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

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

#81

Post by astoor »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #33
latexr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I know they can’t be decoupled, but I think smart contracts have more potential than coins or tokens. There is no reason why whole swathes of saving, lending, derivatives, fx and insurance products couldn’t be implemented as decentralised smart contracts. I suspect the smart contracts to do all of this would use less energy than a single office block.

A big chunk of the people working in the "office blocks" of "saving, lending, derivatives, FX and insurance companies" are there to deal with support and exceptions. This is a feature not a bug - if something goes wrong you want it to be fixed, especially when you are dealing with large sums of money. With smart contracts, if there's a bug it can't be fixed, if your money gets lost or stolen you can't get it back, if you lose your keys then tough, etc. This is considered a feature not a bug, e.g. to quote Satoshi "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more." However, in most people's view, this would be considered a backward step, and so not an example of a technology with a positive impact.

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

#82

Post by elviejo »

Bedon292 wrote: post #77
loudmax wrote: post #50

So many communication platforms are proprietary walled gardens these days. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord, and so on. Their incentives do not align with what's best for their users, or society in general. We absolutely need open solutions become the standard dominant medium for communicating. If Matrix and Mastodon become as easy to use as their proprietary counterparts, they could undo much of the harm done by ou…

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

Social networks most important metric is "engagement" number of minutes spent on the site. And turns out that it is human nature to engage with content that it's "dangerous" so the social networks have optimized to show divisive content.

A free social network, will work to improve the happiness of their users... Which will include measures like limit the amount of hours you want to spend on the site itself. (Like HN does by the way)

Or like I'm in NYC today, who wants to meet? Let's have a real interaction

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

#83

Post by [deleted] »

elviejo wrote: post #82
Bedon292 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Social networks most important metric is "engagement" number of minutes spent on the site. And turns out that it is human nature to engage with content that it's "dangerous" so the social networks have optimized to show divisive content. A free social network, will work to improve the happiness of their users... Which will include measures like limit the amount of hours you want to spend on the site itself. (Like HN…

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by nonrandomstring »

aabajian wrote: post #54

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

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

Can technology help with that?

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

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

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

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

The universities need an enema.

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

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

#85

Post by loudmax »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #66

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

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

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

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

#86

Post by eddieroger »

pjerem wrote: post #35
mysore wrote: post #22

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

Interestingly, I thought like you some years ago. But since then, I realized that, nah, we just need to make cities that don't require cars at all. I'm not against self driving cars, they'll totally save millions of lives. But we must not make the mistake to build our society around the fact that self driving cars are a thing. We must build our future around the fact that any city should be livable without a car.

I think it's important to acknowledge that not everyone wants to live a life that doesn't require a car. A car is a surrogate for other problems, like poor city planning and bad public transit, but even in the best of cases, it's a perfectly valid desire to be removed from urban centers and living and being willing to transport in to those areas when needed.

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

#87

Post by notacoward »

mg wrote: post #12

I think that aggregating medical research studies could lead to a significant improvement of the worlds health situation. There are tens of millions of medical studies available online. But no system to look at the data in an aggregated way. I have been doing data analysis and aggregation in several fields. Every once in a while, I dabble with the concept and implementation of a tool to do it for medical studies. It…

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

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

#88

Post by loudmax »

Bedon292 wrote: post #77
loudmax wrote: post #50

So many communication platforms are proprietary walled gardens these days. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord, and so on. Their incentives do not align with what's best for their users, or society in general. We absolutely need open solutions become the standard dominant medium for communicating. If Matrix and Mastodon become as easy to use as their proprietary counterparts, they could undo much of the harm done by ou…

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

I don't think there's much hope for people that go out of their way to insulate themselves into echo chambers. The key is removing the economic incentive for corporations to deliberately build these echo chambers and set them against one another. It's not that open federated systems will solve all problems, it's that a number of these problems will cease to be exacerbated. This may sound like a small thing, but at scale, the impact is enormous.

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

#89

Post by yobbo »

Bedon292 wrote: post #77
loudmax wrote: post #50

So many communication platforms are proprietary walled gardens these days. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord, and so on. Their incentives do not align with what's best for their users, or society in general. We absolutely need open solutions become the standard dominant medium for communicating. If Matrix and Mastodon become as easy to use as their proprietary counterparts, they could undo much of the harm done by ou…

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

One problem with the walled gardens is they allowed themselves to be influenced/controlled by politics and public opinion "campaigners".

The harm thus far caused can of course not be undone.

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

#90

Post by Artistry121 »

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

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

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