Ask HN: What problem would you solve with unlimited resources?

Aging. Nothing brings more suffering. Resource needs are considerable due to long preclinical & clinical studies necessary, perhaps also due to novel paradigms which will have to be invented along the way.

Whirled peas!

Honestly, unlimited anything is a trap: unlimited destroys. It's the limited that makes things great.

If you need unlimited, try space, or the heart of the sun.

Something, something the allegory of the Krell...

A global rail network. Homestly, I just think it'd be kinda awesome. If you asked your local politicians if it would take unlimited funds to get started they'd likely say yes. Haha.

Energy storage. This is making very rapid progress already, but "solving" it is has the highest payoff for tackling global heating.

Within the field of energy storage there are two important sub-fields... grid-level storage (cheap, long-lasting) and high-density (for transport applications). Both fields are already making good progress but I think I'd focus on grid-level first. Success here means basically being able to make the whole world's electricity grids "green". It will also be a massive economic stimulus because electricity will get very cheap.

No, you don't need "unlimited" resources for this, like I said, rapid progress is being made right now, it's just not quite rapid enough for the urgency and more focused funding and stimulus could definitely accelerate things. So if I had a lot of money and top talent I would distribute those among the handful of most promising approaches that are already being tried and keep funneling them there until it's "solved" for what we need.

climate change.

poverty.

cancer.

explore ideas like UBI, modern Cybersyn, a renewed US Digital Service, various election algorithms/methods (e.g. Condorcet)

a new PARC

a new Bell Labs

I think I'd start a maker space and see what people smarter than me choose to solve.

Computer Security - I'm firmly convinced that it has already been solved, but the solution[1] isn't widely known about or understood properly. Because we don't have computers we can trust, we can't have communications that we can trust, and thus we can't have true Democracy.

Computing efficiency - The fact is that most of the transistors in a computer sit idle, waiting for their 15 nanoseconds of fame. A first principles review of what is actually possible leads me to suspect we can run LLMs and other large compute loads for 1% (or less) of the current energy requirements without new process nodes, using current fabs.

The Supply Chain - We need to have a publicly documented and tested second supply chain for everything in our society. Less efficient, and more robust ways to make every essential tool and material required for a modern society should be developed. Even if it's 1000x more expensive, it's still better to have that backup rather that being completely without options.

Radio Mesh networking - I'd set up a system in which everyone, everywhere, could stay in touch with everyone else. Governments and other organizations would handle the fiber backbone for big stuff, but a low bandwidth system that could work slowly, and globally, without it should be the thing we can all own.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

racism, blaX.ai

Housing and urban planning. It's the single most important factor in quality of life, and the root cause of so many critical issues such as energy usage, pollution, climate change, and even geopolitics.

Years ago I watched a video of a young woman foreign worker from I think Philippines kill herself because of abuse. It really haunted me. And more research showed it's pretty common, as well as unsafe labor to the point of death, mostly all in middle eastern countries.

So, since then, my answer is modern day slavery. Wherever and however it exists.

Don't need unlimited resources to start, just to make a living.

Would likely need unlimited resources both monetarily and legal to actually attempt to tackle it, though.

If I had any real idea of how to start, I'd have done so yesterday.

Climate change, and by extension, unlimited clean energy.

I’ve always loved the Star Trek spin that once you have unlimited energy, a lot of human dynamics cease to be exist. Capitalism is one of them.

Aging must be first

How to make projectors reliably connect to laptops every time. Although I’m mostly sure unlimited resources won’t be enough.

Climate change.

Why?

Because it's already killing people every day. And is slowly but surely making our environment entirely unstable. But as a typical consumer we don't have much power to stop it.

Do you need unlimited money? Not necessarily, but there are so many different possibilities when it comes to dealing with it. Carbon capture, green energy, (fusion?!), energy storage, planting more millions of trees, phasing out fossil fuels, holding companies accountable for their use of fossil fuels, the list goes on.

Looking at any one of these would be an expensive endeavour. Hopefully we can find small but very impactful methods in dealing with our climate troubles. Because as someone who turns 30 this year, it isn't looking promising for the next 30 years.

Decrypting Assange's insurance files. Plaintext but very long passphrases, as one password for the US cables was already leaked

I would change the voting system in the UK.

I would get rid of first past the post voting scam and change to proportional representation.

Labour won at the last election with just 33% of votes, not 33% of the population of the UK, this is not representative of the people.

Only about 50% (35 million) of the entire population voted. So about 10 million people out of 70 million people decided who should run my country. Thats why they do not represent me or us.

I would charge every person in the UK just £1 to vote.

This money, say £50,000,000, would be shared equally among political parties. They would then sell us their proposals and we would vote on them.

Instead of our Government working for big business, government would be working for the people.

get rid of lobbying and business money influencing politics.

A minumum tax of 75% on the rich.

stop private ownership of housing specifically to generate profit. you can buy a house to live in not to rent it out.

A local housing project recently built near me, was sold as affordable housing, to help wth local homelessness etc.

It was very affordable for the rich, One guy I know bought 19 of those brand new properties on a huge mortgage, and rented them out at extortionate prices. He raked in a tidy £30,000 a month profit! Plus the accrued increase in value of the properties each year.

