Examples:

* burning fossil fuels externalizes the cost of dealing with climate change

* during the housing market crash of 2007, lots of risks were ultimately externalized to the state

* plastic waste ending up in the ocean means somebody[tm] externalized the cost of not properly disposing of / recycling their waste

... and so on, once you think in these terms, you find that pattern nearly everywhere.

If we had some kind of software solution to track externalized costs, that would be a huge step towards reducing it.

I know, this is very abstract, and I don't even know what a software solution for that would look like, but if somebody comes up with a really good of tracking that, it could have a huge impact on society in the long run.

Try to think of a society where nobody could quietly externalize a cost, and we had an effective way of tracking who externalizes how much, and go after the big offenders in a very data-driven way. There could even be general laws that make certain externalizations illegal, in a much broader way than current regulations do.

At the start of the industrial revolution no one knew about global warming. Then the science came out but was lobbied against. Now the science is (mostly) accepted, but we still don’t know concretely how expensive global warming is per ton of CO2.

I think these are scientific, social, and legislative problems. There may be a role for software around the edges, but the core is going to require research, public acceptance of research, and ultimately legislation.

This is true, but it's been known since at least medieval times that that air pollution was pretty unhealthy; arguably a better reason to actually do something about things than climate change.

The same can be said about the usage of lead in fuel and paint; people have known it was harmful well before leaded fuel was invented.

The elephant in the room seems to me more that we, as a society, are pretty inept at long-term and "big picture" thinking and have a strong and deep bias that progress is both good and inevitable.

By that definition progress is always good.

Or maybe there's progress in the short-term but not in the long-term.

For example, the globalization of our supply chains was probably viewed as progress by some, but that very efficiency also involved a trade-off in resiliency that resulted in how brittle we now know them to be from the events of the last two years.

It's rarely that simple.

I agree that development/forward movement is not always good (or inevitable, and a deep rooted bias)

And that "good" needs context or is a simplification.

I'nt language fun: it's both logically correct and incorrect to say that progress is always progress. ;)

Like for example we know that if we want to do anything about climate change we probably need to change our diets. I don't know how we can convince anyone to do that except through questionable means like social media campaigns.

Eg. Coke removed it's bottle pickups when they switched from glass to plastic bottles

https://iconicair.io/ https://www.sinaitechnologies.com/ https://www.persefoni.com/

This enables consumers to see that one phone is, for example, 50% more expensive but if its reusable (right to repair comes in here) and has a life time twice that of the comparable device. Consumers can make the right decision. Its really important to log the miles and age of cars as they get sold so that consumers don't buy cars that end up being replaced too early. Second hand markets will reflect that knowledge once its collated and published and market forces do the rest. You ought to regulate to ensure that facts once known are presented to consumers by suppliers. In theory, with perfect knowledge, and consumers that care, the market regulates itself. Anything you do to improve consumer knowledge and encourage responsibility helps.

If you tax power consumption you let market forces prioritise low power solutions. US is against that for gas, but it works.

As for plàstics you can do the same, tax plastic users presuming it end ups in the ocean and give tax breaks to those that find ways to prevent it and prove they have done so. Again this uses market forces to let individual enterprises find solutions for their own use of plastics. If consumers are price conscious they will chose greener alternatives due to their own cost.

Taxing corps profits is too easy for them to avoid.

Another advantage of using taxation to regulate green issues is that you get a load of money to spend on clean up operations.

There is no need for Software, you need a majority of voters who care enough to be willing to pay for their environmental damage.

The problem is the business model. If it’s paid for by businesses due to regulation it’s incentivized to undercount and be shitty. If it’s paid for by government then it’s going to be somewhat winner-take-all and you have to go through their procurement. Either way it could be very innovative and cool but due to the business requirements it’d likely end up very enterprisey and crappy

https://ourworldindata.org/

https://carbonplan.org/

It's not a pure-play software solution or an external policing force; it depends on large amounts of work done by analysts and cooperation from the companies themselves.

However, the motivation to drive internal actors in companies to care about tracking externalities has always been the hardest part of this problem, and that's starting to be solved for us by society and the market.

Disclaimer: I'm the CTO and we're hiring

Similar to Paul Grahma's design paradox: " I call it the design paradox. You might think that you could make your products beautiful just by hiring a great designer to design them. But if you yourself don't have good taste, how are you going to recognize a good designer?" (http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)

As long as people (including the business owners, customers, the rest of society, the rest of the world, etc) don't recognize the cost or don't care sufficiently even if they do recognize it, the best tool still won't have any effect nevermind solve. Usually, that's the critical problem, not the tools. And of course, tools won't fix people either. Software is useful only if used by the right people in the right way, which is usually much later.

