I keep seeing critiques against working on tasks that are meant to maximize user engagement. A recent comment that I saw on the subject went in the lines of: <these are not the big/important problems of our lives>. Therefore my question comes because I cannot seem to see by myself what the real problems are.
A short argumentation would be valuable too, just so it's understandable where you come from.
Thanks & Happy Monday!
Winning that war is prerequisite to everything else.
If you're worried about climate change, remember that authoritarian regimes don't care about climate change.
If you're worried about injustices, remember that authoritarian regimes don't care about them and actually manufacture them.
If you're worried about any particular political thing, remember that authoritarian regimes don't even let you speak your dissent.
If you're worried about economics and making a living, remember that authoritarian regimes don't care if you have enough food.
Authoritarian regimes only care about themselves and their power. They'll make sure they're insulated from climate change. They'll make sure the law doesn't apply to them. They'll make sure they have megaphones for their propaganda. They'll make sure they always have food and shelter.
So what can you do?
Write Free Software. Get people to use Firefox and Ladybird (once it's ready). Refuse to work for companies that are locking down computers. Shift the culture until it is shameful to even do so. Reject remote attestation. Accept inconvenience in the software you use. Preach to everyday people about using Free Software. Teach them about privacy and control issues. Help them install Linux on their laptops. Root their phones for them. Be their tech support when things go wrong.
Most of all, learn UX and make your Free Software more usable and convenient than the freedom-snuffing software. Until Free Software is more convenient, there is very little way we can win this war.
This is something Free Software enthusiasts are really blind about: we can't just make software how nerds want it; we need to make software that will be useful and convenient for everyday people.
Russia and China both have government-mandated forks of Linux. Chinese companies like Linaro, Huawei and Alibaba contribute to Linux kernel very actively.
When the war against Ukraine escalated 1.5 years ago, proprietary software companies like Microsoft, Adobe and Apple quit Russia due to international sanctions and reputational risks. Since then, pretty sure free software became even more popular over there.
Authoritarian states are the result of a societal phase-change, occurring when a majorty feels this way. Those presumably "strong leaders" usually lack any sense for democratic ideas of relinquishing their position.
And manufacturing further "threats" down the line is easy to do. Which is why authoritarian regimes behave the way they do.
If you want to counter authoritarianism, you have to help people feel save about their future.
Share at least one positive interest story a day on social media with friends... more people do that, more people see more good in the world. Make an effort. Sometimes it's harder to seek out though. I'm not immune from the negativity even if I don't always agree with it.
Make an effort not to confuse people with their views, and don't talk down to people with differing political perspectives. Most people are mostly good most of the time... stop making assertions that tear people down.
I believe that without general-purpose computing in the hands of regular folk, getting out of authoritarianism is impossible.
Why? Because authoritarians will still have access to general-purpose computing, and that gives them an even greater amount of power that is even harder to overcome.
Open source software is a great thing for humanity, but as software engineers, we should keep the big picture in mind. Software is software. The sky has been blue and the grass has been green since long before software existed, and the sky will be blue and the grass will be green long after software ceases to exist.
Me, I'd go one step further and say electoral reform is what's needed (in the UK and US, at least). At least then, if we vote for crooks I'll be confident we deserve what we get.
* Ensure that men with guns cannot be paid.
If you do that, every empire falls. It is not necessarily a technically sophisticated problem - it happens naturally through economic constraints. Technology can have a role in how rapidly that develops, though. The "this software shall be used for Good, not Evil" clause may be enough to tip a balance.
"What is the highest-impact problem you are capable of solving?"
^^ I think this question is more powerful and much more difficult.
Learning your limits is incredibly hard. You have to border between optimism and pessimism -- between ego and humility.
After you understand your capabilities, follow your curiosity to find great problems. I think the discovery of good problems is itself the important trait. If you rely upon others to tell you which problems are important, you will spin directionless without understanding the underlying principles.
I've spent my career building web based software for solving business problems. That doesn't translate at all to solving anything that qualifies as a problem for the world or humanity. I don't intend on changing my career trajectory at this point, I'm fine with solving these types of problems for the money it pays. This doesn't mean I don't care about big/important problems just that my contributions to those will be small in nature based on my personal time/money.
