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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#351

Post by jscn »

edwardw wrote: post #181
rdl wrote: post #163

There's a clear search engine improvement which I'd love, and my friends would love, but I think it's not yet technically possible. (the tech to do it exists, but it's a big engineering challenge to actually build it in an economically viable way). A way to search (public, private) documents without leaking ANY information (beyond possibly "I did a search") to the operator. DDG's "trust us" security policy doesn't re…

The tech exists, which is called fully homomorphic encryption scheme. But I concur in what olalonde says, average people simply don't care that much about privacy.

Hence why OP mentioned the need for a scifi novel and some court cases to create a market. I'm not sure that would work, it doesn't seem to have done so in other domains.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#352

Post by waterlesscloud »

aptwebapps wrote: post #21

The last graph of #6 is great. I hate to stray into politics but my scary ideas revolve around public policy and the various actions people undertake in the public sphere that affect it. More specifically: Is it possible, by providing better tools for publishing and accessing information, to substantially improve public policy debates? Can we reduce the very large rewards for dishonesty and the use of disinformation?…

The problem here is that politics is largely not about facts, but the difference in interpretation of those facts.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#353

Post by waterlesscloud »

ilaksh wrote: post #52

I think that the hard part of tackling these ambitious projects is (often) not the actual engineering but rather making the ideas popular and fighting against the status quo. Another hard part is how difficult is the transition from how we do things now to the new way. So most of these things he mentions, people are working on them, or something similar, or even have functional software. That software just isn't popu…

One of the benefits of something like Y Combinator is that if you have one of these ideas, and you can actually make it work, YC and its associated network of people can be massively helpful in spreading the word.

In fact, that may be the major benefit of YC.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#354

Post by comex »

lars wrote: post #191
samstave wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The breakthrough in your comm analogy will come with the translation of thought to word. We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation, then send that to the recipient. This will be wired-telepathy - the recipient will get a message which they can receive any way they choose; visually (email - they read it) audio playback, or thought-injection.…

> We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation Since this thread is presumably being read by entrepreneurs making bets on the future of technology, it needs to be said that this will never happen with the current imaging technology. Brainwaves implies EEG, and the research in this field strongly suggests that it is information theoretically imp…

It doesn't actually need to be noninvasive. If an invasive procedure is useful enough and can be made safe, eventually it will be ubiquitous.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#355

Post by jscn »

patrickaljord wrote: post #105
mmphosis wrote: post #59

0. free internet - as in beer and as in liberty 1. a new search engine http://duckduckgo.com/ 2. replace email - with a todo list? - as I look at that old Palm IIIxe sitting in the cradle on my desk, my mind swims in the ideas of all the databases on all of the devices everywhere all being in sync 3. replace universities - yup, and recreate the free university of olde 4. internet drama - indie drama titles (movies/sh…

> - why limit yourself to 1000 years of ?barbaric? western medicine? > - why not look at all of humanity's history of medicine from all cultures? Western medicine is nothing more than medicine being tested scientifically before being accepted. If you know anything better than the scientific method to test medicine than please do tell. How would you prove to people your medicine work, because "it is so"? Nonsense. If…

Western medicine is nothing more than medicine being tested scientifically before being accepted. If you know anything better than the scientific method to test medicine than please do tell.

There is no such thing as the scientific method. What you're thinking of (presumably something Popperian) is not how science is really done. A lot of science is pig-headedly ignoring evidence which tells you a theory is wrong. Sometimes that works itself out and you get a better theory (see Einstein). Other times it doesn't.

Look, the purpose of medicine is to make people healthy. Definitions of 'healthy' are different for different cultures and social groups at different times. Western scientific medicine is only one approach for one kind of culture, and it often does more harm than good.

Furthermore, western scientific medicine often ignores procedures and knowledge coming from non-western sources which, when translated into scientific language, turn out to be correct within the WSM framework.

edit: formatting

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#356

Post by hollerith »

Androsynth wrote: post #333
diminish wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of 2012, start-ups with over 1 billion growth potential appears to revolve around services or products offered to a large portion of the society or companies and which can generate 10 to 100 USD per person ( employee or individual) per year such as Search(ads), emails, education, showbiz, healthcare. Here are some additions; cheaper fuel, integrated software-as-a-service(kill salesforce or gapps), faster travel, s…

I've been thinking about the 'Kill the state' idea for a while. It just makes sense. I have more in common with the average person in Germany than I do with the average person in Kansas or Alabama (not necessarily politically, but culturally). With online communities and instantaneous worldwide communication, I am also more closely in touch with my global counterparts than a significant portion of people in my own co…

>It just makes sense. I have more in common with the average person in Germany than I do with the average person in Kansas or Alabama

Unless you socialize, talk to your family and take your entertainment in German, I struggle to imagine what you mean.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#357

Post by im3w1l »

comex wrote: post #354
lars wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation Since this thread is presumably being read by entrepreneurs making bets on the future of technology, it needs to be said that this will never happen with the current imaging technology. Brainwaves implies EEG, and the research in this field strongly suggests that it is information theoretically imp…

It doesn't actually need to be noninvasive. If an invasive procedure is useful enough and can be made safe, eventually it will be ubiquitous.

The problem with invasive is upgrading.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#358

Post by im3w1l »

lars wrote: post #311
tomp wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your judgment that present technology is inadequate is based on the assumption that computers need to learn to read the human thoughts. What about the inverse, that the humans learn how to think in a way that a computer understands? That will be much easier, as humans learn much better than computers, and also much safer - I will have complete control over which of my thoughts the computer can detect and interpret.

The human learning to adapt to the machine has been the way EEG-based brain computer interfaces have been made for a couple of decades. Using machine learning to adapt the machine to the human is a much more recent development. It is possible today to make EEG controlled devices. They typically differentiate between a small number of real or imagined movements in the user. This is awesome, because it can allow severe…

The keyboard is not very good at determining which words I'm internally vocalizing either, still seems to work. The point I'm trying to convey is that maybe we can learn to transmit words using some form of brain reader, but that measures something else than vocalizing.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#359

Post by im3w1l »

eta_carinae wrote: post #299
Alex3917 wrote: post #7

The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse, but I've also mostly outgrown it, in that it isn't sophisticated to answer pretty much any scientific question I would want to ask. - No way to search for a scientific question and get a summary of the current scientific consensus or viewpoints on specific issues - It's really hard to access academic journal articles online. - Even when you can access…

> The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse, but I've also mostly outgrown it, in that it isn't sophisticated to answer pretty much any scientific question I would want to ask. This simply means that Google doesn't work very well for you, and I mean no offense, but what you are searching is a very, very small minority of search queries. Google still serves a crushing majority of people very wel…

Google holds the elite back, holds science back, holds are collective knowledge back. Even if it is a minority of queries, these queries are more important than your typical query.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#360

Post by im3w1l »

paulhauggis wrote: post #274
marvin wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a lot of people disagree with you, but I agree with this viewpoint. That the Luddite fallacy will be a fallacy forever is a fallacy in itself. I've said this before, but I keep repeating my viewpoint. At some point, we will have automated too many of the "useful" things to do for there to be enough work in the private sector for everyone. There are only so many cars, houses, gadgets and foods humanity n…

"We will have to find some sort of tax system that makes it possible for those who can't participate in the elite to also live their lives" Rather than a tax system that gives them pretty much no incentive to get a job (if you were essentially paid to do whatever you wanted to do, would you want to get a job?), it would probably be better to have government enforced jobs (IE: you want money from the government, you n…

Why should we incentivise people to work if nothing needs to be done?
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