Agreed. Supply chain in general is actually a substantial area requiring innovation (see shipageddon/chipageddon/every sales or purchasing department ever). I generalised some thoughts about an actor-transaction-oriented protocol model with features such as risk modeling, arbitrary assets (eg. physical trade) and settlement paths, arbitrary precision, fee/tax/discounts and redundant and multi-hop paths over here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/ifex-protoco... - since then I've moved in to manufacturing and it absolutely would be a godsend. Happy to help someone else pick up a similar line of development.

As a plain text accounting fan, I usually think of this as the way. Then I think we could do it more easily in spreadsheets, if we wanted to. Then I think spreadsheets don't induce collaboration, education, auditability and persistence the way PTA can.

Then I think more software is rather far from being our biggest need. Building relationship with nature and ourselves is far more impactful. Still, we are complex creatures, capable of doing many things at once..

OP, that's a great question; I see the Cardano project, I think it's one you should take a look at.

Actual measurement (and definition) of externalities will be very diverse, so the tracking will have to evolve and expand. Crowd-sourcing can handle that.

Once externalities can be clearly documented, public opinion will shift and companies will start to change their behavior in response. Then enforcement and laws will follow.

If Matrix and Mastodon become as easy to use as their proprietary counterparts, they could undo much of the harm done by our culturally divisive "social" networks.

Or it could be worse. Meta/Twitter spend a lot of resource to moderate content for a reason. I don't see how a decentralised model could solve the problem of content moderation.

[0] https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...

So, basically what Reddit does.

This leads to the creation of echo-chambers where the power is at the hand of select few.

No, not at all. If Reddit were to adopt this model, then anyone could act as a moderator for any subreddit, publishing their modding decisions and letting everyone else opt in to applying those decisions to the posts and comments that they see.

I suspect that if someone's modding decisions could be ignored at the click of a button, there would be less temptation for them to abuse their power, and the role of moderator would no longer attract people who want to force their view onto others.

The WWW exists, that allows "select few" to publish and irc/bbs/group chat are echo chambers, but these techa have not done the damage that social media has. They are doing something wrong.

Social software should have built-in moderation controls that assumes moderators are corruptible and may sell out the community.

1/ Moderators aren't always aligned with the community (see recent /r/antiwork scandal).

2/ Reddit does not pay moderators for the labor they provide. Moderation is basically a job that takes hours of time and they profit off the backs of that free labor.

At best, moderators will be influenced by corporate paychecks and at worst be exclusively composed of privileged people that don't need to work.

This is the reason we pay politicians.

For instance, if my instance has a rule that “nothing related to feet may be posted on No-Feets Friday”, I might decide to block foot.celebration for being a hotbed of constant footposting regardless of the day. If you disagree with my choice, there’s a ton of other instances out there you could move to, or go get foot.party and start your own. I might block these Friday-Foot-Friendly instances as well; if enough of my users decide they want to talk with people on those instances then I might suddenly find myself with everyone leaving. If sentiments are widely split on the subject of Feet On Friday then we might end up with two groups of instances that largely don’t federate with each other over this matter.

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

People can't be harmed by seeing updates from their friends and from communities they deliberately chose to follow. It's very important that every single post you see in your feed is a direct consequence of your informed decision to follow its author.

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

> If Matrix and Mastodon become as easy to use as their proprietary counterparts

The problem is not primarily about usability, but about network effects and economic incentives. First, it's really hard to break the dominance of existing social media platforms, and they will never voluntarily adopt open standards. Second, I fear that if a platform becomes big enough, they have an incentive to close down their standards because, you guessed it, cash money.

Therefore this needs to be regulated. The EU is taking a good first step with the Digital Markets Act, and just a couple of days ago decided that big messaging services need to open up their APIs. Now, this is not the perfect solution, but a step in the right direction.

Would love to hear thoughts to the contrary however. It's worth discussing as this is a big problem for an internet hitting critical mass in participation.

Open source software isn't driven by a dictator with a better vision - software projects run by good dictators will always win out against "built and design by committee" open source projects.

Gossip protocols like Secure Scuttlebutt allow for each application login to have it's own feed that others can verify through public key encryption, therefore marketplaces and collaborative tools can be built without relying on the servers of one corporation. Ideally something more compact like RSON can be incorporated.

CRDTs allow for consensus building applications were each individual collaborates on designs, documentation, contracts, voting, feedback, etc. Your data is usable without a network connection, backed up on your peer's computers and historically accurate.

The tool is also flexible enough to be used as a collaborative tool, building organizations to accomplish tasks from your network. The value that each person brings to the table can be tracked, allowing for invisible labor to be surfaced and properly compensated.

Often it's cheaper in terms of marginal cost in dollars to buy new, but this does not factor in the environmental cost of having built two devices and disposed of one, or the opportunity cost of unused devices.

In the same way that initially Linux enabled users to repuporse old pcs and eventually that tech made it to revolutionize many other areas. I get the feeling that, if right to repair bills had teeth, we would see similar innovation phones, vehicles and other consumer devices.

There is so much underused existing hardware that only a change of law and a few small projects (a consumer/hacker/small business friendly re-installer) could have significant environmental benefit with close to zero environmental cost.

