down the power grid, and plunge millions into darkness. We can generally agree that circuit protection is a good idea.
When you run a program, you could explicitly specify the resources it is to have access to, instead of giving access to all of your files and folders. In fact, it doesn't even have to work differently in many cases, just replace the calls to file selection dialogs with equivalent calls to "power boxes" which return file access capabilities for the calling program. This allows the user to quickly and easily work in the manner to which they are accustomed, while simultaneously preventing malicious or just buggy code from accessing anything outside of the wishes of the user, no matter how evil the code is.
Spreading awareness of such systems, incorporating capability based security, is a worthy pursuit over the next decade.
Yes, there's much more work to be done here in the open source community, and I think it might have to be done there due to lack of aligned incentives otherwise.
For instance, on platforms such as Android that are meant to be secure in this way, I can't block an app from accessing the internet anytime it wants. Of course, the reason for that is that blocking internet access would also allow blocking ads, which Google has a negative incentive for.
Large corporations always take advantage of the sandboxing for anti-user features as well. In many apps I can download videos on desktop whether they want me to or not using inspect element etc, but this is often tricky or impossible on Android. Again, corporate incentives are aligned against the user.
Renewable power production is wasted due to curtailment.[1] All this free power is being wasted, which could be used to charge cars. The US has 2 billion parking lots, 290 million cars and cars are idle 23+ hours every day. All we need is a cable from nearest building to parking lot to charge electric cars. The technology exists.
This is a win-win opportunity, accelerate renewables and wean off of fossil fuels. I'm working with middle/high school kids on improving charging: HOA managed parks (a LOT of them), parks, schools, utility poles, apartment garages, all new construction ready for EVs (residential, retail and commercial).
I don't think it's solely a matter of getting more electric cars connected. Basically it's a mismatch between production and consumption by time (peak vs base loads) and so storage (whether electric cars or otherwise, like home storage solutions) acts as kinda a buffer. But so would utility scale storage (pumped hydro, giant battery farms), demand time shifting (smart water heaters, HVAC, dryers, etc.) or fossil fuel/hydro peaker plants.
But a big part of it isn't just the engineering but the human and consumer psychology. You can build all the infra, but convincing households to abide by your time of use schedule is challenging unless you force them into it (which many utilities do). People want to use their stuff whenever they want, not when it's most efficient for the grid.
That's where the storage is nice, letting the utility manage those fluctuations, but we can't produce enough battery capacity at a good cost right now. And there's geopolitics too, China controls a lot of the raw materials, and production of the downstream products are often limited by the Japanese and Korean battery manufacturers.
It's a multi faceted problem, not just something we can throw an infinite amount of EVs at.
So basically the battle to fight here is overcoming various regulations and restrictions on laying or hanging cables? A quest for a true hero.
The company, of course, needs to employ highly efficient, least-invasive, fastest ways to lay cable. But it's a serious power cable, it can't be easily snuck together with other existing cables or pipes, like it's done usually with fiber cables. Some technical innovation can belong here.
Someone threw in the rise of authoritarianism. The issue is much broader. It's one of efficiency; understanding and respect of technology and science (past, current and potential); influence of religions, mobs and fads (including scientific fads and mobs); understanding and respect for economics (mostly taken as a joke and molded to other obsessions); understanding and respect for time scale including the power of engineering at scale (as opposed to the next election or coup).
In general humanity has tremendous resources and potential power - and makes sad and shitty use of it. Yes, different people have different ideas on what is the right thing to do, but that's where the problem is. We need to become more effective at sorting that out. It's hopefully not simply a question of "enlightened authoritarianism can do it". This all deserves work and progress and our systems are dated and don't seem to be progressing currently (I mean over the past 20 years).
And corruption (in broad terms, not just money), and alignment, etc, etc.
The animals and ecosystems wide scale extinction seems to be a major threat I think. It’s something people don’t seem to notice much as it isn’t in the news constantly, but 60% of wild life disappearing in the last 70 years seems like a disaster snowball that is growing fast.
I think this is the threat that will be largely ignored, and because it is purposely ignored it will keep growing in the background until it takes us all down as a storm of natural disasters.
If companies can own the genetic code of the animals they protect, as long as those animals are alive, will the companies create the necessary structures to protect their animals?
As much as we are all about laissez-faire when it comes to dating and romance - I think we’re getting to a point that might cause some real strife in the western world. Seeing 60%+ of young men be single when only 30% of young women are single - it’s… worrying.
There’s no simple solution when we’ve become such an atomized society and so hyper individualistic. It’s a problem that we rarely care about as well. As soon as someone is no longer alone, they no longer care about this problem that society is going through. As long as the majority of people are getting together (even if it’s a slim majority), nothing will be done.
I think the fall of romantic relationships is a contributor to society becoming more individualistic. I’m not worried about birth rates like everyone else. I’m worried about our happiness.
Being single and alone and without any intimacy is a very unenjoyable existence for most people - and I don’t think there’s ever going to be a cure for it other than to be with someone who loves you.
Fundamentally we have only 1 problem worth solving: how to support 11bn people sustainably and equitably by 2050 (that's when the population peaks and levels out).
you can do a Wardley map that shows the needs of those people, then you can move down the chain of needs, until you find something you're apt to solve.
Personally I'm working on reducing eWaste by providing a global solution to carrying multiple mobile phones as many people do this for work.
2. Actively making us not noticing their existance by shitting us with some fake problems like gays, drugs, foreigners, terrorists, etc (different set of fake problems per country).
In the western democratic world billionaires are an inevitable side-effect of having a high standard of living for the general population. If you create a company that employs a million people and manages to remain profitable you'll be a billionaire even if you don't want to. The only way for you to not be a billionaire is to give up control of your company to someone else who will then be the billionaire.
We have yet to discover a system of government that both allows for a generally high standard of living yet at the same time prevents billionaires. Every variant that has been tried so far has inevitably led to total misery for the entire population.
I think the solution is not to prevent billionaires, but to prevent their ability to affect politicians, being very strict about anti-trust and so on.
By no means easy but I think preventing billionaires from even existing is a dystopian nightmare in any scenario.
Just because terrorism and drugs make you uncomfortable to think about, doesn't mean that those are fake problems. If you prefer to live your life in a bubble, go ahead that you do that while you can. But good luck trying to convince other people that the real world doesn't exist.
I think your reasoning is an example of modern Stockholm syndrome, where people get absolutely furious at anybody shining a light on a problem, instead of getting furious at the actual problem.
Some things I'd love to work on if I could make it work.
1. Food: Current farming practices emit a lot of CO2, hurts local ecosystems (nitrogen runoff), and consumes a lot of water/fertilizer. Currently proven methods could fix many of these problems.
2. Housing: Bringing modern technology to the construction of homes/apartments could dramatically lower costs. Kit homes are an example where only focusing on the tech and not the zoning/social issues doesn't improve the issues. I think realistically we could build a lot of high efficient, safe (much safer than codes require), and comfortable housing and drive down rental prices substantially while turning a huge profit (if you can sort out zoning).
3. Programming: Working in a large monorepo is amazing. Many people who work at a big tech company which has one will tell you about the amazing stuff you can do in this environment. Open source does not have one and most developers only ever see the multi-repo approach to software development. Building a parallel SWE-tooling stack which was "the monorepo of $FAANG but open source" would allow OSS devs to collaborate and build really cool things.