Private renters generally pay the house owners mortgage, its a scam.

The renter pays the mortgage and the house owner walks away with the tax free profit.

Tax unearned income on profits on housing.

The bigger the house the more tax you pay.

get rid of the BBC

I am a socialist, which for me means, to create an equal society

If I had the Infinity Stones [1], I'll redefine human legal, political, cultural practices and beliefs so that we set right fitness function as it relates to 'survival of the fittest'. Nature evolved its own criteria for what is fit and unfit. We humans have twisted those around with our beliefs and systems, often for good, but often incorrectly and often inconsistently.

'Fit' cannot be meaningful unless 'unfit' too is, and the unfit are set to some real disadvantage. Trying to attain equality over both fit and unfit is detrimental when taken collectively. Having ethics defined in a way that in practice, those who follow ethics suffer more while those who don't follow have higher chances of success, is not good.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Stones

I would be the king and you would be my wife. just be honest, there's no pure altruism out there. So having the resources, the great power comes and change every thinking. I would be a good king.

* Social intelligence testing. I would create a testing scheme robust enough to serve as a form of employment credential. Typically people of extremely low social intelligence present catastrophic performance failures that directly impact career performance and working relationships at dire costs to their businesses and the people around them.

* I would create software licensing. This would identify persons capable of writing original software and assuming business ethics and liability for the products they create. This a massive gap in software. You can’t do any other professional job without a license.

With unlimited resources, I’d solve the fundamental bottleneck holding back our species: getting off this single planet and establishing a true space-based civilization - colonizing our solar system.

Along the way we’ll be solving for energy, jobs, resources, environment and existential risk.

Reading some of the answers in this thread, I think I would put all my resources into a global education program.

In my eyes the greatest challenge is to find a way to enable humanity to live in a way that does no longer destroy the ecosystem it relies on.

Unfortunately, the solution won't be just technological but rather social, educational and political.

We must find ways to stop overconsumption, overpopulation and to teach children (and people in general) the value of our natural environment.

I'd revamp the entire computing stack from first principles.

Replacing the layers of patchwork technology that have accreted onto each other, with clean, direct architecture (reminiscent of earlier days) and more sensible abstractions. Reliability and security baked in from the start. A focus on clarity of intent - not just through documentation (for which the quality bar would be set exceptionally high) but also how the code is crafted and structured. Tending toward mental models that are friendly for humans to grasp and reason about. Basically, designed according to the same opinionated, high standards that I bring to my own development work.

Then one of the things I'd use that stack for would be to introduce a legitimate competitor to Apple and Android smartphones.

That disposes with the harmful games the incumbents play when it comes to user control, privacy, advertising, and the many dark patterns engineered (by them and publishers on their platform) to drive their revenue ecosystem. There are more humane and decent means to carry on the business of building a successful and modestly profitable platform (and one of the great constraints of unlimited resources is I wouldn't feel compelled to optimize along the $ axis). Fostering a culture that genuinely cares about its users, the prime guiding principle would be to remain a worthy custodian of their trust, by making decisions that consistently put user interests first. Maybe reminiscent of how early Google wanted to be when they still tried to practice the 'dont be evil' mantra.

Next I'd work on the problem of identity on the web (and in the digital world), by pivoting it into one of reputation. It wouldn't rely on government issued ID, age checks, KYC partners, etc. Rather you'd spin up a new identity (with a choice whether or not it remains anonymous) and work to build up reputation for it in a manner that builds value along a metric you care about - eg. social media engagement, forum posts, GitHub contributions, Pokeman collected, whatever. The key game theory behind this is it's something the corresponding user cares about. That way they are motivated to preserve their reputation and not undertake offenses that would 'burn' it. The solution here isn't as clear a vision as my other initiatives, but the idea is to devise a primitive that can then be used to solve all sorts of other problems when strangers need to interact digitally (eg. I can trust this vendor because they have a history of delivering what's promised and honouring returns, I can trust the information provided by this human as they're recognized as an expert in their field of Pokemon hunting, etc). Maybe tack on some kind of zero-knowledge, six-degrees vouching mechanic as well.

Finally, I'd work to improve how civilization practices politics.

I was lucky to be born to a time where I got to witness the birth of the Internet and see how it impacted and evolved nearly every industry. How we communicate. How we collaborate. How we trade/shop/bank. Yet democracy is still run in a similar fashion as it was when first invented in the era of the printing press. Oh what the founding fathers might have envisioned in a world where every inhabitant has a rich, two-way channel directly to their institutions, their representive politicians, and each other.

I'd start by creating a space on the web committed to gathering solid background knowledge and opinions on issues (from all sides) and surfacing the best and most important facets in an easy to digest fashion. Something like a cross between Wikipedia and StackOverflow, but for political/civil issues. We'd take on all issues - from the mundane, to the most divisive. With a means to promote discourse that relies on transparently sourced facts, and a moderate emphasis given to subject matter experts (based on their reputation in a specific domain - see above). The aim is for the most informed or insightful arguments to f...