Phones are amazing tech these days but they get thrown away at the same time newer/larger/less powerful single use devices (Alexa/music players/home automation) are purchased new.

Economies rarely measure wealth (because its hard) and target income and profit. For humanity and the planet, wealth and efficient use of that wealth is what matters.

Two clear examples.

Software to re-purpose an unsupported phone into a iot device, voice activated device, media player or back into a working & secure phone.

Software to turn an unsupported self-driving vehicle back into a manually driven vehicle or vehicle with driver assistance.

I think the software required is easily within reach in a five year time frame.

Also, in terms of AI, reducing the energy demand and solving the black box problem.

Not exactly software, but the concept of eco-certified software can surely have a positive impact as well, when it gains traction beside KDE's PDF-viewer Okular.

It feels like we can't have nice things because if you want to put a user-editable resource online, you first have to solve the Sybil attack problem. The more valuable the resource is, the more friction you need to put in the way of users to make them prove their humanity and divulge more of their offline identity, and this takes up engineering time which could have been devoted to making the resource itself more useful.

By "resource" I mean anything that accepts and displays user input from the internet, whether that's a wiki or a poll or a form or a multiplayer game or an online review or some completely new type of content that hasn't emerged yet because innovative creators have given up after their first bot raid.

The problem is that most of the existing ways of transferring reputation (or the appearance of it) between contexts result in opportunities for arbitrage: celebrity endorsements, scientists supporting theories outside of their field, con artists leveraging social proof escalation, phishing, etc.

We've seen some of the strictest mechanisms of reputational transference leveraged for illicit purposes:

https://cromwell-intl.com/cybersecurity/pki-failures.html

Everything that makes reputation and trust transfers useful and convenient for users creates a huge attractive nuisance for illicit actors, from state level APTs on down to 419 scammers and everyone in between.

The problem is, the systems we have today don't put walls between contexts but between implementations.

If someone is a famous actor, and they have millions of followers on Twitter, then they can tweet out some hot take on vaccines and all their followers will see that. However, if a scientist has a lot of followers on Twitter, but wants to move their account over to Mastodon, they have to start from scratch and lose their audience.

Conclusion: Celebrity reputation is more transferable than science reputation.

Which is beside the point, because the ability to migrate between services doesn't affect the issue I was pointing out that the potential of making social media followers, Academy Award nominations, and academic citation metrics all fungible with an "Internet points" abstraction even in principle is almost certainly a disaster waiting to happen.

I'm commenting on the "trust and reputation" aspect in the bit I quoted, and you're replying on the topic of identity and federating the social graph (where I actually don't disagree with you).

> making social media followers, Academy Award nominations, and academic citation metrics all fungible with an "Internet points" abstraction even in principle is almost certainly a disaster waiting to happen.

I don't recommend that any community makes a social media follower equivalent in value to an academic citation metric, but there may be specific cases where, for example, having more than 1000 social media followers grants you the same allowance of a resource (e.g. compute cycles, or disk space) as having 1 research paper cited in a prestigious journal.

The important thing is that it would be up to each community to decide for themselves how much each type of reputation is worth. (They could even decide that having an Academy Award nomination should give negative reputation, although if identities are anonymous then a user would have plausible deniability).

It's also worth noting that social media followers are, in some sense, already fungible. For example, some monetisation programs require at least 1000 followers, and some brand deals require a specific audience size. Obviously that is treating one follower as completely interchangeable for any other follower.

Okay, let's explore that. Now a researcher has an incentive to go buy social media followers as a hack to get compute resources.

The problem with these sorts of equivalencies is that they are often transitive ($ = followers, followers = compute, therefore $ = compute). I've exploited some myself in a small way (eg. created Gmail accounts to generate 'referrals' to get more free storage), but many developer services have recently had to discontinue their free tiers due to exploitation for mining bitcoin, and there is a whole subculture of travel points and credit card reward hacks, eg. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/13/137795995/how-...

Formalizing a mechanism for reputational equivalencies could lead to an explosion of exploitable edge cases similar in spirit to privilege escalation in a security context.

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 would need quite a bit of effort to get it right. But the potential is epic.

I was surprised the author gave up after he didn't find doctors who would pay for access. The post says he met 10 doctors in the bay area and when none of them became a paying customer, he shut his project down.

If you really think you are making a dent in the worlds health situation, why give up so fast?

There is significant reason to be hesitant about having an algorithm suggest every sickness under the sun that hasn't been "ruled out" by testing or statistics yet. Ever use WebMD to try to diagnose yourself?

In other words, I worry about what this approach would do the signal to noise ratio for doctors.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/913790

seems to go down this path. It is doable and they were able to beat IBM Watson to find some thing or another (_can't find the article off hand_) and won an R&D 100. But as you can tell, no one actually wants to use it.

And so on.

