Ask HN: What are the big/important problems to work on?
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!
211 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadThere're two reasons:
- In order to substantially improve these models we need to understand what they do. Something similar happened with steam engines when thermodynamics helped to explain what they do and improve them substantially.
- We need to understand their failure modes in order to understand their safety profile. I.e. it's AI safety problem.
exactly this. most people i talk to about this feel their mind blown when they think about the implications. i don't know why this is so hard to imagine.
And then, you see what people actually do with the little free time, the precious little free time they actually have. An astonishingly large group spends hours a week in a ritual that involves sticking prosthetic bristles the size of paint brushes to their eyelids because it looks "hot." another group spends an equal amount of time fitting obnoxious light bars to their oversized pretend work vehicles to blind other drivers and pedestrians because its "cool."
A still greater group, which encapsulates these two examples as well as many others like rhem, is chiefly interested in acquiring toys to show off to one another; a behavior that remarkably doesn't seem to ever get curbed no matter how wealthy and maximally free to do whatever they want, (like the aforementioned research and artistic pursuits) people become. As having access to essentially limitless energy and resources is comparable to winning the lottery, just for an entire civilization instead of a handful of people, as a sample ask yourself what is the fraction of today's lottery jackpot winners you suppose have taken their sudden windfall and with it the freedom and flexibility to do anything they want, and turned it toward personal pursuit of any of these noble interests such as you describe?
I don't mean throwing some money at it for bragging rights and to feel like they've made some contribution to the world, I mean personal interest where they themselves engage in a focused program of skill development to a degree of expertise beyond what can be purchased off the shelf. I would wager that it's as close to zero as makes no difference, and this does not bode well for a future in which everyone is given a comparable access to leisure and resources to spend as they choose.
not at all. unless you limit the definition of being like yourself to be interested in learning useful things.
you are not seeing the bigger picture: when most people are out of work because what they were doing until now is automated, we will have to come up with ways to keep them busy.
but even if most of todays work is automated, there is still a lot of other work that humans can do: we need more doctors and teachers for example. but also artists and entertainers.
so what needs to happen is that our education changes. basically, school is no longer just about learning the basics you need to function in society, but school will be more focused on training teachers, doctors, scientists, artists, entertainers and any other work that still should be done by humans. and no matter how much these people are like your or myself, when that happens, we will end up with a lot more scientists.
However we would need to do two things that just aren't going to happen on this planet with humans:
1. Ensure that these robots will work for humans for free forever with no ethical liabilities (Is it ethical to keep a conscious robot as a slave?) or long term existential risks 2. All value/money/etc... created by the robot would be 100% be captured by the individual using/running/owning the new robot slave
Perfectly possible to do technically but unlikely as the political-economic structure that dominates the world will destroy whatever it creates along with the customers and employees to the temporary benefit of a tiny group of people.
"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.
Making the basics more efficient is always helpful. Though this is hard as a lot of smart people are already on the job.
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.
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.
You also don't need to do any of the technical work yourself. You can do HR, funding, art, management for that team.
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.
We are about to see machines surpass human performance at every conceivable task.
I therefore consider the problem of understanding what humans are at the fundamental, existential level (besides second-class machines) to be the deepest and most important problem of today.
And I suspect it will be the only problem left for the humans of tomorrow.
Some companies, like Fairphone, have made huge strides into addressing this problem, but there's a big question about how sustainable they are in our present economy. They may fail because of restrictions they have imposed on themselves, that every other company should be operating under as well.
He poses the same question in pretty much the same way, “why aren’t you working on the most important questions in your field?”
I would say that what he defines as “important” is along the lines of “what will be the most influential?” - the sorts of things that bring Nobel prizes and glory.
But no one can tell you what is important: it depends on your own values; it’s a question you have to ask yourself.
- 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
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.
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.
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 don't know where to start though. i guess it is a combination of picking a target area and finding others interested. also choosing what is important to you. like how close do you want to live to the city. i fear that more isolated locations work better for an already close knit group as opposed to one that just finds itself.
an alternative approach might be to buy a piece of land and start building for yourself but with expansion in mind and then invite others to join you for short or long term stays. (like build an area with rooms for guests and if you find some that want to stay expand as needed)
Yeah I thought about that... if only land was not so expensive in Europe and UK. I can't afford to do this investment by myself just yet, but that is what I'm working towards anyway.
* Some new kind of wholesome work that gives anybody with a mobile phone a source of income, enough to pay for shelter and food.
* Invent a way that an organisation's operations that cannot fail because the operations are desired by people and it is not dependent on funding or property.
* Abstract the problem of costs so that we can indeed have good things and they are sustainable and kept alive.
* Heal the world wide web.
