We haven’t solved homelessness, poverty, cancer, or war. We don’t have self-piloted flying cars. But for about $90 in parts, one person can design, manufacture, and build their own bespoke smart watch. Humans have made truly remarkable progress in some very specific ways.
Although unfortunately not solved, we've made great strides in regards to child mortality, extreme poverty, war, violence, health, freedom, literacy... If you could choose any point in human history to be born, you'd be best off choosing today.
I think William Gibson say something like, "The future is here it's just unevenly distributed."
We have made great strides, but in the U.S. social mobility is lower now, life expectancy is down, so if you have to be born to a poor family, being born earlier might be better.
If you had the power to choose when to be born, you might also have the power to choose where to be born. In which case you might want to choose someplace other than the U.S.
There are few better places for social mobility than the US. If you are poor, but smart and ambitious, being in the US is the best thing that could happen to you.
The metric used here is an incorrect metric of social mobility. It compares father-son income correlation (which depends mostly on inheritance taxation and many other factors), while a better idea would be to compare the percentage of high achievers who started from humble beginnings.
Indeed, US education system is somewhat strange, to say the least. However, all these metrics are almost designed to present the US in bad light.
How about "the percentage of millionaires who were born in a poor family"? I bet this is where US shines. Rich people in most other countries are mostly from old money.
I used to live in Denmark. Ease of doing business -- well, there are good things (streamlined and transparent bureacracy) and there are bad things (taxes make you uncompetitive, especially if you plan to hire people). Access to capital -- can't even compare.
Regarding social mobility -- well, you can live a good life in Denmark, but living great life is different. Janteloven is still very much a thing.
How would the world be today if the government pulled all the brightest engineers off working on optimizing advertising tech at FAANG companies and paid them equally to solve these larger societal problems such as homelessness, reversing climate change/pollution, solving cancer, creating unlimited nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels, terraforming Mars for the humans, etc? I can only wonder... Thoughts?
Not significantly different to how it is today. Potentially much worse. It's solipsistic to think that more engineers and software developers would help with some of these social problems.
Sociology, economics and politics are difficult, valuable and all too often completely overlooked by people who have the luxury of being able to solve for x in their day job.
I suspect you'd make more progress on those particular problems by funneling the same amount of money into paying all the lobbyists to stay home and play Fortnite.
You'd be better off redirecting a portion of the funding that supports their work to people with actual expertise in the fields you mentioned. Particularly when it comes to solving social problems, many of which we have answers for that aren't implemented because their expense is politically untenable.
Social problems are best solved from a grassroots perspective, and they require negotiation, compromise, and HN hates this one, wait for it... politics (both official politics, and everyday interpersonal politics.)
Most people don't want to live on Mars. But they do like soap operas. If only people would donate their Netflix money to cancer research and donate the time saved from not using Facebook to do voluntary work.
It would be... dystopian. A lot of the work we do at FAANGs or similar startups is designing (i.e. manipulating) people into doing what we want them do. Imagine Obama or Trump having all those people and technology working to advance their agenda. That’s not a country I’d want to live in, even though I voted for one of those people.
I like the book "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley which covers a broad range of topics like these.
Some observations are quite surprising, for example using coal and then oil for energy replaced huge amounts of manual labor and might have eliminated slavery, deforestation and hunting whales for whale oil.
> Although unfortunately not solved, we've made great strides in regards to child mortality, extreme poverty, war, violence, health, freedom, literacy...
What great strides do you think America/the developed world have left to make?
Homelessness: unsolvable in a society where it is illegal to force someone to take care of themselves (by being sheltered). The west has decided that individual freedom is worth the cost of some people using it to choose to be homeless. I think this legal framework will make it impossible to solve homelessness.
Poverty: It is now known that there is a rising gulf between subjective and objective well being. A majority of millionaires do not think they are rich. I think this psychology will make it impossible to solve poverty.
Cancer: Entropy/cosmic rays scrambling DNA... I think thermodynamics will make it impossible to solve cancer (as in, all cancer) for everyone (very rich with DNA repair therapy in the medium/near future).
War: Actually living now in the most peaceful time in human history as a % of humans in conflict. I think the human desire for power/wealth (again, back to poverty) will make it impossible to solve the zero war scenario. At least nukes scared everyone from the big wars so far :)
> Homelessness: unsolvable in a society where it is illegal to force someone to take care of themselves (by being sheltered). The west has decided that individual freedom is worth the cost of some people using it to choose to be homeless. I think this legal framework will make it impossible to solve homelessness.