4. Compute: Non-profit compute infra for common good. Right now everyone is focused on decentralized apps and it's possible these are just too complicated for end users (I certainly am confused but I don't know if I'm just too old). If there was a not-profit-focused compute infra which gave out free compute/bandwidth/storage to open source public commons software that might be a good thing.
Monorepos put us in the blast radius of a lot of premature commits we could have avoided. I'd rather have a git submodule UI that isn't meant for aliens to operate, and use known-good dependencies.
The world population is collapsing at a rapid pace.
Our economic growth is based on a growing productive population.
Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.
Different parts of the world are dealing with population collapse.
Look at Japan, a xenophobic country facing population collapse. The total GDP has remain stagnant over the past 20 years.
Look at UAE, a country facing population collapse and acknowledging reality by handing our long-term residency permits to affulent immigrants, mostly Indian Hindus. They are even building the first Hindu temple in Islamic middle-east in Dubai!
Look at Africa, where the population growth combined with sectarian warfare is making for a troublesome living - https://pudding.cool/2018/07/airports/
South Africa is even regresssing. Rich businessman of Asian Indian origin who have lived for generations are already heading for UK/Canada. And with them tax base would collapse like Uganda (90% tax revenue came from Asian Indians in Uganda in 1972 - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-36132151).
Look at USA/Canada/Australia, all of them have low birth rate but compensate by being genuinely immigration friendly. They will grow while sucking even more productive population out of rest of the world.
The Europe would keep importing cheap labour (by choice) and welfare-loving immigrants from middle-east & Africa (by virtue of proximity). And they would transform Europe, how they tranformed Lebanon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WubIe3c5NGc, further imagine how the voting blocks would look like when whites are rich & old while non-whites are poor & young. Why would they not demand higher taxation and lower welfare policies?
China would have same fate as Japan. Xenophobia with a collapsing population. China would appear a lot of more timid.
12,000 years ago, when sea levels rose, Tasmania lost connection to mainland Australia, and this lead to decline of knowledge and tools over time.
We might see the same in our world.
So, I believe population collapse is a huge problem.
> Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.
Yet a growing productive population, in modern societies, relies on cheap (usually fossil) energy, which brings two problems: 1- fossil energy is not unlimited, and we're soon at peak production. 2- fossil energy brings climate change, which is very very bad for our survival at large.
I think the refusal to marry and have kids (regardless of it being necessary or by choice) is basically the ultimate worker’s strike. So far capitalists have relied upon the fact that there will always be workers to exploit, since they consider any care work necessary to raise families (for the next batch of exploited workers) as simply just given. Now that this is going away (people can actually choose to not bear the burden of reproduction!) first in Japan and South Korea but also in China and the rest of the developed world, the ultimate factor that has propelled economic growth so far is withering away…
>> The world population is collapsing at a rapid pace.
Maybe the second derivative of world popultion is collapsing but not the "world" population (at least if you mean world as a whole and not "developed world" only, because population of "developed world" maybe getting there).
>> Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.
If by prosperity you mean key economic indicators like GDP, then yes. But those economic models are so primitive that I question they usefulness and validity. The nature of work changed so much for last 100 years due to technology that it amazes me that we still belive that it can be summed up with few simple agregate numbers. Even the most important domains such as Agriculture, despite growing population, are needing less and less people to produce almost enough (if we include the food waste it's more than enough, but lacking fair distribution).
At this moment about 800 milion people are working in or around farming - that's only 10% of overall population. In year 2000 agriculture was employeeing more than 1 billion, that is - 16 % of population.
This is the real reason of production growth - technology advancements and popularisation, not population growth.
You’re missing the knowledge gained over time in your equation. You only need more people assuming that we don’t have technology that increases productivity.
I’m happy to see population numbers decrease and I’m ok with the stock market getting hit or having to make some sacrifices on lifestyle if that means a more sustainable way of living.
We keep hearing of food production issues caused by climate change. Why would we need more people? To starve them? To give them busywork? To have to figure out welfare?
I’m ok with going through shrinking pains, it should be a lesson that the fake reality we built for ourselves was not sustainable.
Technology: (1) getting off “free” platforms aka adtech. (2) Software quality aka actually providing good software that is intuitive to use and does what people need.
So what do we do with the billions who can't pay? They should stay offline until they can? I know I can pay now, but when I was starting out, I couldn't
The rise of authoritarianism. We need computing, banking, communication and other solutions that are more robust to governments and people generally that want to control what people can do. Decentralized (I don't mean anything to do with crypto nonsense) and simplified methods are needed, e.g currently any nontrivial computer and internet use require relying on a bunch of parties that could quickly turn hostile.
As someone who grew up in the 1980s, I find very amusing how no one seems to be worried about the nuclear war. Even though NATO is de facto in a war against Russia and could face China as well soon.
Phone addiction. I know plenty of people that average 10+ hours a day of screen time. Teenagers are even worse. We have tons of worrying signs and for now we’re not doing anything about it. Unfortunately not a problem that’s easily solved and the algorithms are only getting better.
I have been thinking more of this problem recently. Excess phone use seems to be affecting vitality, presence, connection, sharpness, and happiness, with older adults too. Can you share any more insights on the problem or ideas?
A website or app that turns exactly this question into action.
This post will fade away in a day or two. However, there could be a place where the answers are condensed into targets to which all available information is added. Structures could form that provide education, information and resources which lead to answers and implementations.
Here are a few that an organization would be able to work on right now according to the researchers at Charity Entrepeneurship. They might even take less than a decade to solve if things go well:
1. An organization that addresses antimicrobial resistance by advocating for better (pull) funding mechanisms to drive the development and responsible use of new antimicrobials.
2. An advocacy organization that promotes academic guidelines to restrict potentially harmful “dual-use” research.
3. A charity that rolls out dual HIV/syphilis rapid diagnostic tests, penicillin, and training to antenatal clinics, to effectively tackle congenital syphilis at scale in low-and middle-income countries.
4. An organization that distributes Oral Rehydration Solution and zinc co-packages to effectively treat life-threatening diarrhea in under five year olds in low-and middle-income countries.
5. A charity that builds healthcare capacity to provide “Kangaroo Care”, an exceptionally simple and cost-effective treatment, to avert hundreds of thousands of newborn deaths each year in low-and middle-income countries.
6. An organization that aims to reduce stock-outs of contraceptives and other essential medicines by improving the way they are delivered and managed within public health facilities.
Soil. It's more of a "how do we get along of people on board to take 5-20 years to rebuild what they have or are near".
Soil scouts, with patches for an acre that sequestors x amount units of carbon, or another that rewards those that have y ppms of living microbes.
If someone could recruit, deploy messaging, and enable long term action, at a minimum it'd be symbolic. In tandem it could be hopeful, and with success could be valuable.
Outside of the 'tech' realm: China's path in International Relations.
The next decade is decisive for China's future. She must make her moves soon or is very likely to be shut out of any path to hegemony for the century. What will be the response of the NATO+ countries to Chinese moves? Essentially, are we finally, for really-real-reals this time, going to see the 'end of history'?
Reports released by IPCC and other organizations [0] indicate that we have 15 years to take drastic action on the environment. This tracks with the extremely accurate prediction from The Limits to Growth [1] published in 1972.
