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Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

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Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#151
post #102
post #10

The UN has identified 17 sustainable development goals ( https://sdgs.un.org/goals ) and the AI for good Global Summit https://aiforgood.itu.int/ (which was held last week) focused on exactly that. 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 researcher…

Neat. Although there seem a to be overlap in the goals. Do they have measurement in the goals over time?

I believe the World Bank keeps some metrics on tracking SDGs (sustainable development goals). Googling "world bank sdgs" yields results.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#152
post #10

The UN has identified 17 sustainable development goals ( https://sdgs.un.org/goals ) and the AI for good Global Summit https://aiforgood.itu.int/ (which was held last week) focused on exactly that. 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 researcher…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#153
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Capitalism has been tried more times than communism and has failed to reward productive people more times. It's 2023. The absurd idea that, for example, the billionaires pushing the Metaverse or burning Twitter to the ground got there by being productive, is thoroughly disproven. Stop pushing this motivated ideology.

Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty. Even China, who is communist in name, only started experiencing high economic growth once Deng Xiao Ping started reforming the state to be more market oriented, ie capitalism-lite.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#154
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).

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)

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#155
post #45
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered is a collection of essays published in 1973 by German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher. The title *Small Is Beautiful* came from a principle espoused by Schumacher's teacher Leopold Kohr (1909–1994) advancing small, appropriate technologies, policies, and polities as a superior alternative to the mainstream ethos of "bigger is better". Overlapping…

This seems somehow unrelated.

It's not about scale, it's about balance. You can run a small an beautiful country with zero economy growth and zero decline, all in a perfect balance, and 70% of population younger than 65. Everything works out.

But when 50% of the population is older than 60, the picture changes a lot; the percentage of economically productive population is much lower, and the need to care for people who can't sustain themselves any more grows. Take a look at how Japan fares today.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#156
post #90
post #77

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…

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 o…

> 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.

I agree, there it likely a lot more here that I’ve overlooked. I certainly believe that online echo chambers are part of it, but I do acknowledge it’s only part of the story.

As for a Putin-free Russia, this terrifies me because of the fact that in a dictatorship-like regime, higher level people who push back or don’t exclusively give good news and information to the ruling parties are often ousted or happen to fall out of windows at a most inconvenient time, which creates a class of yes-men/women who are either puppets or vultures that will swoop in and attempt taking control if their leader falls. Further, the brain-drain they have been experiencing over the years has now that had been accelerated by this war, leaving not a lot people left (proportionally) in the class of educated citizens. This hallowed out Russia will become a husk where the propaganda machine will continue to spew absolute garbage for years to come rotting whatever is left of its population’s minds. A developing theory I have is that Lukashenko’s diplomacy with Wagner and Russia is simply an attempt to position him to be able to take over Moscow when he senses its fractured enough but I also think he’s lacks the stones to do so.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#157
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.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#158
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you swallowed the “capitalism is evil” pill and now you’re confusing everything. But it’s not complicated. GDP is literally ”the total sum of what humans value” (per year). GDP growth is “creating more of what humans value”, and profit is “reward for those who create value”. You can split what humans value into essentials (food, sex, medicine, security, …) and non-essentials (nice car, nice house, nice…

you could create degrowth libraries, or community sheds where you store items used irregularly that people can borrow like lawn mowers, drills, saws, 4 wheelers, cleaning supplies, etc, and even have a free Laundromat, and other tools and a free clothing swap. In this way you can buy less, do you really need a drill if you only use it twice a year? A lawn mower if you only use ur 20 times per year, etc? isn't it a wa…

This is actually something I 100% support. As long as degrowth or similar non-sensical ideologies ("luxury beliefs") are practices within free-market capitalism.

The obvious problem, of course, is that 99% of people won't willingly choose lower quality of life (as described in your post, and as most "green" solutions end up being) voluntarily. So ultimately degrowthers end up trying to coerce others.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#159
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 liv…

I'm not sure I follow. The mass extinction event is mostly due to habitat destruction AFAIK right? The reason for that is seeking new resources aka energy. You don't need to cut down the rainforest to plant low yield crops if you can more profitably grow higher yield crops vertically with grow lamps and powered watering systems.. no? 'Cheap energy' is very different from 'basically free energy' in terms of what you c…

I get what you are saying, but... yeah I guess I need to elaborate on why I believe fusion is not a solution (and get more downvotes from techno-solutionists, yay \o/).