Your current options as an adult are to take a course online, take a course at a community college, or buy books and watch YouTube videos all on your own. The problem with these approaches is that all motivation must come from within. There's no requirement that you learn. As soon as you get bored, you can quit. A large majority of kids, even stellar students, study because they are required to do so, out of a fear of the consequences imposed by their parents, by their teachers and even by their peers.

Imagine if you had to learn a subject outside your comfort zone. How attentive would you be to an online classes? Even basic courses like algebra are very uncomfortable to adults with minimal mathematics knowledge. It's not enough to hope adults who enroll will 'do their best', you have to motivate them to stay and push them to excel.

Now...I don't know what such a system would look like or even if it's possible to implement on a large scale.

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.

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

How is this relevant? There always have been and always will be. The education system wasn’t designed for auto-didacts. They will thrive no matter the system. It is for the average worker bee to make sure they aren’t stuck with limited capability/mobility, which is bad for society. The question nowadays is related to whether the education system is too old to train the average worker for modern jobs as opposed to the old Prussian factory style education.

Education reform through technology hit a plateau early. MOOCs seem to have bad engagement metrics, so they suffer from the same problems that the worst in-person schools have. Few companies use online certificates as a stronger signal than branded, accredited 4-year university degrees.

I would argue that YouTube has been as much of a curse as a blessing. For those individuals with any non-trivial amount of gullibility, they can easily fall down a rabbit hole of false facts. Finding rigorously verified facts is more difficult, but still possible. I would have a really hard time hiring someone who believed the world was flat because they learned it dozens of videos on YouTube; that is a signal of high motivation but an inability to filter signal from the noise.

I agree that really reforming education will involve all of the tough things in your last paragraph. But you didn’t once mention parents in your comment, which is really interesting. I haven’t seen a movement of homeschooling which is much different from the anti-secular Christians have been pushing for decades.

Charter schools seem to be a mixed bag. Their biggest feature seems to be that they select their pupils/families (selective admissions, expulsion, etc). It will be interesting to see if any charter companies can grow to a national scale and keep high quality teaching results.

> your complaints aren’t actually about education, but about the increasing specialization of the world.

I hadn't noticed. Can you maybe give an example of where my aim is off? To me, education is at the centre of my thought regardless the way the world is turning because it's about more than filling jobs.

> How is this relevant? (that there are many very successful self-educated people in the world.)

Sure, I meant to imply that actually autodidacts, and the plain-old 'talented' have less opportunity to thrive regardless as certified education becomes essentially mandatory. Sure, with the right social connections, supreme confidence and some money you can still freestyle through life. But requirements for credentials are closing in. The "Education Industry" is not just about teaching people, it's about erecting systems of trust and verification, metrics, models, passports and gatekeepers, serving industry as an outsourced filter and so on.

Perhaps I would say; there are many very successful self-educated people in the world today, who would not make it if they were born now and faced the gauntlet of the twenty first century judgement machine.

> Education reform through technology hit a plateau early. MOOCs seem

Yes I am aware of that functional saturation. I was involved early in research on what we called CBT (computer based training) and we saw limits as early as 1990. What I am more concerned about now is the non didactic encroachment of tech. Google and Microsoft are taking over the academy not in the classroom but at the infrastructural, communication and behavioural level. This is not a value neutral prospect, they very much are bringing SV values into places they don't belong, along with normalising permanent surveillance and extraction of psychometric data from students.

> But you didn’t once mention parents in your comment, which is really interesting.

Oh you got me. I am one, so it's just too confusing. There's a can of worms there next to a tin-opener and I am resisting the temptation as much as I can.

respects

In a world where adults are given freedom, the government doesn’t generally take part in motivating them to do anything outside of paying taxes, avoid breaking laws, participation in military conscription. Nearly everything else has always been up to the individual or their social circle to generate motivation.

I'm working on an experiment at https://toplists.app/ that tries to leverage existing social networks, but this would probably work much better if e.g. Twitter expanded its "pinned" posts so that the UX would be seamless.

Also - perhaps software that improves visibility/transparency/understanding of energy usage, the lives of people in poverty, victims of human rights abuses, farmed animals, political votes, the impact of donations (Effective Altruism), etc

One could argue this exists in some way through forums that rank posts through a voting system like HN or Reddit, so my question would be around what would a “2.0” version of this sort of forum look like? How can good behavior be incentivized, I.e positing high quality, original content without allowing older top posts from being reposted by spam bots in order to karma farm?

Much of what happens on mainstream and default subreddits is bot generated, in the sense that they pick popular things and repost them at optimal times of day for as many upvotes as possible.

I think YouTube does this to a large extent. They use algorithms to help discovery but users can easily click on a channel and view all of a creator's high-quality material. But YouTube is video-only..

HF could power a grassroots revolution in search, translation, question answering and other NLP tasks. How cool would it be to be able to search without disclosing your keywords, or filter your content based on your rules and not theirs?

They focus on the very problem you're asking about.

With out it, people have to use the walled gardens to stay safe. Software innovation is stifled, and it's always there as an possible trigger for overbearing legislative answers to a technical problem.