If we do not take action on climate _now_ then _nothing_ is going to matter.
We will enter into an irreversible feedback loop that causes human extinction, yet it won't be apparent until it is literally on the doorstep for people to realize.
If you are not quitting your job and working to advance the existential threat of climate change and the main driver of the catastrophe (capitalism and perpetual growth) then you are wasting your (and your children's) time.
An excellent book on what needs to be done is Less is More by Jason Hickel [2]. This is the only problem that matters since literally existence depends on solving it. The time for deep concern is over. Action is needed and it is needed now. Education, degrowth, reuse, technology. So put everything else aside or you are laboring (and living) for nothing.
Unfortunately, this argument is no longer convincing. I've been hearing for most of my life, at least the last 40 or so years, that "action is needed now" and "we're 10-15 years away from disaster," which never comes. The doom-predictors' credibility is unfortunately totally shot at this point. We've been "almost beyond the point of no return" for as long as I can remember--it's the Truck Almost Hitting The Pole GIF[1]
The world will not end, just change. Maybe for the better? E.g. Siberia becoming fertile. Maybe even Sahara becoming green again!
We know what needs to be done. Build nuclear! But unfortunately anti-growth “green” parties and activists (like you I presume) have been pushing anti-nuclear propaganda for decades, stopping progress.
Nothing can be done on an individual level, so quitting your job or not having kids is completely pointless. Only top-down action (less regulation) can solve the problem. So vote!
Did you quit your job? And how are you working on climate change now?
> If you are not quitting your job and working to advance the existential threat of climate change and the main driver of the catastrophe (capitalism and perpetual growth) then you are wasting your (and your children's) time.
Or did you decide to waste your time (and possibly the time of your children?)
Grand problems for any decade until there are figured out.
- General artificial intelligence - being able to effectively model how the world works, and search for solutions in that model.
- Energy - nuclear fusion, cheap artificial photosynthesis, cheap solar such that we can have solar on almost every surface facing the sun.
- Molecular assembly - figure out how to custom program DNA from scratch to build what we need. Imagine building more efficient trees where it captures CO2 and sunlight into gasoline, or strong timber directly.
Each of these can go quite wrong if not developed with safety in mind.
I call it the Mind (intelligence), Body (molecular assembly), Energy (putting energy to work) problems.
AI will upend the economy before we create skynet. All the people worried about AI destroying society are looking in the wrong direction: they think some evil AGI will somehow hack the nukes and kill us all, but we'll kill each other over the increasingly scarce share of global wealth as our jobs are eliminated one by one.
It never was useful, people differentiate based on the choices they make outside of school and the people they meet. Public education is there to level out the childhood trauma and normalize things. It’s a big sander that levels down.
- Figuring out how to build resilient, long-lasting kinship structures capable of surviving reduced state and market capacity. This means comms platforms that are encrypted, easy to set up and use, decentralized, and safe.
- Novel food sources (we just had the four hottest days on record, in succession)
- Adversarial health care (e.g. getting an abortion in a dominionist state)
Actually unpopular opinion: Existential risk from AI.
I think people think "AI is overhyped" etc, but there is a difference between there being too many low value AI startups right now (a bubble) and whether a few top labs will produce an AI that threatens humanity.
Even if it's a ten percent chance, it's a huge problem that we need to address.
imho. with the perspective of 2023, there are only 2 major problems;
* (real) war
eg. "large" ones between superpowers ... not decimating goat-herders equipped with not much more than ak47 & towels around their heads somewhere in the lesser developed areas of the planet.
Addressing climate change and sustainability is crucial. Investing in renewable energy, promoting circular economy practices, and developing innovative solutions for waste management are worthwhile endeavors.
Rapid increases of health problems we haven't dealt with for decades already that we need more information rapidly to figure out better solutions. Mast cell disorders are a good example here. Autoimmunity as well.
The biggest threat is health. The whole world have become helpless in front of Corona. World class medical institution, labs, scientist, colleges were weeping like an orphaned child. Don't think other than health. If we will remain, then we will think and work. For anything else human life needs.
Some of these? They're not problems to be solved, they are dilemmas to suffer. Your ingenuity is not all-powerful and it's about time someone knocked the "software will eat the world" ego trip out of this crowd.
Technology is not going to "save" humanity. It raised standards of living, and it created problems where previously there were none. This crowd has a habit of saying that technology is neutral, that the positive and negative consequences that come from it are people problems. Technology is a people problem, but besides that, they take the hypocritical stance of taking credit for the positive consequences of technology yet pushing the responsibility for negative consequences of technology onto individuals - individuals who react to emerging technology, not create it. Parents are supposed to limit a teen's phone time to prevent addiction but only lip service is paid to disincentivizing the psyops that Big Tech use to create the addiction in the first place.
Swap your stats, trade a little intelligence for wisdom. How many times here have people brought out the could-vs-should quote, completely oblivious to the fact that they were the scientist fools, I've lost count.
The fascination with technological solutions and the marrow-deep, if well-hidden abhorrence of nature will kill us all, and sooner than many here think. How hot are the waters off Florida? How long is Arizona's record breaking heatwave? How many floods did we have this week? You. Won't. TeChNoLoGy. Your. Way. Out. Of. These. "Problems".
Patterns hold, until they don't. Population isn't going to keep growing forever just because Malthus was wrong in his time. Progress isn't guaranteed just because you wished really hard to santa that the singularity would happen in your lifetime. "Humanity has never suffered an extinction event, so it never will" is an abysmally stupid sentence that anyone here should be ashamed of unironically spewing from their mouths. Humanity also couldn't harness nuclear power, until suddenly it could. On the existential threats humanity faces - as many here are so fond of sneering at AI-doomers, reality isn't fiction, so we're NOT guaranteed a plucky hero who clutches victory from the jaws of defeat, as the media that brought us Skynet would have you believe.
Making money the be-all end-all of business and then making business encroah on every other sphere of life is why standards of living are dropping, and every time you feed the beast with rent-based economies you make life worse. When you maximize profit, it comes at the cost of everything else, up to and including your life.
Growth isn't infinite, except for the stupidity of hopium smokers here. Please explain how a planet made of finite mass and energy can keep GDP going up, up, up forever? Based in reality, please.
Limits - they're okay to have. The obsession with breaking all limits, with optimizing for maximum efficiency, are biological edicts taken to an extreme too far to walk back from.
"One of the more annoying and least explicable features of life in the 21st Century is our hubris in glibly assuming that because we have better technology, we are smarter, wiser, and more virtuous than our ancestors." (and also immune to the things that brought down civilizations in the past. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.)
Creating an open source graph of health symptoms, illnesses, medications etc. so that there can be statistical models / AIs that do a valuable pre-assessment to inform clients and support doctors. If we had something like this, maybe risk factors for critical immune reactions on COVID vaccination would've been known earlier and that could've prevented unnecessary deaths.
Water!!! With drying rivers, increasing pollution, potable water for humans, flora and fauna is becoming a key necessity.
The other side of this increasing pollution - this dramatically reduces the amount of potable water available.
THIS (m'thinks) is / will be a key reason for conflicts, for the continuation and accelleration of the ongoing extinction event...
