Robert Miles posed a question in a video about AI safety that has echoed around my head for the last few months. It’s originally a quote from Richard Hamming. It’s almost haunted me, demanding that I face it. This is my attempt to organize myself to answer the question. The question is:
“What is the most important problem in your field, and why aren’t you working on it?”
I’ve felt a strong awareness of my own mortality and the short window of time since experiencing a significant health issue in 2017. I’m also aware of how fleeting the opportunity is at present for the human species to keep the light of consciousness aflame - we’re simultaneously at our most capable of shaping our world for the better and most capable of destroying ourselves. Given the present and my connection to my fellow humans, in the absense of an external purpose it makes most sense to me to dedicate my life to trying to improve the likelihood of a good future for humanity. Like an ant in a sea of ants pushing on a boulder, my push will likely be forgotten, but there’s purpose and deep satisfaction in believing that I helped push us towards a better future.
So now it’s a matter of figuring out what that biggest problem is. As Douglas Adams pointed out in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, often the question is much more difficult and important than the solution. We’ve got our work cut out for us.
Through this blog, I aim to:
- Organize my thoughts on mapping and identifying what I see as the most important problem(s)
- Document my approach to understanding and solving pieces of these problems
My goal in documenting this here is three-fold - to distill my knowledge gained through this process for myself, for people I’d like to talk with or teach, and the greater community.
I want to give myself something to refer back to that can hold the structure of reasoning and links to valuable source data. I want to be able to revisit problems and sketches of solutions to integrate new information, building towards a comprehensive approach to the problem. I can’t keep all this in my head and so I need a scratch-pad to reason about things.
I also want to be able to talk with people about these problems and teach them what I’ve learned. I’ve found myself explaining concepts like the surprisingly small amount of land required for solar energy, how to delegate effectively, or how to solve design problems through rapid iterative design to many people and it would be helpful to have my thoughts written up to share.
Finally, I want to give someone like me, who feels a deep need to do something but is unsure of what to do, a head start on tackling some of these problems. I have found reading Jason Crawford’s “The Roots of Progress” and Casey Handmer’s blogs terrific for analyzing and planning how to solve big problems. Ideally, someone would read over this blog, become convinced that solving these problems is important enough to dedicate their time, get caught up on key context to begin solving the problem, and get connected with the people currently working on the problem.
What am I going to tackle?
I’m going to explore into how our world’s problems are interconnected, in particular from a systems and first-principles perspective. For example, I want to try to understand where exponential growth can be unlocked, e.g. through automation freeing up people to do more high-level work, or through universal basic income and education increasing the effectiveness of the population. I want to try to understand where the big levers are that accelerate our ability to tackle problems. I want to know which thread to tug on to undo the Gordian knot.
I also want to write up strategies and optimizations for solving classes of problems, based on my own readings and experience. In solving a problem, I’ve often found that a significant difficulty is recognizing the pattern, at which point you can deploy a well-tested solution approach from another domain. If I can distill what I’ve been taught and what I’ve learned into short posts, I think it will be helpful for passing that knowledge on.
A caveat - I am frequently wrong. I build my mental models and arguments, then test them by crashing them directly into the rocky crags of reality. I will do my best to research well and reason correctly, but I fully expect to make many mistakes. I will add corrections and edits as I become aware of the errors. Don’t take anything on this blog as gospel. I’m figuring this out as I go and I see making mistakes as a key part of learning.