First, let me say that I usually start by mentioning the mass extinction, because technical people (myself included) have a tendency to believe that "the problem is CO2 emissions, and we can find new technology to reduce that". So I find it important to note that we humans are already responsible for the loss of essentially 2/3 of trees, 2/3 of animals and 2/3 of insects on Earth, and this is before the consequences of climate change. It is easy to say "if we had more energy, we would grow crop vertically and leave biodiversity alone", but sadly I don't think it works like this. Crops are not the only factor (population raises because of cheap energy, so we transform more wild spaces, also for tourism, and I am not even talking about hunting and industrial fishing, etc). But even for crops, we already know a simple way to use them more efficiently: eat crops, not meat. But we don't do that, because with cheap energy (and ignoring the fact that we are killing the planet) we don't need to. If you think about it, we used to eat the crops (and not the meat) in the past, when we did not have access to cheap energy :-). Why would we suddenly avoid rebound effects with fusion, when history shows that it has never happened for any technology before?

Then, if we put the biodiversity problem aside, there is the energy problem. Modern society fundamentally relies on fossil energy, which is limited by definition (this is very important to realize!). We passed the production peak for conventional oil in ~2008 (Europe has been feeling it since then), the global peak is predicted to be around now (I remember the predictions for the peak of conventional oil from when I was studying in 2004, and retrospectively they were very accurate, so I could imagine that the new ones may be reasonable as well), and for natural gas it may be in the next decade. So fossil energy will become a problem in the next few decades. Building a nuclear plant today, with technology we know (i.e. fission) takes what... 15 years? Fusion is most likely already too late for the party (and anyway it is not clear to me that it fundamentally solves the problem better than fission, except that people are afraid of fission for some reason). But nuclear plants make electricity, and that's only part of our society. Planes don't fly with electricity, plastic is not made of electricity, and we can't store electricity in big jars like we do with oil. So we are facing an energy problem, and we don't know technology today that could remotely solve it (I know, it's hard to accept for engineers, but please try to seriously think about it and don't stop at "many VCs put a ton of money on startups that try to find solutions, it will work out in the end").

Finally, and on top of all that, climate change is coming (again in Europe we have been feeling it strongly every summer in the last few years, and it won't go back to "normal" ever again). From what we can observe, it seems like the IPCC predictions are systematically optimistic; in other words, it seems like climate change is going faster than predicted. So it's not that we can count on 60-80 years to solve the energy problem anymore: now it seems like we may be playing the "survivability" (if that is a word in English? :-)) on many places on Earth in the next 10-20 years (maybe less). As a reminder, 10-20 years is the time we need to build a nuclear plant. If we continue in the next two decades the way we have in the last two decades (which we are clearly doing, if not worse), it is very likely that we will have screwed up many places on Earth for the next centuries. That means mass immigration, famines, wars, general world instability... not very good conditions to develop new non-military tech to solve a problem we haven't solved in decades of peace (globally).

Those are all problems with huge inertia (i.e. once you realize it is very bad, then there is no coming back), each with major consequences if they were taken individually. But they are not happening individually, they are happening together! Essentially for the same reason: our society is based on abundant energy. So the solution is not to "make a small step in one of those problems with a major technological change (like fusion)", because (and ignoring rebound effects with new technologies) even if we solve one of them, the other two problems will screw us big time.

All that not to say that we are already screwed anyway: maybe it's too late already (that's possible), but maybe not. And in case it is not, the highest chances of survival IMHO come from degrowth. Degrowth is a huge technological challenge. It's maybe not as fun as throwing Python scripts using ChatGPT in piles of docker containers running on hundreds of machines on the cloud, but it is not less challenging: how do we do less with less, while keeping our society from collapsing?

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#160

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.

You can't "software" your way out of authoritarianism.
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