If we must survive, this is one problem that needs to be solved.
There are others too: handling/processing/disposing pollution/garbage at scale and sustainable power generation but they are currently the next priority.
My wild-ass guesses of where the future is going and its associated problems:
I think we are going to see additional polarization in online discussion and we will continue to see this spill into the physical world as violence. This level of division has not been seen at this level in modern western societies. More people have taken on their political sports team as the very thing they identify with and their opposing team(s) have been painted as conspiratorial psychopaths, preventing discussion across the aisle from even happening at a meaningful level. In the US, we will see a clear bifurcation of states where any remaining purple states will solidify their leaning during the 2024 election and we won’t see this shift again in a meaningful way for at least a few election cycles.
We are going to see massive, non-collateralized debt defaults and financial companies will attempt to claw back that money, with those who continued to borrow above their means and were hit with variable APR that doubled or tripled interest on their accounts, minimum payments go up, and it becomes unsustainable. We will see a 50% rise in bankruptcies over the next 18 months and a 100-200% increase over the next 5 years. Student loan default will be rampant as payment of these loans will become due again in October, destroying any hope of credit access in the near future to these people. Banks will foreclose but not be have the bandwidth to repossess all the property, leaving empty shells of neighborhoods. The labor market will sharply flip in favor of the employers and labor will lose a lot of bargaining power or other gains received over the last few years. Rent will go up, private equity will buy houses for cheap, mortgage rates will stay just under 10%.
China’s one child policy that began 40 years ago is starting to be felt, with only half as many people at their full earning potential (30s-40s) trying to support an aging population. The bottom has fallen out of their labor force, the CCP’s grip on the people is becoming tighter, but one day they are going to flip the light switch in their home and will be without power. Their strong, centralized government will falter and diminish or outright just fail, the north China plateau will revert to its wasteland type state, formerly propped up by will of the government. Tianjin will be the only city to survive and will receive the majority of refugees from the northern areas. Tianjin, Shanghai and Hong Kong/Shenzhen will revert to city states and will self-govern. Fragmented China will become a huge consumer of global food as they will be incapable of growing their own, with the supply of nitrogen fertilizer and potash being clinched by the Russo-Ukraine war and reserves dwindling, global food shortages will be occur within the next two years.
Russia will continue sending every able bodied man into the nato-powered meat grinder of Ukraine until a proper overthrow of Putin occurs or they run out of people. This will create an absence of men in this generation which will
be worse than their losses sustained during WWII. The vacuum of power within the hollowed-out Russia will not last long and I worry to think who will rise up as the next leader. Ukraine east of the Dnieper river will be mostly leveled by then, further exacerbating the food shortages. Ukraine will eventually join NATO, Russia will attempt to create the USSR 2.0 from mainly the west Asian countries.
We may be see a collapse of generalized globalization if the US Navy decides it’s not in its best interest to keep peace on the high seas causing insurance rates to skyrocket and shipping via international waters becomes a dangerous prospect. A lot of our production will move to Mexico where there is an educated and motivated population that is already producing goods of higher quality than China. Trade between the US-Canada-Mexico will become increasingly important due to access to both resources and labor that all 3 bring proped up by agreed upon free trade. This transition will be long and will come with challenges.
The EU will lose more membership and if Germany is unable to fully replace its energy needs, the EU as a whole will diminish. The Anglosphere may create its own free trade agreement, maybe even going so far to allow for free travel amongst the group (but this will be symbolic as very few counties share land boarders). This will create tensions with N. American free trade and Mexico, perhaps prompting Latin America counties into creating its own Schengen-type zone. America-Mexico relations will sour but the trade relations will be to solidified to do anything.
I was going to make a reply to OP about how most problems are moot if we don't tackle polarization and (for want of a better term) political decline. But your comment is more comprehensive than mine would have been, so I'll just add my two cents here.
> I think we are going to see additional polarization in online discussion and we will continue to see this spill into the physical world as violence
I wonder whether online discussion is at the source of this, but I doubt it. Perhaps this is something for sociologists to ponder over. We have have access to more information than at any point in history, but it seems like our knowledge (and empathy) haven't grown by the same amount.
> Russia will continue sending every able bodied man into the nato-powered meat grinder of Ukraine until a proper overthrow of Putin occurs or they run out of people.
The idea of a Russia without Putin frightens me. Not because I'm a fan, but because it seems like every likely alternative is even worse. A politically unstable (nay, volatile!) country with a huge stockpile of nukes ought to worry everyone. I hope humanity can find a way out of this shitty situation.
> The EU will lose more membership
Probably. And this ties in nicely with your first paragraph, polarization is a big contributor to this. By and large, Europe has never been as safe or as prosperous as it is today, yet everywhere extremism is on the rise. The EU (or at least the Commission) has a reputation of being a busybody everywhere except for where it matters. Political reform seems needed, so that people at least feel represented, but that's unlikely to happen when so many Europeans are devolving into an "us vs them" mindset.
Xanax/benzos are the most effective psych medicine, deserve to be over the counter, but can be fatally overdosed. All mental drugs and others such as chemotherapy need to be precisely targeted at limited part of an organ.
2030 4 high-NA EUV fabs will have 1.4 nano RiscV chips; rollable microLED; solid state battery. That's still not paper thin all day phones.
1 passenger, only autopilot drones should transport snakebite victims in dangerous countries.
How big of a problem are "snake bite victims"? I live in Australia, one of those countries that people would class as "dangerous" with regards to snakes, and... There's only been about 40 deaths in the past 20 years...
It's just a really strange thing to ping as a "big problem to solve", and such a bizarrely expensive solution to the problem, too. I think that a much better solution would be improving development and access to antivenin
In my experience benzos are effective in the same sense alcohol can be. They don't really solve anything, not to mention are highly addicting.
I'm sincerely doubtful that being able to target their impact more tomorrow the brain alone makes a reasonable difference.
Getting at the mental health crisis might take a multipronged approach but I'm not sure this is an essential prong but I'm open to arguments to the contrary.
There's absolutely no reason for benzos to be over the counter. They're extremely addictive, can have really bad side effects and contraindications, and can be fatal during withdrawal. You should be under the supervision of a physician if you're taking them.
You must be joking. Xanax/Benzos are highly addictive and all they do is shove whatever problem you have for "the next day", just like alcohol. They don't treat shit.
xerxesaa|2 years ago
Who will care for these people? How will we deal with the consequences of flat population growth? How will we deal with the stock market's expectations of perpetual growth when the underlying population itself is not growing (and especially since productivity has also been relatively flat)?
ssss11|2 years ago
TheFreim|2 years ago
I'm hoping that we start to see an increase in pro-family policies. A couple rough ideas to look into would be decreasing taxation (or giving refunds/payments) based on how many children a productive family has, providing financial support so families can buy homes, and promoting wage increases so a single income can support a family to allow one to work and the other to focus on raising the children.
yieldcrv|2 years ago
By adjusting which price to earnings multiple we want to tolerate, just like we always do
Or take a bearish position if it happens to match your risk tolerance at the time
The stock market will be fine, people will trade shares, who cares if the market price is greater or less than today’s
Denatured9654|2 years ago
rlupi|2 years ago
If you check the recordings, some sessions were directly focused on connecting problem experts, data access, computing resources and people with skills or idea or passion. The opportunities span from students or researchers, up to what will take innovative companies or bigtech to solve, or government and international organizations.