People will still use Android or iOS even if you build a state of art mobile OS based on SeL4 completely written in Rust & ATS, with more features and customizability than Android or iOS. Because it doesn't come preinstalled on their devices, and does not have popular apps.

I am afraid walled gardens are logical conclusion of the field, for the things industry tends to optimize.

Not microkernel-based, but hardware virtualization based, which is even more secure: https://qubes-os.org.

We have a lot of choices with WordPress, Wix, etc., but the drawbacks are too much. 1) You don’t own the domain. 2) Personalization is limited, so you end up with a generic page. 3) They cost too much.

I think something like Gatsby+<some CMS>+Github Actions+Azure Static Apps in one tool.

Everyone should have a personalized web page that they own.

For what it's worth, most musicians, small business owners, etc. I know are pretty happy with things like Wix and don't care much about technicalities like owning domains as long as they can choose what shows up in the URL. Those that have more custom needs usually just want to delegate to someone else.

But it’s not inherent. Making a UI that can do both is hard, but possible.

Reminds me of Frontpage days. Most of the web pages had marquee (floating text?) and sound those days.

And second one, even a bit more niche, And its a bit more of positivity in terms of usage. Distros like Fedora Silverblue and NixOS. Confidence in that, even if update breaks something, you can just boot back into previous setup, and have working system, not bothered by breakage for the time being.

This was the goal of Ubuntu distro called snappy Ubuntu core [1]. Does anyone know whatever happened to it?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlcTDz9ogug

Oh, easy - https://enso.org, of course!

Spreading _solid_ knowledge about everything all over the world and people will be able to improve their societies, no matter where they are. That will probably have a huge impact.

The problem is that this does not change the dynamic of what people want to watch. The problem is not necessarily a lack of ways to find and filter such content, but rather that this is not appealing for broad audiences.

With regards to being able to find and filter such content, I'm not sure that point still stands. With the various changes YouTube has made, it becomes very hard to see what's good and what not before watching a video or being into the topic and understanding whether somebody is telling the truth and solid information or not.

Youtube doesnt even want you to see the length of videos by upcoming shorts feature which i absolutely despise. They dont want you to choose which media you consume so they can push more trash down viewers throats.

They concern themselves with finding things that empirically would have the biggest impact, or if we don't do it, we have the biggest consequences.

https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/

* An implementation of Nix's ideas for mere mortals.

* Version Control for non-technical users and for any kind of binary files.

The last one is interesting because most users will just see it as a more powerful undo/redo system.

Software that would make this easy, or otherwise make that problem go away or smaller on a global scale, should have huge positive impact:

- increase positive impact of all non-profits. - improved feebackloop should also make quality better (less funds to bad non-profits that write great documents).

Seems to be a problem where software can be part of the solution.

Spreadsheets are by now almost... 40 years old? And they are ubiquitous in business still despite the explosion on software written for various purposes. The spreadsheet model is a powerful computing and automation platform, with good-enough zero-code UI and organization.

Together, they are easy to grok, use and manipulate for most tasks. Add in the observation that most CRUD apps are basically slow spreadhseets, and you have a deal.

EU tackling big tech because the US sure won't.

Greater role out of automatic breaking systems.

Greater role out of demand management (energy).

Remote work decentralising our cities. I expect to see new cities being built.

Would be curious hearing from someone in the space how open or closed the existing solutions are, in the sense of being able to make future changes or drive them from new systems?

Is it a world of vendor-locked black boxes? Or pretty reasonable for future evolution, without gut-and-replace?

(Presumably we're talking about the entire generator-utility-consumer loop here?)

Google will not fight against itself. GNU/Linux phones already provide this functionality.

In other words, you get more power (and yes, freedom but i won;t dive into that aspect now) but the look-and-feel resembles Windows that it sounds like you are familiar with/prefer. Full disclosure: i am a diehard linux user, so am biased in favor of linux. I invite you to explore Ubuntu Mate (or any other distribution of linux)! Enjoy!

It will happen in a week after the documentation for the hardware is released.

Windows Server?

So both technical and non-technical counter-measures are dearly needed. From federated messaging systems to the privacy-oriented legislation, every little thing will help.

It is an uphill battle though. This much is obvious.

Two problems.

1. DNA sequencing, now is two part process (I simplify a lot, sure) - at first stage, target DNA divided for small pieces, and those pieces sequenced to digital codes and saved to database. Than in second part, computer cluster works few months, to connect those pieces to one chain. And this is very expensive process even considering few gigabytes storage to store all these data for few months.

The problem is that currently used algorithms are very naive, even in some projects used Perl implementation, not C or some other fast language. So exist opportunity, to create new special algorithm/software, or may be also some hardware support, so this will be at least 5 times faster, and if costs will drop under 100$ for one human DNA, this will lead to very new type of medicine - genetic checks of everything.