If you could avoid or correct that course, like at an architectural and protocol level that'd fix a big problem of the internet.
I'd only accept that it's not possible if someone could somehow demonstrate a logical proof (such as, presume a system existed, then prove by contradiction that it's not possible, etc). That would be an achievement in itself.
Mass shootings that start with people being radicalized by some kind of online patterns and systems is certainly a problem worth trying to fundamentally tackle somehow.
I've got no fixes so that's why I mentioned it.
Ad companies have strong financial incentive to maximize user engagement. Over time, they discovered the best way to achieve that is promoting outrage culture. Angry people generate tons of clicks, page views, and comments.
Before mass advertisements, content providers paid for bandwidth instead of earning money per views. I don’t believe internet had such polarizing effect back then.
Back in the Usenet and BBS days there were lots of online hate stuff. https://timeline.com/white-supremacist-early-internet-5e9167...
There's something deeper about the medium, structure, engagement - it's complicated but it also might be solvable somehow.
Still, before the modern internet infested with ads, there was no incentive for platforms to actively promote these polarizing views. The opposite was true, because network bandwidth costed them money.
Modern internet ecosystem does just that, at great scale. No longer these are small groups general population is unaware about and not interested in. The polarizing content is now actively promoted by both mainstream media, and huge social media platforms. It’s so profitable they can’t resist, and their shareholders don’t care about the externalities it causes to the general public.
These externalities of ad tech aren’t limited to political polarization. For social media, mental health is another major one. Teenagers are especially vulnerable, and it seems there’s strong correlation between mental health and social media use. Here’s some article about the topic: https://www.newportacademy.com/resources/well-being/effect-o...
this can be addressed by teaching people to be better and to get a better understanding of each other. on the individual level and in school, our education needs to focus on this.
I think parents and peers have more influence on the children compared to the education system. For this reason, the real problem here isn’t “how to improve education” it’s “how to improve the society”. Sadly, this one is way harder to solve ‘coz education is only a part of that.
1: The Mark Twain adage "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
2: Given (1) Successful hate mongering is based on methods and patterns of propagating deceptions and lies that are distinct from good faith efforts of say historians or scholars
3: These methods are easier to do on how the web is currently configured than the scholarly ones.
4: The current configuration for the web is one of many. Choices were made in the late 80s/early 90s on which axioms of choice and constellation of ideas would be implemented to construct the web in a certain manner that still exist.
5: There exists some configuration C0 that makes the methods and patterns of lies and hate mongering more difficult then it currently is.
6: There exists some configuration C1 that makes the methods and patterns of good faith efforts less difficult then it currently is.
If we can agree that these premises are all plausible then the next and way harder job is to show that C0 and C1 either can or cannot exist by discretely defining everything else in those other premises.
We're talking probably multi-year PhD level work here. Maybe it involves rethinking network-routing or DNS, introducing new protocols like an SSL for cross-checking reliabilty - I have no idea. This is not trivial.
We have real world analogs for this by gatekeeping titles and activities such as "doctor". But these legacy protections have atrophied due to the web and the institutional choices of the internet have eroded the earlier institutional choices of how we, say, use the term doctor and what significance and authority we bestow unto it.
The cement of the internet has long dried and we sit here thinking the decisions of the 20th century are somehow taken as natural law. In reality, it's all mutable institutional choices that we've forgotten to continue questioning. Whether that is worth doing or a waste of time I have no idea.
"The one who first states a case seems right: Until the other comes and cross-examines." Proverbs 18:17
Reserving judgement until one has all (or, at least, most) of the facts is the first step towards preventing the spread of lies.
"Always tell the truth. Or, at least don't lie." --Jordan Peterson
Humans are very quick to spread rumors, gossip, half-heard/misheard 'facts', uncorroborated/unsourced/unevidenced stories, etc because we have an innate desire to tell others something "secret". To feel like we are in a position of authority or power because we know something you don't.
And sometimes we can tell the truth that looks especially bad.
My dad likes to tell this story from when he was about 12.
One Monday morning, his little brother walked into Kindergarten with a giant black eye. His teacher asked what happened, and he replied, "my brother hit me in the head with a baseball bat."
This, of course, was obvious cause for alarm.
So they pulled my dad out of class and asked him what happened to his little brother, to which he replied, "I hit him in the head with a baseball bat."
As they were getting ready to call their dad for a parent-teacher conference - possibly even to consider pressing charges on behalf of the injured child, they went and found their 9-year-old sister, and asked her what happened to her little brother. She told them, "oh - my older brother hit him in the head with a baseball bat."
But she went on to provide context: "he was hitting pop flies to me to catch to practice for softball season, and our little brother ran behind him while he was on a backswing, and got knocked down."
