I'm sorry if this is an unsatisfying answer, but if you mean convincingly pitched, I couldn't answer a question like that without disclosing the long-term plans of startups that would prefer to keep them secret. If you mean unconvincingly pitched, it would probably be the applications we get from people who've discovered new power sources that violate the laws of physics.
i dont like ideas that need to be kept a secret, i think its just psychological or emotional to feel or think you need to keep your idea a secret to increase its chance of success
if its so easy to execute and replicate ... its not much of an idea ...
"Anyone else got 3 or higher?" I have a drug that could massively raise the IQ of the world's population, in total more than the power of all the world's computers combined. And it costs only a couple pennies per person per year. Iodine.
Improving world health status might not improve IQ as some inherent human intelligence capacity, but would certainly have an immeasurable population-level effect on "effective IQ" i.e. ability to practice whatever intelligence capacity exists already. Consider just the challenge of defeating the obesity epidemic. Better diet improves energy and massively increases, again at the population level, the amount of raw tho…
I think the idea of level 6 is not merely an incremental increase in effective IQ -- the internet and smartphones putting most of human knowledge at anyone's fingertips could qualify as that -- but something that fundamentally changes what it means to be human. Defeating obesity, the African AIDS epidemic, or even cancer would be amazing, heroic, and worldchanging, but still wouldn't qualify as changing what it means…
Improving world health status might not improve IQ as some inherent human intelligence capacity, but would certainly have an immeasurable population-level effect on "effective IQ" i.e. ability to practice whatever intelligence capacity exists already. Consider just the challenge of defeating the obesity epidemic. Better diet improves energy and massively increases, again at the population level, the amount of raw tho…
I think the idea of level 6 is not merely an incremental increase in effective IQ -- the internet and smartphones putting most of human knowledge at anyone's fingertips could qualify as that -- but something that fundamentally changes what it means to be human. Defeating obesity, the African AIDS epidemic, or even cancer would be amazing, heroic, and worldchanging, but still wouldn't qualify as changing what it means…
It would for a significant portion of human beings alive today. We stand at and often think solely of what ends up being the 99% percentile of human capability, happiness, opportunity.
In case anyone missed the small blog link on the bottom: http://blog.automicrofarm.com More information about the idea there. Count me interested! As long as it doesn't involve entomophagy... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy
TED talk on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=E... A cool Maker-type article on how to build your own setup (it looks like the AutoMicroFarm may be loosely based on this): http://www.northernaquafarms.com/knowledgelibrary/NAF_PDF_Fi... I know someone in Campbell who is playing with this stuff, and he's sent me tons of links that I can share here if people are really interested.
TED talk on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=E... A cool Maker-type article on how to build your own setup (it looks like the AutoMicroFarm may be loosely based on this): http://www.northernaquafarms.com/knowledgelibrary/NAF_PDF_Fi... I know someone in Campbell who is playing with this stuff, and he's sent me tons of links that I can share here if people are really interested.
Please, do share! And thanks for the TED link :).
Here's a dump of links on the subject that should keep you busy for a while. :-)
> Edit: It's not a drug - but it will, imho, produce a change in the basic human condition, if/when implemented. He's probably talking about an idea similar to the H+ neural implant ( http://www.youtube.com/user/HplusDigitalSeries ). It's a nano device that is injected into or around your spine/brain, and after a week it learns how to interface with your body. Then it links out to the network and you can do all the t…
Nope. Fair enough on the downvotes, btw, you're right - I didn't add much to the conversation. I don't feel ready to share/discuss that idea yet. Funny, considering I'm a strong proponent of "ideas are nothing, execution is everything"...
Holy schmaloly, that actually is a 3 if it works. Anyone else got 3 or higher?
"Anyone else got 3 or higher?" I have a drug that could massively raise the IQ of the world's population, in total more than the power of all the world's computers combined. And it costs only a couple pennies per person per year. Iodine.
I have a drug that could massively raise the honesty of the world's population.
A major healthcare breakthrough that improved the quality of life for a large number of people would qualify as a solid 3 -- a major political-level change. I'd save 6 for things like defeating the aging process -- something that, like raising the IQ of the population at large, would also fundamentally change the human condition. I'm not really sure how many medical breakthroughs of this magnitude there are.
Improving world health status might not improve IQ as some inherent human intelligence capacity, but would certainly have an immeasurable population-level effect on "effective IQ" i.e. ability to practice whatever intelligence capacity exists already. Consider just the challenge of defeating the obesity epidemic. Better diet improves energy and massively increases, again at the population level, the amount of raw tho…
I'd've rated Adipotide at 2 (make a large difference to the lives of hundreds of millions of people), and even with cognitive effects factored in, well, Apple hasn't had zero cognitive effect either. The thing is, there was already an age before high-fructose corn syrup when almost nobody was obese - you couldn't call it a novel change in the human condition to put things back to how they used to be. If you consider Apple as having popularized icon-based GUIs then it's got a substantially better claim to 5 or even 6 than a completely effective anti-obesity drug.
We never pitched him on the Singularity Institute ( http://singularity.org/research/ ), but I doubt he's ever been seriously pitched on anything more ambitious than "build a recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence with a stable, specifiable goal system so that it can improve into a superintelligence and do world optimization." If he's been pitched on anything more frightening than that, I'd really like to…
Honest question: Does SI actually do anything other than hold conferences and take donations so smart people don't have to get real jobs?
My hope is that if the spun-off Center for Applied Rationality takes off, we can all get out of the business of "Trying to explain to people why this an urgent problem that needs funding" and get back to "Actually researching the problem." It does take more than 2 people to actually research the problem (we know, we tried it with two people) and up until just recently there wasn't a very obvious path to how to find and fund 3 or more. Of course we've also produced various think-tank-ish analytic papers along that trajectory, whose value is not zero, but actual serious end-of-the-world basic-math research has always required more funding and more attention than we had.
All I can say is - it's starting to look like it did work (the "spend years convincing people to fund it" path) and it's not at all obvious even in retrospect what else we could've done.