2. connected to 1st problem - find protein folding structures from DNA, and how they interact with other proteins, with drugs and with chemical molecules. As I know, this now solved in similar way as 1st problem, but in partially 3d space - programs try to calculate some positions, in which parts of structures are attracted to each other and calculate power of attraction. This way for example, calculated probability of drugs, which will attract to spike protein of Covid and neutralize it. Also this way calculated effects of new drugs, like interaction with proteins in human organism, etc.

In ideal world, possible, that for example for cancer, 1st will create fast DNA of cancer cells of some human, and 2nd will create DNA code of artificial protein, which will be printed on DNA-printer and inhibit cancer, but will not affect normal cells, and all this will be done in just few weeks.

Protein sequencing is not so easy... very basically you can do it one amino acid at a time based on the fact that amino acids are "sided", meaning side A of each can only connect to side B of the next one. So you attach the end of the protein to some kind of substrate (which can only attach "A" sides), then cut off each amino acid one at a time.

There are some companies in this space:

https://www.quantum-si.com/

But their software not good, because they just make first steps into gigabytes world, they have not worked with so large data chunks before, and this is really stellar opportunity.

2) see AlphaFold2 and other related methods -- the protein folding problem is still a big challenge but the field is moving in leaps and bounds

2. Author asks about biggest opportunities, and I give example. I suggest you to learn, how to be less toxic in conversation, as this will make your life better.

2. Various mobile operating systems targeting GNU/Linux phones, e.g., Mobian and PureOS. They have convergence by design (running desktop apps) and absolute freedom without walled gardens for the user.

Right now it is very difficult for people to figure out good ways to help causes they care about. Whether in big ways, like career shifts, or small ways, like writing a letter on behalf of a divestment initiative.

(This is a biased answer since I am working on this)

You could come at it from two fronts. Bottom up there's a need for tools that better help you investigate "what the hell is all this, what's in it, and where is it?" for software artifacts. Top down there's a need for an interactive dashboard executives could use to get a view (on their terms not the programmers') what the software that runs their business actually does.

If I knew how to implement this I'd quit my job tomorrow to work on it. Unfortunately I have no idea. I can only see in vague terms what it might look like and the hole in our current way of interacting with software that drives this need.

Or I could be wrong: in general other people consistently don't care about the things I think they obviously should care about.

> Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.

> So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.

> “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.

> “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation.

> “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.”

> Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.”

> “Almost precisely.”

There's no current tech that will have a marked positive impact in the next five years.

Nix. Makes dependency management kind of magic (but requires so much more development to make it practical for common people).

Data being a liability. Stuff like data breaches being adequately punished to make overreaching tracking unprofitable and encourage E2EE everywhere.

Open platforms. Apple being forced to allow running software on iOS devices.

Federation. Imagine the E-Mail model for everything. Matrix and Mastodon are leading the new bunch, but still have quite some adoption gains to make by improving the UX.

GUI programming. Think Blockly, but for real work. This will first be used to extend end user application with scripting and eventually make its way into general programming. A lot of tooling potential can be unleashed when you stop forcing the semantics of code into a linear text representation.

Traditional SaaS ceasing to be a viable business model. Ok, this is just a wish, but you can’t depend on something that can change or completely go away at any time. The JetBrains model is reasonable.

Explicitly not mentioned: Distributed databases (blockchain), VR.

Actually take a dent out of cyber attacks by unifying cyber, physical, and personnel security all in a single program that can record every type of incident and automate responses ahead of time.

(Feel free to steal this idea)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly

> Musical.ly Inc. was founded by long time friends Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang in Shanghai, China.[7][8] Before launching Musical.ly, Zhu and Yang teamed up to build an education social network app, through which users could both teach and learn different subjects through short-form videos (3–5 minutes long).

sentiment analysis and nudging, when people are angry with each other it is easy for AI to analyze; likewise if people are being tricky, defrauding, etc, it could be analyzed from their interactions facial expressions etc. These behaviors are a drain on the economy and within a few years AI could help solve it. Basically, five years from now when someone gets a "you've just won x", "paid thank you", or even "congratulations you've been hired" AI could ensure there is not someone on the other side of the transaction who is actively tricking them. Something like, "looks like you're trying to defraud or steal from someone. Here are some coursera courses that are a better path for you".

I feel like these things are a real drain on the economy, and lead to mistrust or markets that fail. Successful economies need trust, it is a prerequisite, and lawsuits or law enforcement are a poor substitute. I feel like AI could be used for productive purposes to increase trust in the world. At the limit, imagine if everyone had a helpful friend, who was also friends with everyone else. Within five years, AI could be that friend.

There are tons of cool companies and non-profits driving the digitalisation of the medical sector, and a lot needs to be done to truly realize the potential of all the data we are gathering currently. Aggregating medical research, data mining actual operations, and leveraging smart devices to personalize therapy are all just beginning to transform the sector.

