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Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

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81–90 of 311 posts

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#81
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.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#82
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology literally means getting more value from the same amount of inputs. Earth has essentially unlimited resources in its crust, and with better technology we'll have access to more and more of them. Not to mention offworld resources. Sure, there's a few things that we need to figure out - like stopping fossil C release into the atmosphere, and how to spread good agritech to poor, non-democratic countries (hint:…

I think we are talking past each other on what is meant by degrowth. Degrowth means not tying the success of nations and people to that of GDP YoY. It is not sustainable. What I mean by degrowth is removing the growth imperative from economy and switching to a sustainable economy. The studies have shown (referenced in Hickel's book) that material consumption goes up with technological innovation. This means that the…

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Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"130,000 deaths and over 300,000 paralyzing injuries and amputations last year." https://www.dw.com/en/snakebites-kill-at-least-80000-people-... Dangerous in terms of crime rate, false arrests that human pilots won't accept hazard pay for. Rural people have either no clinic or poorly trained nurse with limited supplies. Urgently going to nearest hospital, refrigerated pharmacy. Also other medical emergencies such as…

The 130K per annum figure is a global death count.

This is serious, other causes of death more so, e.g:

    The Global status report on road safety 2018, launched by WHO in December 2018, highlights that the number of annual road traffic deaths has reached 1.35 million. Road traffic injuries are now the leading killer of people aged 5-29 years.
That's 10 motor vehicle deaths for every snake bite death.

It's certainly possible for both to be addressed and it's certain there are parts of the world with more snake caused deaths than road fatalities.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#84
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.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#85
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.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#87

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 ta…

Could preserving animals be turned into a market?

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?

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#88
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.

> to providing equitable outcomes for all people and the planet The top 10% who hold essentially all the wealth in the world have very little interest in that goal.

Yep 100% agree. Unfortunately

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#89
post #20
post #3

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 problem with free is the adtech surveillance system.

“Can’t pay” is a sliding scale - without going into a detailed discussion it’s hard to say what a product is worth, but i get your point.

There needs to be some cost to cover operations of the business.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#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 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.

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