This may be philosophically true, and probably even technically true in practice, but I suspect the vast majority of homeless would prefer better shelter than they currently enjoy. For whatever reason, these people have failed to attain better shelter within our societal system. Some people blame the system for letting these people down, other people blame the individual for not having what it takes to "make it", but I don't think you can call this a choice unless you call failure a choice.
Given that, there probably are things we can do to "solve" the vast majority of homelessness, so don't give up just yet. The few people that then legitimately choose to be homeless will probably be so scant as to be barely noticed by the rest of us.
> Poverty: It is now known that there is a rising gulf between subjective and objective well being. A majority of millionaires do not think they are rich. I think this psychology will make it impossible to solve poverty.
I'd argue (and I'm not a millionaire) that being worth less than 10M isn't really that rich. A long-term pet peeve of me is that most people don't realise how poor they are, if you treat everything as being relative.
For most civilians, access to wealth and being able to access debt (and leverage) is tied to house prices, and a lot of house prices in high-paid areas are beyond the reach of most people. Thus, by extension, access to wealth is not easy for most people.
Trying to have access to wealth AND having at least one stay at home full-time parent? Even harder to achieve in this day and age. People born between the 50s and 80s basically were able to both get on the wealth ladder AND afford for one parent to dedicate themselves full-time to parenting their children.
Poverty versus homelessness is an interesting cognitive reframing of the same fundamental problem.
War, meanwhile is a scalar concept of the platonic idea of conflict in general, between two individuals, but scaled up and beyond the scope of individuals to transcend to rival collectives.
So, cancer. Unsolvable for absolutely everyone, although it can be solved for some, but then dancing around the issue of wealth again.
Here’s where I’d like to stop for a moment, and dispense with the conceptual curveballs being tossed around, because now with wealth as a requirement for diamond sure shots against cancer being accessible only to the wealthy, we’re right back onto the homelessness/poverty concept.
I’m going to cut to the chase: the words “illegal to force someone to take care of themselves” is an extremely misguided framing of what homelessness is. Almost to the point of willful deception. That ain’t what homelessness is.
Okay, sure. You’ve got psychiatric, fractured people walking around in circles, and lead a horse to water, do no harm, you’re idea of compelled assistance is my idea of a cage, and what about all the sociopaths who might game the system like blood sucking parasites. Healthy people need not be beset by the lampreys of willful destruction and self destruction.
But.
The U.S. Marshalls and/or the town sheriff’s department will trot on up to my door with cuffs in hand, and guns drawn, within 45 days of my bank telling someone that I haven’t scored enough paper points to pay tribute to the monarch of my roof. So, under threat of violence, not only is the degree of luxury stripped from my permission to simply exist comfortably, but perhaps I land in a cage. A real cage, not a conceptual economic cage of taxes and regulation. A cage shared with some of the fractured psych cases that might fracture me to match their proclivities and better suit their surroundings.
So, poverty. Back to wealth, yes? Points scored on paper, retained by banks that publish scores to highly available, networked computer databases for live transactions and batch processing.
We’re rapidly approaching a situation where electronic systems, computer software, and related hardware applications will obviate human effort in a wide array of scenarios. Transportation, anything involving sorting, organizing and distribution, rote fabrication and assembly; much of that can be automated, with or without magic decision making buzzwords for the edge cases that are currently mechanical turked with brute force data entry by humans in the loop.
This reorganization, centralized around advanced electronic systems of record and authority will drastically improve efficiency, to simultaneously create surplus and idle humans in one stroke, or many, many concurrent strokes, struck within a very fast, short span of time.
Now, broken humans, stupid humans, evil humans, and even just plain old humans, mediocre, unfuckable, and aged out; such a chore to be around and listen to. Why do anything for anyone that can’t charm your pants off? And then, there’s the biosphere to think about. Do we use automation to unleash a surplus of pollution, garbage, waste and toxicity upon our already fragile planet, but for the want of maximizing a bottomless pit of human activity? Indeed, when we play god, and cure cancer, feed the poor and house the homeless, do we even fix the ugly, mean freaks that no one finds adorable or even mildly interesting?
I think we can draw a bounding box around an extrapolation of all living humans in their current state of affairs, and what it would take to raise the standard of living, and provide a comfortable pasture for all the broken shambles of misfortune that creates poverty and all the mental illness that creates homelessness. We’ll probably even have enough surplus to snip out all those pesky tumors, and mend the festering sores that sprout more. We’ll probably be able to figure this stuff out, granted that biology is merely piles of chemistry, which of course is merely piles of physics, and that highly efficient resource sharing will produce idle humans bathed in surplus, many of whom will be pretty smart, healthy and motivated. My, that’s optimistic, isn’t it?