It was also the place were a lot of discussions about AI regulation took place. The discussions and the decisions that will follow from that meeting will shape the world to come IMHO.
willmeyers|2 years ago
nojvek|2 years ago
Do they have measurement in the goals over time?
TheAceOfHearts|2 years ago
Every physicist and engineer in the world should probably try dedicating at least one or two month of their life to figuring out fusion.
If humanity could pay a trillion dollars to instantly unlock fusion it would still be considered a bargain. And yet we don't treat research into that field as something with such a potentially massive impact.
palata|2 years ago
Fusion would be great to finish making life on Earth look like surviving on Mars. Is that what you want?
What we need (and will most likely face anyway) is to do less with less. Organise society to live the forced degrowth that is coming, and survive the climate changes that we started and cannot possibly change anymore.
leptoniscool|2 years ago
Whereas solar power is cheaper than coal now. Also on the horizon is thorium reactors.
jacknews|2 years ago
D-T fusion is not as clean as is touted, and the economics just aren't ever going to make it viable compared to ever-cheaper solar, wind, batteries/energy storage, etc.
Better fission designs OTOH are worth pursuing, and also deep geothermal, and maybe one or two of the CCS options though they seem a bit greenwashy.
fullstackchris|2 years ago
oli5679|2 years ago
My understanding is that that raw materials are a low % of total cost for fission, waste disposal is not that hard, and that it's technically more complicated and expensive to build a fusion plan than a fission plant.
I found this pretty interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tYlXY19I3c
t312227|2 years ago
supportengineer|2 years ago
mynonameaccount|2 years ago
Based on your requirements, this is already solved. Pull more oil out of the ground. Burn more trees.
AND, throwing money at a problem will definitely solve fusion.
Give people cheap energy and people will use it up. Just look at cryptomining. Then you are back to needing more energy. People will do just fine with expensive energy. They will adapt.
mikewarot|2 years ago
The US produces large amounts of oil via fracking, which requires more resources to drill and produce than previous methods. At the same time, the wells tend to decline at 40% per year. These wells are making up a larger percentage of our fossil fuel production as time goes by. At some point the energy and resources required to drill a well will match the possible production, and new wells won't make sense, leading to collapse.
Without fossil fuels for transportation, and especially as chemical feedstock to creating fertilizers, food shortages would quickly appear world-wide.
We need to transition away from fossil fuels to avoid this fate. In doing so, we'll also help reduce, and perhaps eliminate the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which is a far more immediate concern in the minds of many.
reducesuffering|2 years ago
proven reserves/consumption = 47 years left
https://www.worldometers.info/oil/
palata|2 years ago
> We need to transition away from fossil fuels to avoid this fate.
Yes, IMHO that involves degrowth: do less with less. Doesn't mean living like in the Middle Age, but make technology that helps degrowth. That's a big technical challenge that is not in fashion (because we love to jump on ChatGPT APIs and feel like we are productive making prototypes using it).
MaxHoppersGhost|2 years ago
The world thought this around 2005 or so and then fracing technology changed everything. Every year new tech is being invented that makes previously uneconomic wells profitable to drill.
Further, there is still so much oil out there.
You are right about society collapsing and everyone dying without oil though, but I don’t think that will happen.
zhte415|2 years ago
Your comment also hints at the repostes by Engels (technological progress) or Ricardo (pricing out, or alternative).
To a united communist-capitalist solution! And a worthy path for OP.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism
mikewarot|2 years ago
This causes a host of problems, and almost nobody is aware of them, or incorrectly assigns them to other causes. This results in a patchwork of "solutions" like virus scanners, signatures on executables, and a need for users to be exceedingly cautious about what they do with their computers. Because of this need for caution, users don't feel free to experiment with novel programs or web sites, lest their computer be infected with malware, etc.
Imagine your house without circuit breakers, or fuses. Imagine that there were no widespread use of them. The first shorted cord could potentially take down the power grid, and plunge millions into darkness. We can generally agree that circuit protection is a good idea.
When you run a program, you could explicitly specify the resources it is to have access to, instead of giving access to all of your files and folders. In fact, it doesn't even have to work differently in many cases, just replace the calls to file selection dialogs with equivalent calls to "power boxes" which return file access capabilities for the calling program. This allows the user to quickly and easily work in the manner to which they are accustomed, while simultaneously preventing malicious or just buggy code from accessing anything outside of the wishes of the user, no matter how evil the code is.
Spreading awareness of such systems, incorporating capability based security, is a worthy pursuit over the next decade.
s1gsegv|2 years ago
For instance, on platforms such as Android that are meant to be secure in this way, I can't block an app from accessing the internet anytime it wants. Of course, the reason for that is that blocking internet access would also allow blocking ads, which Google has a negative incentive for.
Large corporations always take advantage of the sandboxing for anti-user features as well. In many apps I can download videos on desktop whether they want me to or not using inspect element etc, but this is often tricky or impossible on Android. Again, corporate incentives are aligned against the user.
EternalCarnage|2 years ago
https://youtu.be/1seNMSamtxM
This embedded computer system has access to all your memory devices.
Disabling it? Not convenient.
thelastgallon|2 years ago
This is a win-win opportunity, accelerate renewables and wean off of fossil fuels. I'm working with middle/high school kids on improving charging: HOA managed parks (a LOT of them), parks, schools, utility poles, apartment garages, all new construction ready for EVs (residential, retail and commercial).
curtailment is the deliberate reduction in output below what could have been produced in order to balance energy supply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtailment_(electricity)
solardev|2 years ago
But a big part of it isn't just the engineering but the human and consumer psychology. You can build all the infra, but convincing households to abide by your time of use schedule is challenging unless you force them into it (which many utilities do). People want to use their stuff whenever they want, not when it's most efficient for the grid.
That's where the storage is nice, letting the utility manage those fluctuations, but we can't produce enough battery capacity at a good cost right now. And there's geopolitics too, China controls a lot of the raw materials, and production of the downstream products are often limited by the Japanese and Korean battery manufacturers.
It's a multi faceted problem, not just something we can throw an infinite amount of EVs at.
nine_k|2 years ago
The company, of course, needs to employ highly efficient, least-invasive, fastest ways to lay cable. But it's a serious power cable, it can't be easily snuck together with other existing cables or pipes, like it's done usually with fiber cables. Some technical innovation can belong here.
creer|2 years ago
Someone threw in the rise of authoritarianism. The issue is much broader. It's one of efficiency; understanding and respect of technology and science (past, current and potential); influence of religions, mobs and fads (including scientific fads and mobs); understanding and respect for economics (mostly taken as a joke and molded to other obsessions); understanding and respect for time scale including the power of engineering at scale (as opposed to the next election or coup).
In general humanity has tremendous resources and potential power - and makes sad and shitty use of it. Yes, different people have different ideas on what is the right thing to do, but that's where the problem is. We need to become more effective at sorting that out. It's hopefully not simply a question of "enlightened authoritarianism can do it". This all deserves work and progress and our systems are dated and don't seem to be progressing currently (I mean over the past 20 years).
