alt Hacker NewsA lot of problems do. But sometimes the problem is people related. You can work around those problems with technology but you can't fix them.
In terms of real world problems: climate change, food scarcity, poverty, water quality and access, health care, etc. a lot of the solutions are technical. And a lot of those solutions are directly or indirectly about making energy cheaper and cleaner. With cheap clean energy, you can address climate change. You can desalinate water (at scale). If you have clean water, you can address food scarcity (e.g. irrigate desserts). You can also address sanitation. Cheap energy also enables transport, having light in people's home (education). so that addresses poverty. And so on. All that comes from just a handful of technical solutions that make energy cheap and clean. Anyone working on those things is accomplishing more than decades worth of well intentioned but not very effective activism, charity, diplomacy, etc. I'm sure AI has a role to play here as well.
The point is moot anyway. We're not going to turn into Luddites and competition continuously drives us to do better. Which means people keep on figuring out technical solutions to challenges around them. Technology isn't inherently good or evil. But it can be very effective sometimes. And of course there is a lot of not so effective or misguided stuff as well. Part of the journey.
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I'm a little stunned that these problems can be framed as technical...
How cheap would energy need to be for those problems to be solved? Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for how low prices would need to go to solve each of the problems? Or a wild guess?
Also, if energy production is getting cheaper, but energy production is only provided by a few entities (e.g. for reasons like production being capital intensive, strategically relevant, or first movers advantage / natural monopolies) would you believe that energy prices go down to that level if production costs fall low enough?
> A lot of problems do. But sometimes the problem is people related. You can work around those problems with technology but you can't fix them.
It depends a lot on what is encompassed in the considered definition of technology. Education and language can certainly be taken as technologies, under certain perspectives at least. And addressing individual behaviors with undesirable social consequences is something that definitely can be solved with appropriate educational "technologies".
In my current perspective, the most weighted factor between a technology and an innate individual trait is how transferable it is.
>We're not going to turn into Luddites and competition continuously drives us to do better.
It all depends on which values we endorse and thus how we deem something "better". On global scale, there was probably never so much passive aggressive competition within humankind (we also never been so numerous to be fair), and its results on global biosphere are to say the least completely disastrous.
>But it can be very effective sometimes.
Sure but working on improving effectiveness means nothing. If we try to enhance efficiency of gaz chambers, we are clearly bringing only more evil to the world. Efficacy is meaningless without a kind and generous purpose.
I could almost say "science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme", but Rabelais actually wasn’t willing to say what it is generally thought it means nowadays. https://theconversation.com/science-sans-conscience-nest-que...
I agree with you.
Before we are so eager to solve the problems, we better pinpoint how the problems were introduced and exacerbated. In the US, there are conflicts between illegal immigration and local communities, or conflicts between BLM and ALM. Especially the latter one, which I as an ordinary non-American cannot understand why ALM was abandoned like SHIT in the end. I do not know that initially aimed to advocate for peace. Quite funny we have to choose sides: IsraeliLivesMatter vs PalestinianLivesMatter or RussianLivesMatter vs UkrainianLivesMatter. In the end, I decided to forget about the controversy. And decide to fight back against those who argue against "all lives matter" just because of a few bad apples. And maybe this is also the reason AllLivesMatterWorld was abandoned like SHIT: just because of a few bad apples, we are abandoning all apples.
I do not want everyone to upload the truth that all lives should matter, but I can make everyone see the truth here: all lives indeed matter whether you argue against it or not.
I hope by advocating kindness first, fairness always, and DUKI in action help dissolving the original sin that we all have, we can solve all the problems that technology and science alone cannot solve. DUKI is not dookie as you think. More on Www.AllLivesMatter.World
Food scarcity, poverty, clean water, basic health care. These are IMO excellent examples of people problems, not tech problems.
If it were tech problems we wouldn’t be drinking clean water, driving Teslas and eating fancy food now would we? These are more or less solved issues. Now what we have not solved is how to share our toys.
Of course, tech could help to lower barrier(s), making access so cheap even “they” can have it, but the fundamental problem here is: why do “we” have “it” and “they” do not?
These are deeply political problems with exceedingly thin ties to technology. I feel focusing on tech distracts from the true issues which are again political and cultural, related to, say, the economy and its underlying philosophy itself, education, geography, history, etc. I don’t know where exactly tech ends up on this list of major factors, but it’s not on the first few pages.
Interestingly I think it is the diplomacy and activism that enabled the resources to open up and drives activity in tech that then eventually winds up where it needs to.