| As others have said in this thread, the bottleneck of solving epic problems is solving social problems. The bottleneck of solving social problems is coordination of individual behavior; cooperating. As far as I can see, the bottleneck of social coordination is information transfer, especially information transfer towards facilitation of trust. Solving epic problems usually requires making long-term investments. I think many individuals would make more long-term investments towards solutions to epic problems if they were able to establish more trust in the cooperative behavior of other individuals. I think it comes down to counteracting the dilemmas studied in game theory. I think there is opportunity to leverage software and the internet to create new/stronger information flows that can more often raise us above the pessimistic equilibrium of game theory dilemmas. Despite the increasing ubiquity of internet-connected hardware, messaging systems, and search engines, I think there is still a lot of opportunity for tech-trained people to improve and build information systems that provide key information to key places in support of social cooperation. Software and the internet has made information flow a lot more liquid, but there is still a lot of opportunity to improve query-ability of data sources, and improve the value of information propagation across communication networks. Ultimately, we can seek to increase cases where an individual changes his/her behavior, due to trust in other individuals changing their behavior. |