You also don't need to do any of the technical work yourself. You can do HR, funding, art, management for that team.
what the world needs the most is more people who understand that we all need to make an effort and contribute to make things better for everyone.
to get people to reach this understanding and be serious about it and also feel like they can actually have an impact, and more importantly have the hope that it will work and is not futile takes living by example and impress that on your family, friends and neighbors. then as your resources allow engage in the local community and show other that making a contribution is easy and worthwhile.
this way slowly there will be more and more people who will pick up this attitude until a critical mass is reached at which point solving otherwise huge problems (like climate change) becomes easy because the majority will be supportive.
1. Get your home in order, groom yourself, take care of your family.
2. Get more involved in your local community, church, charity, local politics
3. Get some issue awareness and vote without being a useful idiot
Those three categories are all things that most people are more than capable of and simply don't... "I don't have time..." meh, most people have time to spend an hour on social media, hours on youtube or playing games every day. There's plenty of time.
I was in the dating pool about 7 years ago, and one thing I always remembered was how much people would say they wanted a relationship, but wouldn't actually take the time to meet someone during the week after work. I mean, if it's something that matters to you, it's something you want in your life to accomplish you make the time.
You don't reap rewards and accomplishments without effort.
Making the basics more efficient is always helpful. Though this is hard as a lot of smart people are already on the job.
- Healing damaged relationships in your life.
- Addressing unresolved internal traumas and fully integrating them.
- Replacing addictive and avoidant behaviours and taking care of the problems in your life head on.
I don't have "the answer" to any of these, obviously, but they are certainly big and important.
If you're in the United States, I think the biggest problem you can solve is to make sure that you and your family are as insulated as possible from the US healthcare system.
- Get and stay as healthy and fit as possible
- Get enough money to where you can afford the majority of the care you and your family need (either through work insurance or straight cash)
- Learn how to advocate for yourself and your family
- Understand how to minimize your chances of going broke as a result of a health issue
Tackling climate change mitigation and remediation.
Getting more people off social media.
Protecting libraries.
Making the police more professional. Raising the bar for police candidates. Stopping the racism and fascism embedded in some police department cultures.
Overhauling the US political system to work for the people rather than the rich.
Protecting the rights of women, including bodily autonomy.
Protecting the rights of queer people.
Protecting the rights of non white people.
Reducing plastics use.
Planting more trees.
Improving housing construction standards.
Giving everyone a permanent place to live.
Decoupling healthcare from employment.
Universal healthcare.
Increasing the number of doctors and nurses.
4 day working week.
Forcing healthcare professionals to work normal number of hours.
Teaching good parenting at school. And various other life skills.
Improving teacher conditions.
Preventing fascism from continuing to rise in America.
To round it out though, here’s another list:
Uplifting the many men falling out of society
Protecting children and their parental rights
Reforming harmful public sector unions like schools and police
Eliminating systemically racist anti white laws in everything from affirmative action to farm subsidies
Eliminating anti white bias in hiring
Reversing the rapidly declining birth rates
Reducing the normalization of sexual degeneracy from porn addiction to the proliferation of digital prostitution (onlyfans)
Reversing the declining trust in institutions (media, public health, DOJ, etc)
The Left doesn't believe these are issues, but are instead moral failings or the result of a reduction in privilege by cishet white men. Their statements to that effect have pushed ~a dozen of my friends from D to R voters.
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All the discussion is about reducing CO2 emissions. But we have nothing to show for it. Even the during the Covid lockdowns, CO2 emissions were reduced by only 10%:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. That means even if we permanently take the extreme measures of the Covid lockdowns, global warming would be in 11 years were it would be in 10 years if we did nothing.
Yes, we should continue to push towards reducing CO2 emissions. A carbon tax would probably be the most effective way to achieve that.
But that will only give us more time to prepare for the inevitable: Living on a planet with higher temperatures and all kinds of problems that arise from it. It will happen.
What technologies can we develop to cope with it?
Demand for shipping, including large shipping containers and many small online-order car deliveries, skyrocketed.
People were working from home instead of large office buildings, which means less efficient use of energy in smaller heating and cooling systems
Energy use in homes (for heating, cooking, cooling, and lighting etc) is responsible for about 11% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Energy use in commercial buildings about 7%.
On the other hand, fossil fuels being directly vented into the atmosphere (from leaks, or burning excess fuel) also contributes 7%.