And corruption (in broad terms, not just money), and alignment, etc, etc.
balder1991|2 years ago
I think this is the threat that will be largely ignored, and because it is purposely ignored it will keep growing in the background until it takes us all down as a storm of natural disasters.
slushh|2 years ago
If companies can own the genetic code of the animals they protect, as long as those animals are alive, will the companies create the necessary structures to protect their animals?
unknown|2 years ago
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bradlys|2 years ago
There’s no simple solution when we’ve become such an atomized society and so hyper individualistic. It’s a problem that we rarely care about as well. As soon as someone is no longer alone, they no longer care about this problem that society is going through. As long as the majority of people are getting together (even if it’s a slim majority), nothing will be done.
I think the fall of romantic relationships is a contributor to society becoming more individualistic. I’m not worried about birth rates like everyone else. I’m worried about our happiness.
Being single and alone and without any intimacy is a very unenjoyable existence for most people - and I don’t think there’s ever going to be a cure for it other than to be with someone who loves you.
orlin_georgiev|2 years ago
[deleted]
dools|2 years ago
you can do a Wardley map that shows the needs of those people, then you can move down the chain of needs, until you find something you're apt to solve.
Personally I'm working on reducing eWaste by providing a global solution to carrying multiple mobile phones as many people do this for work.
dndn1|2 years ago
Bret Victor did a good subdivision into sub-problems for a technologist here - which probably suits this audience:
http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange
eimrine|2 years ago
1. Exist
2. Actively making us not noticing their existance by shitting us with some fake problems like gays, drugs, foreigners, terrorists, etc (different set of fake problems per country).
DoingIsLearning|2 years ago
https://v.redd.it/6wourzysxuma1/DASH_720.mp4
Kon5ole|2 years ago
We have yet to discover a system of government that both allows for a generally high standard of living yet at the same time prevents billionaires. Every variant that has been tried so far has inevitably led to total misery for the entire population.
I think the solution is not to prevent billionaires, but to prevent their ability to affect politicians, being very strict about anti-trust and so on.
By no means easy but I think preventing billionaires from even existing is a dystopian nightmare in any scenario.
carlosjobim|2 years ago
I think your reasoning is an example of modern Stockholm syndrome, where people get absolutely furious at anybody shining a light on a problem, instead of getting furious at the actual problem.
bruceb|2 years ago
kfrzcode|2 years ago
[deleted]
camdenlock|2 years ago
How about 999,999,999? Still bad?
How about 900,000,000? No?
Hm. How much is too much, and why?
gravypod|2 years ago
1. Food: Current farming practices emit a lot of CO2, hurts local ecosystems (nitrogen runoff), and consumes a lot of water/fertilizer. Currently proven methods could fix many of these problems.
2. Housing: Bringing modern technology to the construction of homes/apartments could dramatically lower costs. Kit homes are an example where only focusing on the tech and not the zoning/social issues doesn't improve the issues. I think realistically we could build a lot of high efficient, safe (much safer than codes require), and comfortable housing and drive down rental prices substantially while turning a huge profit (if you can sort out zoning).
3. Programming: Working in a large monorepo is amazing. Many people who work at a big tech company which has one will tell you about the amazing stuff you can do in this environment. Open source does not have one and most developers only ever see the multi-repo approach to software development. Building a parallel SWE-tooling stack which was "the monorepo of $FAANG but open source" would allow OSS devs to collaborate and build really cool things.
4. Compute: Non-profit compute infra for common good. Right now everyone is focused on decentralized apps and it's possible these are just too complicated for end users (I certainly am confused but I don't know if I'm just too old). If there was a not-profit-focused compute infra which gave out free compute/bandwidth/storage to open source public commons software that might be a good thing.
erik_seaberg|2 years ago
john_max_1|2 years ago
Our economic growth is based on a growing productive population.
Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.
Different parts of the world are dealing with population collapse.
Look at Japan, a xenophobic country facing population collapse. The total GDP has remain stagnant over the past 20 years.
Look at UAE, a country facing population collapse and acknowledging reality by handing our long-term residency permits to affulent immigrants, mostly Indian Hindus. They are even building the first Hindu temple in Islamic middle-east in Dubai!
Look at Africa, where the population growth combined with sectarian warfare is making for a troublesome living - https://pudding.cool/2018/07/airports/ South Africa is even regresssing. Rich businessman of Asian Indian origin who have lived for generations are already heading for UK/Canada. And with them tax base would collapse like Uganda (90% tax revenue came from Asian Indians in Uganda in 1972 - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-36132151).
Look at USA/Canada/Australia, all of them have low birth rate but compensate by being genuinely immigration friendly. They will grow while sucking even more productive population out of rest of the world.
The Europe would keep importing cheap labour (by choice) and welfare-loving immigrants from middle-east & Africa (by virtue of proximity). And they would transform Europe, how they tranformed Lebanon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WubIe3c5NGc, further imagine how the voting blocks would look like when whites are rich & old while non-whites are poor & young. Why would they not demand higher taxation and lower welfare policies?
China would have same fate as Japan. Xenophobia with a collapsing population. China would appear a lot of more timid.
12,000 years ago, when sea levels rose, Tasmania lost connection to mainland Australia, and this lead to decline of knowledge and tools over time.
We might see the same in our world.
So, I believe population collapse is a huge problem.
defrost|2 years ago
It's climbed from 2.6 billion in 1950 to 7.8 billion in 2020.
If world poulation halved we'd still be at 1975 population levels .. a time when the world functioned.
> Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.
We live on a finite planet with limited resources, the notion of unlimited growth being essential for continued status quo is flawed thinking.
Our greatest challenge as a species on this planet is to learn how to live well within our means.
palata|2 years ago
Yet a growing productive population, in modern societies, relies on cheap (usually fossil) energy, which brings two problems: 1- fossil energy is not unlimited, and we're soon at peak production. 2- fossil energy brings climate change, which is very very bad for our survival at large.
cyber_kinetist|2 years ago
I think the refusal to marry and have kids (regardless of it being necessary or by choice) is basically the ultimate worker’s strike. So far capitalists have relied upon the fact that there will always be workers to exploit, since they consider any care work necessary to raise families (for the next batch of exploited workers) as simply just given. Now that this is going away (people can actually choose to not bear the burden of reproduction!) first in Japan and South Korea but also in China and the rest of the developed world, the ultimate factor that has propelled economic growth so far is withering away…
v-erne|2 years ago
Maybe the second derivative of world popultion is collapsing but not the "world" population (at least if you mean world as a whole and not "developed world" only, because population of "developed world" maybe getting there).
>> Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.
If by prosperity you mean key economic indicators like GDP, then yes. But those economic models are so primitive that I question they usefulness and validity. The nature of work changed so much for last 100 years due to technology that it amazes me that we still belive that it can be summed up with few simple agregate numbers. Even the most important domains such as Agriculture, despite growing population, are needing less and less people to produce almost enough (if we include the food waste it's more than enough, but lacking fair distribution). At this moment about 800 milion people are working in or around farming - that's only 10% of overall population. In year 2000 agriculture was employeeing more than 1 billion, that is - 16 % of population.
This is the real reason of production growth - technology advancements and popularisation, not population growth.
culopatin|2 years ago
I’m happy to see population numbers decrease and I’m ok with the stock market getting hit or having to make some sacrifices on lifestyle if that means a more sustainable way of living.