So, I dunno. I don’t see things your way, but then again, I have to spend eight or more exhausting hours a day, on this treadmill of income chasing to pay rent, eat food, run fool’s errands, commute, idle in front of a cathode ray tube, psychically recovering from the trauma of the stupidity inflicted upon me by this shitty mess of a groundhog’s day rat race, and then sleep for eight hours, so I’m actively prevented from helping you solve the problems you attempt to frame as so bloody insurmountable.
I was being a bit flippant in my comment because I take issue with the phrasing of these problems in the context of 'solutionism.'
We can, and have, eased poverty. Families aren’t having to eat their children as happened in 1920's Russia. We must strive to ease it our entire lives to add meaning, even if we know we will never reach the asymptote for the reasons I mentioned,
We must strive to ease war. Does that mean having a strong police-like presence in the Middle East, or just getting the fuck out? Our own society arose like a Phoenix from extreme violence, at we harming less developed countries by constant intervention in their sectarian violence?
We must strive to ease cancer, because we have to solve this before the heat death of the sun if we wish for humanity to survive afterwards.
My ten year old daughter recently built a robot that finds a face and then applies blush. We used an old printer for parts, a blush brush, and an Arduino clone. That's $3 in parts. She also had no prior experience with the Arduino or C, though she knows a bit of Python.
That is the level of technology that we are at today. We are living in the future. And it is a future that Asimov would like.
The circuit boards and the solder paste mask are made by another company and delivered by mail. It's been a while since I looked up costs, but it's quite cheap these days, and the watch's circuit board is small, so I can comfortably say it cost under $100 to get the mask and a few copies of the board.
The soldering could be done with a $200 chinese reflow oven, like the T962 (https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=t962), or with a $20 toaster oven, an oven thermometer, and some careful timing. (Some people do their surface-mount soldering with just a frying pan and their kitchen stove!)
The rest is just basic hand tools -- screwdriver, file, sandpaper, tweezers, maybe a magnifier. Maybe a $5 Arduino clone to help with debugging and programming, and a $35 T12 soldering tip+controller for doing soldering test stuff and "I messed up" wires.
If the first try doesn't work, and it's not obvious why, you'll to spend more money.
If fixing the problem requires changing the board board then you need to order new ones, and the mask to solder them.
DC voltage levels, current consumption, and electrical continuity can be checked with a $20 multimeter. The presence, frequency, and integrity of signals can be checked with a good used analog oscilloscope costing $100-$200. Some things are easier to check with a new, basic digital oscilloscope costing $300-$400.
If the electronics are good but there's something wrong with the software, you'll need something to read the signals the chips are exchanging with each other. Basic, low-speed (less than 1 MHz or so) signals can be read and generated with the Arduino board, or a $30 Bus Pirate. If your project uses higher-speed signals, you'll need a logic analyzer. A good USB model is the Saleae Logic 8, which costs $400.
(There is overlap in the capabilities of digital multimeters and logic analyzers, so you can sometimes just buy one and use it for both purposes.)
The case is 3D printed on what appears to be a $160 Monoprice Mini Delta.
Soldering was done in a reflow oven, commercial units start at around $200 or you can use a modified toaster oven. This board doesn't look too terrible to do with an iron or hot air gun either. You can get a decent combo hot air/iron station for about $60.
You'll want some test equipment, cheap multimeters start at free from harbor freight but you'll probably at least want to step up to a ~$15 model. Logic analyzers are handy and until fairly recently were quite expensive but now you can get them for $10. An oscilloscope might be handy for debugging the power circuitry here, you can get a cheap one for $20 or a nice one for a few hundred or an old nice one for about a hundred.
An adjustable bench power supply isn't really necessary but nice to have, those start around $50.
A professional EE's workbench will probably have many thousands of dollars worth of equipment on it but most hobbyists have much more modest budgets.
What tools? I think the biggest thing is a reflow oven, but, honestly, I've soldered using a cheap, used toaster oven from Goodwill + an oven thermometer. Worked wonders!
The 3D printer might have been the biggest offender, to be fair, but many libraries have some (as do many maker spaces that are hourly). Additionally, you can order a number of 3D printed parts online as well, for relatively low cost.
I'm pretty sure they used a Monoprice Mini Delta[1], which is one of the cheapest fully assembled 3D printers available (about $160), so it's not even that bad without a printer.