Agriculture, mostly meat and dairy production, and deforestation driven by producing feed for livestock, is responsible for about 18% of greenhouse emissions.
Reducing emissions is really straightforward, and no mystery. It hardly needs new technology, just better deployment of the technologies we already have.
Coal produces about a quarter of total energy, but nearly HALF of all emissions. We need to stop burning coal YESTERDAY.
We only generate about 10% of total energy using low-carbon sources like nuclear and renewable energy. We need to scale those up.
In addition, we need to replace inefficient energy use with more efficient energy use.
Lighting accounts for roughly 5% of all energy consumption. With incandescent lighting being 5x to 10x less efficient than LEDs, we can save about 1% of global emissions just by switching all the remaining incandescent light bulbs.
And yes, we should. And we will tackle them to some degree.
But that does not change the fact that we will live on a warmer planet in the future.
We can't make the planet cooler by taking these measures. They only slow down the pace at which it heats up.
That's the point of my post. That we should also incentivize the development of new technologies that will help mankind live on the warmer planet.
Moreover, global warming is just the tip of the iceberg, it's the thing that is presented to us in the most direct ways, but other things like mass extinctions of species, oil depravity, overpopulation, forever chemicals etc. Etc. Will be a problem someday also.
So instead of trying to "cope" with every catastrophy that is thrown at us (while making living on earth more and more annoying), maybe we should think about the solutions on a global scale, because there's no way it will happen without that
So there's really nothing one can do. Even living the regular lifestyle of any western country is by itself a contribution to the issue. Stop fooling yourself with technical solutions, as it will only push the issue for later, or be counter productive
Changes can't come without a massive overhaul of our economy and society (probably for the worse)
This is a cop-out. There's always something you can do. The problem is that it's often very complex, or requires more experience, or more influence, etc. Meaning that before you can noticeably move the needle, you need to get 10 years of prep work behind you. But the fact that it's difficult or time-consuming is a completely different story than it being "impossible."
Sorry, but I get tired of people throwing up their hands and saying "I can't do anything about this situation" when they really mean "this situation is so difficult that I'd rather go take a nap than deal with it."
1.) Every major city needs evacuation plans, and evacuation routes, in case of a natural disaster. Because disasters will get more frequent. Right now these are terribly inadequate, as we saw with Hurricane Rita. Solving this starts with FEMA, but probably requires advances in transportation, ability to quickly lay new infrastructure, construction technologies, information & coordination tech.
2.) Low-lying cities will need large seawalls and levees, like what Foster City just built. It cost them a few billion, but it's still cheaper than rebuilding all the buildings after a flood. Imagine scaling this up to every coastal or river city.
3.) We need better strategies to let wildfires burn in the wild yet quickly arrest their progress when they get close to populated areas.
4.) We need cheap insulation, and even cheaper ways to retrofit all the old housing stock in the U.S. with cheap insulation.
5.) We need more efficient and cheaper HVAC systems, ideally ones that don't burn fossil fuels.
6.) We need huge investments in the electric grid to support EVs + beefier HVAC. We also need software systems to manage this smartly, so eg. we can stagger EV charging and not put huge loads on the grid all at once. HVAC also serves as a big battery in a well-insulated home; you can time heat-pump loads for when they'll be most effective and retain that heat within the home during peak load times.
A lot of these will also require extensive public/private cooperation, which is its own sort of problem, and one that's also fairly amenable to software assistance (once the people in charge get tech-savvy enough).
I am not sure that many here know the fact that man-made CO2 emissions are only about 10% of the natural CO2 emissions [0]
> That total dwarfs humanity’s contribution, amounting to ten times as much CO2 as humans produce through activities such as burning fossil fuels.
The problem with man-made CO2 emissions that even though they are small relative to natural CO2 emissions, they change careful CO2 balance in atmosphere and over decades tips the CO2 balance.
Unfortunately, only relying on reducing man-made CO2 makes for a lousy control variable precisely because man-made CO2 is only 10% of total CO2 emissions (kind of a second-order effect). Any effect of reducing it will only show up decades later and we do not know what the new CO2 equilibrium point will be. We need to think out of the box and develop alternative and active climate engineering methods. It will not be easy but we should study, discuss and debate all alternative without exceptions.
[0] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-carbon-dioxide-does...
EDIT: grammar & some wordings.
