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Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

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Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#91

Post by iofj »

Neural networks with the direct objective of creating a "conscious" animal. Right now AI architectures are focusing on prediction, classification, pattern recognition. And this is very, very different from what nature does with AI. Nature controls animal/human bodies, and a few plant bodies using AI.

If we could push an AI controller to the point of having the intelligence of a cat or a dog, we would be able to make transportation equipment that would blow the wheels of of anything else we currently know. Having equipment carts that walk with you, baby carriers that do the same, and have zero issues with stairs, doors, ... (and yes, the military applications I'm sure are wonderful too). The dream would be that you'd have a mobile robot that can deliver packages. Packages the size of refrigerators and that could deliver them in your kitchen, walking in through your door, walking up the stairs/taking the elevator if necessary, ring your doorbell, ... Not to mention the industrial applications. Such robots would enable reconfigurable factories : the robots doing the work simply walk over to their new positions.

Even that would just be the beginning.

Then suppose we get there, can we go further ? Flying animals have extreme advantages over our airplanes. What if you could design a 4 seater airplane with legs and wings like a duck ? A large airplane that could reliably land and take off on a runway shorter than the length of the plane in strong crosswinds. And yet have that plane capable of maintaining flight for hours, far exceeding the endurance and efficiency of helicopters.

What I'm saying is. A lot of limitations of our current state of the art vehicles are effectively a control problem. Building a legged robot is not a problem at all, yet it would have massive advantages. Building a winged robot is harder, but certainly within the realm of possibility. Yet we don't have them. Why not ? We can't control robots like that (see youtube).

Let's fix that.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#92

Post by monk_e_boy »

joeyspn wrote: post #72
monk_e_boy wrote: post #43

Robotic or automated environment clean up. Open source. Fish plastic out of the sea. Oil out of water. Things like that. Solar powered (or wind etc) little machines that communities can buy (e.g. the local surfing club) and we can let lose into the problem area.

Along with clean nuclear fusion (already well funded), this is another great idea. I think there are already a couple of big projects working on this... http://www.theoceancleanup.com/

A little robot that would patrol a beach picking up small plastic bits 5mm - 15mm in size would be amazing. There is so much of that crap on our beaches. It's crazy. Also making a robot move on sand, rocks, pebbles, keep out of the way of people and dogs. Navigate sand and rivers and the tide. It's hard for people to do, we see people fall over, or get wet feet from a big wave washing up the beach or get cut off by the tide quite often.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#93

Post by Glench »

I really think YC Research, given its mission of funding long-term fragile research, should think hard about reworking the fundamental institutions that we live in now.

For example, what would a school for children look like if it was re-imagined without the century of cruft that's built up. What do we do with children and how do we judge what we've done.

Another project might be re-imagining a hospital. Due to economics, advances in technology, current scientific advances, etc, we've come to a rather agreed-upon notion of what healing looks like that is only one answer in a huge space of possibilities. What would it look like if people truly, actually healed and maybe weren't worked on solely as the "medical bodies" they are now.

Hillary Cottam's career (link to TED talk, sorry: https://www.ted.com/talks/hilary_cottam_social_services_are_...) points in the direction of the type of thing I'm thinking of. These kinds of services seem fundamental to how humans work (we have to learn, we have to heal), so we should really use this opportunity to understand these things deeply.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#94

Post by jallmann »

The ocean. Pollution, cleanup, how we are affecting the oceans, how changes in the ocean affect us, and ultimately harnessing the oceans for greater good, preferably without destroying them in the process. Space gets a lot of attention, but the oceans are rightthere and we are (rather carelessly) only exploiting the low hanging fruit.

Nukes. I know YC has funded a few nuclear power companies, but this seems like an area that still needs a lot of basic research, especially with newer reactor designs. Maybe even some more speculative stuff like fusion.

Developing new types of antibiotics. Nobody is really trying, and iChip style devices seem pretty interesting. Even with that, there's still be a ton of work needed to bring new drugs to market. New tools and techniques for evaluating efficacy and pharmacology? For something more exotic, you could study phages.

Aging reversal.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#95

Post by harigov »

autopov wrote: post #88
harigov wrote: post #64

Policy enforcement and law automation - It's ridiculous that we spend so much money and time dealing with legal issues - both in terms of creating new laws, and in terms of enforcing those laws. Because of the delineation between those who create laws and those who enforce them, we came up with a way of encoding law so as to avoid misinterpretation errors. What if we were to automate the enforcement by programming la…

This is an excellent idea. I spent a year at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The number of statutes and regulations for just CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) [1] for example fills 425 pages. The department also oversees building codes, liquid pipeline infrastructure, wildlands defense, fire & rescue, etc. Whenever a new or amended statute is introduced it takes months to evaluate…

I think programming evolved from math oriented folks, which is why we find it unnatural to reason about law and other societal constructs using a programming language. I wonder how it would look if it were built for an entirely different purpose. It would be really interesting if Y Combinator invests in that research effort.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#96

Post by jcr »

sama, my apologies if quoting you is too over the top, but the following comment of yours from last year is just wonderful, and it's a great answer to your question:

"I think figuring out how technology can encourage empathy is one of the more interesting and important open research problems in the world right now." -- Sam Altman, July 10 2015 [1]

There is one group at Stanford that's been working on the empathy-tech problem. I don't know any of them, but I've read a few of their papers. I've submitted a few of their papers/projects to HN in the past six months.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cudmx/i_am_sam_altma...

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#97

Post by jakecarpenter »

Addiction. It affects so many of us-maybe all of us-greatly. Our legal system, education system, healthcare system are all heavily burdened by it, and they all treat it differently. Good solid science (and a health dose of PR) in the name of ending addiction could go a long way towards making the world a lot cooler place.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#98

Post by Alex3917 »

I want to see someone do forest gardens / permaculture at scale. Right now the largest projects have only been a handful of acres. I'd like to see someone setup a forest garden that's 1000+ acres, so that we can learn more about the economics, viability, and best practices for actively managing entire continents to passively produce food the way the native americans supposedly did.

I realize this is out there, but I also think it's something that's viable from a cost perspective, and also has the ability to capture people's imagination like few other things. I'd also like to see an emphasis on promoting fungi in the ecosystem. Right now there isn't a single park in the entire world that's actively managed to promote the growth of edible mushrooms. And while setting that up would take 20+ years, it wouldn't be that expensive and again I think there would be something kind of magical about it.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#99

Post by BIackSwan »

Deriving (almost) limitless energy from geothermal wells can enable energy independence for practically every nation. This can be a huge game-changer in geopolitics and concept of nation states. Perhaps on how to do it and then open sourcing the technique.

Got this idea from Manoj Bhargava's project of using graphene cables to conduct heat from the earth and then convert to electricity. (link: http://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/could-a-new-approach-to-therma...) He claims that they have already figured out the basic mechanics for it - i don't know how far it actually is tho.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#100

Post by Alex3917 »

chubot wrote: post #76

I feel like the world runs on several billion dollars with of insecure code, like GNU/Linux, Apache, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, etc. This code will last decades, and YC startups in particular rely a lot on it. It's not clear that the current processes for writing code and then patching security holes will bring us into the future. Powerful governments and companies are routinely hacked. Can we move all this code to a secure f…

In addition to security stuff, it would also be good to see projects get funded that have the potential to save massive amounts of electricity. PyPy might be a good example of that.
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