If you want to buy your own 3D printer and reflow, it's going to be pricey. If you live in an urban area, there are likely "maker spaces" nearby where you can pay a nominal fee to use the communal tools.
While I can appreciate the sentiment, the reason we can do things like this is because of all the research and development that went into things like integrated circuits, manufacturing and CAD. This is more the classic hacker thing, were you use something larger and serious for you own purposes. Not making something primarily for serving ads, or whatnot.
This technology can very well, and was to a large extent made to, be used for something else. I don't think researchers or EEs are stepping over homeless people more than anyone else. When it comes to doing good things with electronics I would be more worried about patents, or just finding the time.
> all the research and development that went into things like integrated circuits, manufacturing and CAD
It's more than just that though. Centuries of incremental knowledge passing from one generation to the next. A global economy that allows chips manufactured in China to be shipped to American for peanuts. All the collaborative effort that went into writing an OS that's available for anyone to use free of charge. That someone is able to be so specialized, they can do this in their leisure time.
It is an incredible amount of human cooperation and achievement over thousands of years. I suppose you could say that about many things today, but for whatever reason, this watch put me in a bit of a philosophical mood.
I guess: humans collaborating achieve great things; we should do more of that.
(You know what else reliably gets me marveling about humanity? Attending a symphony orchestra performance.)
Homeless, poverty, cancer, or war are all people problems, and people are complicated. We do have flying cars but they're not very good at flying or driving.
The “we don’t have flying cars” argument always strikes me as begging for something to complain about. We could easily have flying cars if there was literally one reason to have a flying car. There is not a single reason to have a flying car, so no one has put in the time to make one because no one would buy it because it’s pointless.
if there was literally one reason to have a flying car
I'll give two: reduce traffic jams, and less need to build/maintain roads. The average commute time* is about an hour a day. Giving people back that time to spend with their family, to work, to play would be an amazing boon to society. The real issue is that the technology to make practical (cheap, fast, quiet, safe) flying cars doesn't exist. A practical flying car would also solve the housing price crisis in cities as people could fly in from the exurbs.
> A practical flying car would also solve the housing price crisis in cities as people could fly in from the exurbs.
Doesn't this just reinvent the problem? You're currently spending a long time commuting due to congestion; you'll now spend a long time commuting due to sheer distance.
People are already driving from the exurbs, so a 2 hour commute from Pittsburg, CA to Downtown San Francisco (30 miles) would drop to 15 minutes in a car flying at 120mph. That's better than a typical intra SF commute. If you look at a 30 mile radius it is a tremendous area for living potential.
If we had the ability for humans to safely pilot a flying car at 120mph, we'd have the ability for humans to safely pilot a on-the-ground car at 120mph.
All the traffic collisions that currently happen in 2 dimensions (changing lanes without looking, failure to yield, rear-end collisions) would happen with flying cars but now in three dimensions. And when a collision happens that completely disables the car, it won't just crash in two dimensions, it will plummet to the ground.
To prevent that, we'd need dedicated air lanes that cars would have to merge in and out of, and on-ramps where they're only allowed to move up or down at dedicated spots to help with merging. Which we have on the ground already.
Yes planes fly fast. They're also piloted by professionals who dedicate their lives to piloting them, controlled by a central ATC tower, and heavily regulated by a governing body. And we still have air disasters.
There is zero reason to move cars into a third dimension of travel. If you want "cars but faster", we have a solution for that: cars. But faster.
I don't get your argument. Humans can safely pilot airplanes at 600 mph, but clearly cannot do this safely on the ground. The difference is density. Cars routinely travel only a meter apart on highways, but because there's a lot more space in the air, planes maintain minimum separation of hundreds of meters.
Ships, also driven by professionals, collide more frequently than airplanes for the same reason.
Another important reason to go 3D is that you can go much faster with less fuel at high altitude.
With credit reports and landlord background checks, I think homelessness will be a rising problem because everything now goes into a database that sticks with you for 7 years.
I have an acquaintance who was evicted (due to property damage caused by her ex boyfriend). She was given a 3 day notice to vacate, and now she has an eviction on her record. The eviction basically means that she cannot rent a property in her own name for the next 7 years, even though she's gainfully employed and can pay rent. After over a month living in a hotel, she finally found an off-lease sublet. But that's only temporary.
We've possessed the technology and resources to solve the first two for at least a decade, but it's unclear how doing so would increase share-holder value.
And when we're piloting spacecraft between various colonies in our solar system, we'll still have wars and poverty and suffering, but one person will be able to design, manufacture, and build their own bespoke nuclear reactor for their personal spacecraft.