Many of the countries in these regions are quite poor. Many have weak electrical grids that may fail in severe heat waves, and many residents are unserved in the first place.
If I could quit my job and work on anything else, I think it would be this problem. I don't know enough to say where efforts should be focused. In some cases, providing AC units and improving the electrical infrastructure may be the answer. Maybe in others, the answer is installing geothermal heat pumps, or some other off-grid solution like solar absorption chillers.
Accepting that CO2 emissions are unbeatable, so the best we can do is cope, sounds like a loser mindset. Those who believe in the inevitability of increasing CO2 emissions have already accepted defeat. The game is far from over and hope is not lost.
It is a bit controversial but I think the best way to deal with climate change is to have less kids. I say that as a parent.
It sounds authoritarian and having kids is basic animal instinct. And probably smarter minds have already thought about it and realized that it would be easier to do everything else except ask people to have less kids.
Governments need to support CO2 reduction and force businesses to cut emissions.
On top of that we need CO2 capture, and yes, we are not going to reduce emissions enough so we will need to adapt a changing climate.
We either need to to remove the carbon, affect the albedo of the earth, or deflect radiation coming to earth. Or all 3.
Deflecting radiation is a large engineering project. Maybe you should try to send a fleet of sun shields to the L1 Lagrange point. Or maybe you should try to pump large amounts of chalk dust into the atmosphere. I'm unsure what would be the better use of time. I've read that even just painting all the roads white buys us a few years.
Of all these possible solutions, the sun shield at the L1 Lagrange point might be necessary for humanity beyond just applications of global warming. It sounds big and ridiculous, but we really should consider it.
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2. Get non-fossil fuel energy to poor countries. They are burning coal or without power due to cost/availability. They still need to go thru all the ages richer countries have gone thru.
3. Clean water. Feel free to research water wars and Wikipedia doesn’t list all of them.
4. Weather forecasting. It is not great especially for disasters. I think the goal is 2 weeks of accurate forecast globally.
5. Getting people together without social media. Like a church but not religious, it is good to have a network of people to speak to.
6. Wicked problems: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
7. Natural language processing. We are repeatedly doing work that has already been completed or solved but we do not know about it. Ex: underground flowering and underground fruiting palm “discovered” but known to locals for a very long time.
8. Communications. It seems to be the problem almost always. Too much data to digest, not enough, frequency of data, etc.
9. tried to get to 10 but just search: difficult problem, Unsolved problems in (math, physics, philosophy, etc)
Green, sustainable, plentiful energy. Turning trash into products.
Achieve greater and more harmonious integration of technology and nature.
Fostering small decentralised groups, communities, instead of large institutions, companies, projects. Doing more research on how small groups of people behave, as opposed to what sociology has been doing for the past 75 years.
Making technology work for us. Dedicating 40 hours a week for 50 years to full time employment, for the privilege of hiding from the rain, is a level of slavery most people are happy to defend.
Declaring the current computing stack as bankrupt and unsustainable and explore novel ways of expanding human intellect through technology. The current code-compile-run model was already ancient in the 1970s. We have reached a local maxima, time to try something different.
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These are the things I care about, and not enough time nor connections to make a significant dent to any of them, just yet. Happy to chat about any of this with other restless souls.
Imagine a high tech eco-commune as close as possible to nature and social life. Gigabit fibre and organic garden. A solarpunk, Raspberry PI powered collective of nerds and artists.
But I don't know where to start, and don't know where to recruit others for this endeavour.
I think that's one of the roles of anthropology.
In fact during my short research on the matter, one source explicitly lamented the fact that pretty much no one has been doing any significant study on small group dynamics since the 70s. All the money is how to make us efficient cogs for the Machine, not how to form small, nimble groups up to of 5 or 6 that are tightly united and motivated in the pursuit of a single goal, often massively more productive than a large system that mostly relies on politics and hierarchy to keep everyone marching in the same direction.
I personally think seeking ways to improve transit and reduce car dependency is an important task. A lot of other commentors mention electric cars. These are conflicting goals but both solve similar problems and may be worthwhile to work on.
If you are interested in seeing what jobs are actually out there, I think "80,000 Hours" is a good place to start: https://80000hours.org/start-here/?int_campaign=2021-12--pri.... I don't think they are always perfect, but I think the idea is in the right place and their job board often has roles that are working on important problems for humanity.