We keep hearing of food production issues caused by climate change. Why would we need more people? To starve them? To give them busywork? To have to figure out welfare?
I’m ok with going through shrinking pains, it should be a lesson that the fake reality we built for ourselves was not sustainable.
ssss11|2 years ago
abenga|2 years ago
version_five|2 years ago
Rodeoclash|2 years ago
whobre|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
gmuslera|2 years ago
Problems will not stop to appear while that is not solved. The whole system becomes fragile, and minor disturbances will become major ones.
bequanna|2 years ago
Why would this be the likely outcome?
serjester|2 years ago
madrasman|2 years ago
toomuchtodo|2 years ago
toomuchtodo|2 years ago
https://youtu.be/9FppammO1zk
slushh|2 years ago
This post will fade away in a day or two. However, there could be a place where the answers are condensed into targets to which all available information is added. Structures could form that provide education, information and resources which lead to answers and implementations.
samantp|2 years ago
riezebos|2 years ago
1. An organization that addresses antimicrobial resistance by advocating for better (pull) funding mechanisms to drive the development and responsible use of new antimicrobials.
2. An advocacy organization that promotes academic guidelines to restrict potentially harmful “dual-use” research.
3. A charity that rolls out dual HIV/syphilis rapid diagnostic tests, penicillin, and training to antenatal clinics, to effectively tackle congenital syphilis at scale in low-and middle-income countries.
4. An organization that distributes Oral Rehydration Solution and zinc co-packages to effectively treat life-threatening diarrhea in under five year olds in low-and middle-income countries.
5. A charity that builds healthcare capacity to provide “Kangaroo Care”, an exceptionally simple and cost-effective treatment, to avert hundreds of thousands of newborn deaths each year in low-and middle-income countries.
6. An organization that aims to reduce stock-outs of contraceptives and other essential medicines by improving the way they are delivered and managed within public health facilities.
Source: https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/post/announcing-our-...
nosmokewhereiam|2 years ago
Soil scouts, with patches for an acre that sequestors x amount units of carbon, or another that rewards those that have y ppms of living microbes.
If someone could recruit, deploy messaging, and enable long term action, at a minimum it'd be symbolic. In tandem it could be hopeful, and with success could be valuable.
Part biology, part humint.
See: JADAM and Korean natural farming.
Balgair|2 years ago
The next decade is decisive for China's future. She must make her moves soon or is very likely to be shut out of any path to hegemony for the century. What will be the response of the NATO+ countries to Chinese moves? Essentially, are we finally, for really-real-reals this time, going to see the 'end of history'?
rajanaccros|2 years ago
If we do not take action on climate _now_ then _nothing_ is going to matter.
We will enter into an irreversible feedback loop that causes human extinction, yet it won't be apparent until it is literally on the doorstep for people to realize.
If you are not quitting your job and working to advance the existential threat of climate change and the main driver of the catastrophe (capitalism and perpetual growth) then you are wasting your (and your children's) time.
An excellent book on what needs to be done is Less is More by Jason Hickel [2]. This is the only problem that matters since literally existence depends on solving it. The time for deep concern is over. Action is needed and it is needed now. Education, degrowth, reuse, technology. So put everything else aside or you are laboring (and living) for nothing.
[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01157-x
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
[2]: https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more
ryandrake|2 years ago
1: https://tenor.com/view/truck-crash-test-pole-doesnt-reach-gi...
tomp|2 years ago
We know what needs to be done. Build nuclear! But unfortunately anti-growth “green” parties and activists (like you I presume) have been pushing anti-nuclear propaganda for decades, stopping progress.
Nothing can be done on an individual level, so quitting your job or not having kids is completely pointless. Only top-down action (less regulation) can solve the problem. So vote!
leksak|2 years ago
> If you are not quitting your job and working to advance the existential threat of climate change and the main driver of the catastrophe (capitalism and perpetual growth) then you are wasting your (and your children's) time.
Or did you decide to waste your time (and possibly the time of your children?)
nojvek|2 years ago
- General artificial intelligence - being able to effectively model how the world works, and search for solutions in that model.
- Energy - nuclear fusion, cheap artificial photosynthesis, cheap solar such that we can have solar on almost every surface facing the sun.
- Molecular assembly - figure out how to custom program DNA from scratch to build what we need. Imagine building more efficient trees where it captures CO2 and sunlight into gasoline, or strong timber directly.
Each of these can go quite wrong if not developed with safety in mind.
I call it the Mind (intelligence), Body (molecular assembly), Energy (putting energy to work) problems.
peter-m80|2 years ago
shortrounddev2|2 years ago
iamjk|2 years ago
hermiod|2 years ago
A pandemic brought a ton of global infrastructure to it's knees, and it could have been so much worse.
What if that happened again?
dakotasmith|2 years ago
culopatin|2 years ago
1attice|2 years ago
- Novel food sources (we just had the four hottest days on record, in succession)
- Adversarial health care (e.g. getting an abortion in a dominionist state)
Teever|2 years ago
flir|2 years ago
habitue|2 years ago
I think people think "AI is overhyped" etc, but there is a difference between there being too many low value AI startups right now (a bubble) and whether a few top labs will produce an AI that threatens humanity.
Even if it's a ten percent chance, it's a huge problem that we need to address.
Madmallard|2 years ago
kabr|2 years ago
Toast_|2 years ago
revskill|2 years ago
flir|2 years ago
t312227|2 years ago
* (real) war
eg. "large" ones between superpowers ... not decimating goat-herders equipped with not much more than ak47 & towels around their heads somewhere in the lesser developed areas of the planet.
* climate-change
eg. taming the resource-hunger of capitalism.
PraetorianGourd|2 years ago
s-kiel|2 years ago
Madmallard|2 years ago
p1esk|2 years ago
MaxHoppersGhost|2 years ago
pieter_mj|2 years ago
Emphasizing metabolic (mitochondrial) holistic health approaches in medicine.
nickd2001|2 years ago
GirishSharma643|2 years ago
soultrees|2 years ago
CatWChainsaw|2 years ago
Technology is not going to "save" humanity. It raised standards of living, and it created problems where previously there were none. This crowd has a habit of saying that technology is neutral, that the positive and negative consequences that come from it are people problems. Technology is a people problem, but besides that, they take the hypocritical stance of taking credit for the positive consequences of technology yet pushing the responsibility for negative consequences of technology onto individuals - individuals who react to emerging technology, not create it. Parents are supposed to limit a teen's phone time to prevent addiction but only lip service is paid to disincentivizing the psyops that Big Tech use to create the addiction in the first place.
Swap your stats, trade a little intelligence for wisdom. How many times here have people brought out the could-vs-should quote, completely oblivious to the fact that they were the scientist fools, I've lost count.
The fascination with technological solutions and the marrow-deep, if well-hidden abhorrence of nature will kill us all, and sooner than many here think. How hot are the waters off Florida? How long is Arizona's record breaking heatwave? How many floods did we have this week? You. Won't. TeChNoLoGy. Your. Way. Out. Of. These. "Problems".