Neither brother lied about what happened.
Indeed, they both "told the truth".
But neither told enough of the story to prevent/correct some likely misconceptions about what had happened. Had they been asked, "why did you brother hit you"/"why did you hit your brother", either would have filled-in the 10 seconds of backstory necessary to change the impression of the adults asking from horror over abuse to sympathy for an accident, and relief it was not more serious than "just" a black eye.
As data and information moves in ever-larger volumes ever-faster around the world, curating it into something that is both understandable and which contains enough context to be able to come to a proper conclusion about what you're seeing/hearing is becoming possibly the biggest issue facing society as a whole.
10 seconds of video probably doesn't have enough context to be fully understood - especially when it could be cut together, deep-faked, dubbed, etc
Solve the problem of ensuring information is reliable, accurate, and contains enough context to be understood properly, and you'll have solved social media
Online communities bypass physical networking limit of social groups due shallow, memetic and low-cost nature of participation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
We're working on the problem of protocol-level solutions here: https://social-protocols.org/
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?
I agree to the general idea that we need to plant trees and create technologies to solve the problem.
[1] https://www.noya.co/
Carbon capture might be able to help if we land on some breakthrough, but it cannot save us.
Remember that carbon is *heavy* (carbon dioxide is actually almost twice the weight of the fossil fuels that were burned to make it -- though hopefully you can avoid capturing the oxygen)
We currently emit something like 15 billion tons of carbon each year.
That is more than 3x the amount of cement made each year (4.5 billion tons). More than 3x the amount of food that's made each year (about 4 billion tons). About 8x the amount of steel made each year (2 billion tons). About 30x the amount of plastic made each year (about 0.5 billion tons)
Can we build a logistic system capable of processing, transporting, and storing carbon -- a completely useless material -- in quantities that exceed the global food, cement, steel, and plastic production combined?
What I would be surprised to find is that there was a massive differential between the cost (in carbon) for raw materials, manufacturing, distribution/transportation and running (energy + people costs) and the amount of carbon captured.
It's a bit like perpetual motion machines. If you zoom in enough, they can seem to move forever. But if you zoom out they are getting energy from somewhere.
On the small scale they transform money into sequestered carbon. But how much of that money goes (directly or indirectly) into generating carbon?
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."
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, we should do it and reduce our carbon emissions as much as we can. But in addition to it we should be researching additional ways to control the climate -- reflectivity of the oceans, stratospheric reflecting particulates, methane control, etc. Putting all the eggs in the CO2 control basket might not solve climate for this or next generations.
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.
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.
Building HR-alternative software for workers to organize with and provide for themselves the things that HR denies them (pay transparency, mutual aid, feedback accountability, worker rights training, etc)
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.
Personally I think it's partly solvable with a combination of cryptographically signed HTML elements and a web of trust similar to Raph Levien's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato or https://keybase.io/
But it's going to be a big piece of work.
teaching people to be better is the only way to avoid oppressive technical measures. because most technical measures will end up being oppresive at least for some minority or corner cases that don't fit the expectations.
i also fear that technical measures have a tendency to get in the way of diversity as they force the same behavior on everyone and punish or prevent people doing things differently.
part of the education needs to be moral education, starting from childhood, about what is good and bad behavior. good rolemodels, etc. we will never completely eliminate bad behavior but we can reduce the likelihood of it occurring by teaching everyone about good behavior.
Goal 1: No poverty
Goal 2: Zero hunger (No hunger)
Goal 3: Good health and well-being
Goal 4: Quality education
Goal 5: Gender equality
Goal 6: Clean water and sanitation
Goal 7: Affordable and clean energy
Goal 8: Decent work and economic growth
Goal 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
Goal 10: Reduced inequality
Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities
Goal 12: Responsible consumption and production
Goal 13: Climate action
Goal 14: Life below water
Goal 15: Life on land
Goal 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions
Goal 17: Partnership for the goals
Each one is broken down into subtasks and targets. Making a dent in any of them would be worthwhile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sustainable_Developmen...
There's so much business processing in local government whose cost could be cut by an order of magnitude if extracted into external software. In an inflationary world with stretched budgets, this could add much needed resources to public services.
For example, instead of each police force building their own video reporting system they could share an external one. Similar for booking GP appointments, managing jury duty, applying for council tax discounts and managing parking permits.
People might critique this comment by referring to SaaS solutions which already solve these problems. However, none of these are adopted at scale.
The biggest barrier to widespread adoption lies in the sales process. Marketing to governments is hard and the challenge of effectively addressing privacy/ethics/sovereignty concerns is bigger than with most private sector actors.
They were somewhere between 6-10 years too early - but had a great premise for a company
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com