The second thing would be the digitalisation of Africa, especially in banking and healthcare. Same as above, tons of startups and non-profits are engaging with this now on very promising paths. Already, millions of people gain access to banking and healthcare through these platforms beevry year, and it is transforming lives and economies at large.

Maybe it is just my limited perception, but while I realize that efforts in both of these topics have been going on for well over 20 years, I feel like it has been accelerating greatly in the last couple of years, and is beginning to show real tangible differences.

If you extend from five years to fifty, then the answer will be climate-related.

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’m currently living in the French countryside in a 3k people village. I do have a car but I barely need it on a daily basis : I WFH or take the 20 min train to my office (currently writing from my train running at 160kmh - 99MPH) and I have a grocery shop at 5 min of walk from my home.

I do have "luck" (well, it’s not really luck since I choose to live there) because even in France/Europe, it’s far from the norm.

But it’s possible and working solutions exists all over the world, just waiting to be copied.

First, if drivers make mistake, make them more accountable; require better training, enforce laws more strictly, etc. What are the causes behind traffic accidents? I'm confident the majority is from reckless driving, disregarding other drivers, speeding, impatience, alcohol / drugs, etc. Another percentage will be from unsafe driving conditions, which self-driving cars won't fix because they'll refuse to work in those conditions.

I remember this being said as far as a decade ago, and still, Teslas from 2022 are emergency braking on the highway.

Tesla isn’t anywhere close to that, but self driving cars have no reason to get worse. Systems good enough for fully self driving taxi services are already on the road and the the software is steadily getting better.

A lot of people who have great trust in the system probably won't see this as an issue until its too late, but one of the things that greatly concerns me about this notion of self-driving cars is its possible negative impact on human freedom.

To some extent, a car represents freedom because its a tool that lets you go anywhere you want to go without requesting permission from anybody. Particularly for cars with internal combustion engines, the ability to quickly fuel up and travel anywhere affords you some measure of control over your life and choices, particularly in an emergency.

A car that's run on software is effectively no longer yours and cannot be relied on as a tool to ensure control over your own fate. And electric cars (at least current versions) cannot quickly be refueled in the same way.

A corporation decides to demand extra payments for some software that lets you travel on highways? What can you do about it when your new car is maxed out the wazoo with DRM?

Government decides that it doesn't want its subjects to travel too far? Software update refuses to take you anywhere besides approved destinations and alerts authorities. This is no longer dystopian speculation or some distant past authoritarian experience: we've seen in modern western democratic countries in very recent experience that it was made illegal to travel too far from your house.

I love a lot of the tech behind Teslas and electric cars, but I don't trust the scenario where my car can be manipulated entirely by software and there's no absolute fully physical manual override that ensures a human can control it.

7B people now, another 20B in our children's lifetime.

We're attuned to what bothers us (software introspection, social network garbage). 10 days of just sitting will show you your emotional concerns are meaningless delusions.

Meanwhile, the forces that determine actual lives - availability of food, housing, health care, transportation, energy; education, rights and corruption, political capture; cultural goodwill and compassion - go largely unseen, mainly driven by people seeking power.

The doomsday clock is mono-dimensional. We need a world dashboard we can all agree upon and fight over. Once it's measured, people can optimize it.

The UN projects ~11B total by 2100 [1]. Most of the growth currently is and will be because of people surviving birth and living long. Global fertility rate is already down to 2.4 (from almost 5 in the 50s) and very likely will keep going down. That's why projections even see a decline of total population after 2100 as likely.

[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...

For instance, software for implementing national ID systems, so people can submit their taxes, get health care, etc. and that banks and similar requirements for know you customer (anti money laundering) can tap into.

Or cheaper payment systems, like VISA/Mastercard, but in an open system with more operators, perhaps even national.

I think this is fruitful area because governments, like big corporations, struggle with developing effective software and they struggle with cooperation. You could make a real impact on millions of people.

You need to be able to navigate the politics, though.

Without thousands of lines of yaml and funky environment variables. Magically. So let's call it Magic Kubernetes then :)

I am very excited about the project's future! One thing I look forward to in particular is hardware developed primarily for GrapheneOS.

[0] https://grapheneos.org/

My project hasn't been announced yet but follows similar design principles to Zircon. I plan to announce sometime in May if all goes well.

As we bring more intermittent power supplies onto the grid, things get harder. The batteries in electric cars are a small, but growing storage capacity that currently can't flow "backwards". Hardware will be a large part of this, but software will be needed too.

Everything else is nice but secondary to people being able to communicate, world-wide. Reason being - I think we've solved the food/clothes/shelter technical problems already. What we haven't solved is the willingness to re-distribute the goodies in a sensible way and the way to get there is, is communication.

Details at https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/139265/avalanche-launche...

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.

If self hosting would be as easy as installing an app on your phone the need for a big entity that hosts your service fades away.

I would accept some kind of world where WASM bindings in browsers become usable as an alternative.

"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

It ought to be emblazoned in 10ft high letters above the doorway to every university, company and research institution.