Patterns hold, until they don't. Population isn't going to keep growing forever just because Malthus was wrong in his time. Progress isn't guaranteed just because you wished really hard to santa that the singularity would happen in your lifetime. "Humanity has never suffered an extinction event, so it never will" is an abysmally stupid sentence that anyone here should be ashamed of unironically spewing from their mouths. Humanity also couldn't harness nuclear power, until suddenly it could. On the existential threats humanity faces - as many here are so fond of sneering at AI-doomers, reality isn't fiction, so we're NOT guaranteed a plucky hero who clutches victory from the jaws of defeat, as the media that brought us Skynet would have you believe.
Making money the be-all end-all of business and then making business encroah on every other sphere of life is why standards of living are dropping, and every time you feed the beast with rent-based economies you make life worse. When you maximize profit, it comes at the cost of everything else, up to and including your life.
Growth isn't infinite, except for the stupidity of hopium smokers here. Please explain how a planet made of finite mass and energy can keep GDP going up, up, up forever? Based in reality, please.
Limits - they're okay to have. The obsession with breaking all limits, with optimizing for maximum efficiency, are biological edicts taken to an extreme too far to walk back from.
"One of the more annoying and least explicable features of life in the 21st Century is our hubris in glibly assuming that because we have better technology, we are smarter, wiser, and more virtuous than our ancestors." (and also immune to the things that brought down civilizations in the past. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.)
pabe|2 years ago
cratermoon|2 years ago
rinka_singh|2 years ago
The other side of this increasing pollution - this dramatically reduces the amount of potable water available.
THIS (m'thinks) is / will be a key reason for conflicts, for the continuation and accelleration of the ongoing extinction event...
If we must survive, this is one problem that needs to be solved.
There are others too: handling/processing/disposing pollution/garbage at scale and sustainable power generation but they are currently the next priority.
poisonborz|2 years ago
lakomen|2 years ago
ecks4ndr0s|2 years ago
slavapestov|2 years ago
Apocryphon|2 years ago
samtho|2 years ago
I think we are going to see additional polarization in online discussion and we will continue to see this spill into the physical world as violence. This level of division has not been seen at this level in modern western societies. More people have taken on their political sports team as the very thing they identify with and their opposing team(s) have been painted as conspiratorial psychopaths, preventing discussion across the aisle from even happening at a meaningful level. In the US, we will see a clear bifurcation of states where any remaining purple states will solidify their leaning during the 2024 election and we won’t see this shift again in a meaningful way for at least a few election cycles.
We are going to see massive, non-collateralized debt defaults and financial companies will attempt to claw back that money, with those who continued to borrow above their means and were hit with variable APR that doubled or tripled interest on their accounts, minimum payments go up, and it becomes unsustainable. We will see a 50% rise in bankruptcies over the next 18 months and a 100-200% increase over the next 5 years. Student loan default will be rampant as payment of these loans will become due again in October, destroying any hope of credit access in the near future to these people. Banks will foreclose but not be have the bandwidth to repossess all the property, leaving empty shells of neighborhoods. The labor market will sharply flip in favor of the employers and labor will lose a lot of bargaining power or other gains received over the last few years. Rent will go up, private equity will buy houses for cheap, mortgage rates will stay just under 10%.
China’s one child policy that began 40 years ago is starting to be felt, with only half as many people at their full earning potential (30s-40s) trying to support an aging population. The bottom has fallen out of their labor force, the CCP’s grip on the people is becoming tighter, but one day they are going to flip the light switch in their home and will be without power. Their strong, centralized government will falter and diminish or outright just fail, the north China plateau will revert to its wasteland type state, formerly propped up by will of the government. Tianjin will be the only city to survive and will receive the majority of refugees from the northern areas. Tianjin, Shanghai and Hong Kong/Shenzhen will revert to city states and will self-govern. Fragmented China will become a huge consumer of global food as they will be incapable of growing their own, with the supply of nitrogen fertilizer and potash being clinched by the Russo-Ukraine war and reserves dwindling, global food shortages will be occur within the next two years.
Russia will continue sending every able bodied man into the nato-powered meat grinder of Ukraine until a proper overthrow of Putin occurs or they run out of people. This will create an absence of men in this generation which will be worse than their losses sustained during WWII. The vacuum of power within the hollowed-out Russia will not last long and I worry to think who will rise up as the next leader. Ukraine east of the Dnieper river will be mostly leveled by then, further exacerbating the food shortages. Ukraine will eventually join NATO, Russia will attempt to create the USSR 2.0 from mainly the west Asian countries.
We may be see a collapse of generalized globalization if the US Navy decides it’s not in its best interest to keep peace on the high seas causing insurance rates to skyrocket and shipping via international waters becomes a dangerous prospect. A lot of our production will move to Mexico where there is an educated and motivated population that is already producing goods of higher quality than China. Trade between the US-Canada-Mexico will become increasingly important due to access to both resources and labor that all 3 bring proped up by agreed upon free trade. This transition will be long and will come with challenges.
The EU will lose more membership and if Germany is unable to fully replace its energy needs, the EU as a whole will diminish. The Anglosphere may create its own free trade agreement, maybe even going so far to allow for free travel amongst the group (but this will be symbolic as very few counties share land boarders). This will create tensions with N. American free trade and Mexico, perhaps prompting Latin America counties into creating its own Schengen-type zone. America-Mexico relations will sour but the trade relations will be to solidified to do anything.
elric|2 years ago
> I think we are going to see additional polarization in online discussion and we will continue to see this spill into the physical world as violence
I wonder whether online discussion is at the source of this, but I doubt it. Perhaps this is something for sociologists to ponder over. We have have access to more information than at any point in history, but it seems like our knowledge (and empathy) haven't grown by the same amount.
> Russia will continue sending every able bodied man into the nato-powered meat grinder of Ukraine until a proper overthrow of Putin occurs or they run out of people.
The idea of a Russia without Putin frightens me. Not because I'm a fan, but because it seems like every likely alternative is even worse. A politically unstable (nay, volatile!) country with a huge stockpile of nukes ought to worry everyone. I hope humanity can find a way out of this shitty situation.
> The EU will lose more membership
Probably. And this ties in nicely with your first paragraph, polarization is a big contributor to this. By and large, Europe has never been as safe or as prosperous as it is today, yet everywhere extremism is on the rise. The EU (or at least the Commission) has a reputation of being a busybody everywhere except for where it matters. Political reform seems needed, so that people at least feel represented, but that's unlikely to happen when so many Europeans are devolving into an "us vs them" mindset.
ioisar|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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unknown|2 years ago
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ntfAX|2 years ago
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ferociouskite56|2 years ago
2030 4 high-NA EUV fabs will have 1.4 nano RiscV chips; rollable microLED; solid state battery. That's still not paper thin all day phones.
1 passenger, only autopilot drones should transport snakebite victims in dangerous countries.
samuellevy|2 years ago
It's just a really strange thing to ping as a "big problem to solve", and such a bizarrely expensive solution to the problem, too. I think that a much better solution would be improving development and access to antivenin
leksak|2 years ago
I'm sincerely doubtful that being able to target their impact more tomorrow the brain alone makes a reasonable difference.
Getting at the mental health crisis might take a multipronged approach but I'm not sure this is an essential prong but I'm open to arguments to the contrary.
pg_bot|2 years ago
fb03|2 years ago
atmosx|2 years ago
These are harmful drugs if not taken with care. In the long run they can very easily have the opposite effect, like cause or accelerate depression.