We, as in humanity, haven't even figured out how to support the people we already have. We never have. Even without the threat of climate change, billions are under-nourished.
High tech might alleviate some issues, but the root cause could be addressed through existing social technology. For example, say we had AGI robots that could do all the work that humans do today - if owned only by rich capitalists, the quality of life for many may actually drop. But, combined with land value taxes and universal basic income, the result would likely be an increase quality of life (unless it turns out humans are willing to keep increasing population as long as the amount of aggregate suffering is below a certain level). AGI robots don't necessarily make things better. But social tech like LVT+UBI could meaningfully make things better, and, it could do it today (without the need for more "geniuses").
Starting with "problems" is already cutting out half of the kinds of businesses that exist.
I much prefer the "jobs-to-be-done" framing: people and organizations desire certain things done, and they pay for products/services to get them done; some jobs are not being well done (and thus, a "problem"), but many jobs are being done fine, but, there may still be opportunities to do them much better. (aka "pains" and "gains")
Ex. Alice was fine with her extra bedroom but AirBnB allowed her to make an extra 2k per month? etc
Its often easier to find acute pains to address than great gain opportunities, but it is possible, and many startups do it. Ignoring gain-potential as an avenue of value creation is myopic.
Exactly. I think one could argue that "gains" have yielded more successful startups.
e.g. Amazon/DoorDash - driving to the store was "fine", but ship to home = way more convenient
Uber - Waving down taxi is "fine" experience, but on demand transportation = way more convenient
Slack - communicating through email is "fine", but async messaging = more real time and productive
It's typically easier to make money from concentrations of money (rich individuals and companies), and those tend have more gain opportunities than problems (because they've already monied-away their problems).
...and, there's nothing particularly preventing a similar approach in JS (keywords would need to be strings, and... data manipulation in JS is relatively a huge pain compared to Clojure)
For anyone interested in a slightly lighter Diplomacy, I recommend checking out Game of Thrones the board game. Like Diplomacy, it can be played with no randomness, but the way orders work is much less tedious. It ties in nicely with the themes from the books. It is still pretty intense, so more for the Risk crowd than the Catan crowd.
As you can see, some houses are 3X more likely to win than some others.
It IS a fantastic game however, it just needs a few house rules to balance it.
For another truly exceptional game with even more treachery than Diplomacy, may I suggest Dune (1979 with a reprint last year)? It has my favorite power of all time in a game: before the game starts, the Bene Gesserit write down the name of a player and a turn. If that player wins on that turn, the Bene Gesserit win instead.
If we could afford to live in a world where everyone was given $5000/mth, would we want such a world? (where work was optional) I think yes.
...can we afford that? At this point, probably not. But is it something to strive for?
I think it is eventually possible to get the costs of providing basic needs to everyone (say, through automation) to the point where they can be easily covered by taxes on those who choose to work.
I fear though, that housing is an obstacle to this vision, because in many countries, people rely on housing to be an investment (ex. my parents house is the majority of their retirement), and so the politicians protect it as such, and developers have weird incentives... and so the prices don't go down.
I do not think such a world is desirable. It would just distort markets. Everyone will charge more for everything, starting with rent.
If you cover the basic needs of "everyone", the number of everyone will just go up and up and up until you can't cover the basic needs anymore. Do you think earth can sustain infinite people? There has to be a mechanism preventing people to increase their number to unsustainable levels. The current world already does a really bad job at that, I don't think we have to make this worse.
I think the most desirable world is one with a build-in pruning process, where only the most adapted people survive, thus preventing the number of humans to reach unsustainable levels, while still progressing to greater heights. After all, if you just put a cap on the number of children people are allowed to have you're just going to stagnate. It's better to have a large pool to select the fittest and prune the rest, resulting in the same number at the end, only with much better quality. Historically, war was such a pruning process. But I don't think it was an especially good one.