We could benefit from a more widespread acceptance of the fundamental utilitarian question "How does this actually make life better for the greatest number, and without inflicting harms as unseen side effects?"

This means careful reflection on human values, and less hubris about what we can achieve.

To see how far from value-neutral your suggestions might be:

> energy usage

Unless stated carefully some people may assume that means "use less". It may well be that the way forward is to use more energy, not less. Renewable non fossil use would seem a better goal.

> preventing armed conflicts

Some with a more hawkish outlook might say of defence, it's actually better to expediently and decisively win conflicts with minimum loss of life.

> reducing poverty

Seems like a universal good. But poverty is relative. To raise the remainder of humanity to the standard of living that most Americans consider "poverty" would be devastating if done with current technology.

> STEM training

Plenty would argue that we have a STEM excess and what is needed is broader application of the arts and humanities to balance life and create a nicer culture.

> improving access to sustainable environments

Most things that start with "improving access" fail to account for the effects of demand on those resources.

> implementing AI

Many, myself included, would caution that a naive pursuit of AI is absolutely catastrophic. Instead we should put more into IA.

And so on.

Now, I am not picking on your values here. If I were to list 10 "bare word values" you'd be able to make similar objections and shoot mine down.

What I am saying is that digital technology has created a "solution trap", where we see things as monotonic linear progress with "fast" ideas that can be made into a product and a company. We see trajectories toward unquestionable good without pausing to consider the cost elsewhere. I recommend reading systems theory (I start my students with Dana Meadows "fishing ecosystem" lecture) and you'll see something frightening.

The trick is not to recoil at the complexity but re-imagine technology as a way to understand it, reflect on it in a less reductionist way.

Move armed conflicts to virtual ;)

Something like idea of Mortal Combat movie.

https://betrusted.io

The market for software ideas is pretty efficient. So most ideas that you can come up with off the top of your head either already exist or didn't work out for some reason that might not be obvious. The way I'd approach this question is to look at what new data sources have become available. One of the comments mentioned OpenStreetMap and that seems pretty reasonable to me. Improvements in facial recognition and object classification are probably enabling new applications (not all of them will be positive though). Biology/medicine is probably the main field that's had major new advances, obviously mRNA vaccines but also things related to genetics. So I'd bet something important would come out of there.

I'm skeptical that software will have a major impact on things like energy usage or preventing armed conflict, etc. Those are more political/economic problems.

Most organizations, and I'm using the word here to describe the local stamp collector club of a dozen people too, need some way of communicating effectively. With GDPR, Facebook is out of the question in the EU.

I've enjoyed phpbb forums in the past - but it needs to be easier to start using, and probably easier to run.

Many of our other biggest problems, including climate change, disease, and wars become much easier to tackle if we could make a substantial improvement in the quality of information being shared.

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.

Software cannot prevent armed conflicts, that's a political problem. That can be solved by voting or assassinations, to be blunt. Politics is broken, and software cannot fix that, revolutions can. It doesn't matter that you can vote remotely on the blockchain if you're in a two-party system where your vote is for the lesser evil. Ban nukes. Stop voting for oligarchs, authoritarians, and fuckwits.

Poverty is a political problem too. The free market didn't work. Raise the minimum wage, give people money if they can't work or are between jobs, give everyone an education for free (it pays itself back within a few years through income taxes no problem), give people health care (and control the prices). Yes it's totalitarian, but we tried the free market and the illusion of free choice and it didn't work. We're rich enough to give everyone a happy life but we refuse to because "I got mine".

STEM training, see above. Make it free for anyone to attend.

AI is not needed, it's used to sell you more stuff. I've yet to see a beneficial application for AI. I hope it can be used for medical science at least but a lot of it is gimmicky.

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.

Machine learning definitely has potential, if we have another surge of breakthroughs in the future amazing things will become possible

Something I would like to see is a movement for software user rights. Between hardware that locks you into to the manufacturers store, and software that is constantly interrupting you and pushing ads at you instead of allowing you to do your work, some kind of social movement to push back against these UI dark patterns is sorely needed. Using computers is absolutely horrible compared to what it could be because of these issues.

https://investmentbusinessu.com/2022/03/16/ethereum-2-0-appe...

1. https://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/

Decentralised Finance in particular could take a huge chunk out of retail banking, investment banking and insurance.

At least retail banking is controlled and guaranteed by national and international governments and banks. If a crypto exchange goes fucky for whatever reason, you're fucked. If the value of your cryptocurrency of choice varies, you're fucked.

I mean how much did a pizza cost 10 years ago vs today in BTC vs USD. In BTC it was a few BTC, now it's 0.00025. In USD it was $10, now it's $10.

There is nothing wrong with retail / traditional banking, investment and insurance. Cryptocurrencies / blockchain technology does not solve a problem.

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.

I think we have challenges with its exorbitant use of energy, but giving more access to more people regarding is a positive IMHO.

It's all just a repeat of the negative comments over and over... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852