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by bsenftner
1218 days ago
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We still are crowded with low hanging fruit, but apparently, it's invisible to the majority. Existing low hanging fruit off the top of my head:
* air quality, safety and more sophisticated air management indoors is a virtually untapped field; as air borne viruses become more of an issue in our denser population, this issue is peer with water and food quality.
* how to promote secondary thinking, soas to prevent public manipulation and abuse.
* interpersonal rights management - systematic abuse of personal rights is institutionalized by modern corporate business and legal procedures; how to frame and formalize so this can be named, addressed, eliminated and the institutional abusers identified and dealt. I'm talking everything from entire industries that overwork, to leased prison labor.
* interpersonal communication management - in the technology industries issues such as Imposter Syndrome and bully behavior is common; this has as a core underlying aspect deceptive language in a individual's self conversation - which can be addressed, corrected, and a level of personal wellness achieved while that individual becomes significantly more accepted and integrated socially.
* Professional communications for scientific and technology careers: our industries are largely populated by gifted individuals who have not received any professional communications training, so our industries are ripe with confusion and miscommunication. How to impress the value of formal communication within the scientific and technology industries, and how to do so without the typical lame ineffectual methods that do not work now. |
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...but I'm not convinced any of them are low-hanging fruit. Almost everything on this list would require sustained R&D across several fields of expertise, and many of them have the significant added challenge of overcoming entrenched interests / power structures.
That's not to say we shouldn't try! Solving even a small part of anything here would materially improve quality of life for a lot of people - but these are not "I could solve this in a weekend" problems; these are generational problems, towards which meaningful effort could easily be measured in thousands of person-years from entire teams / organisations / ecosystems of smart people, and where even a chance at success would require a steady supply of adequate resources that is durable across periodic economic shocks.
CERN is the closest thing I can think of as a useful mental model here: sustained cooperation across multiple nations, massive amounts of public investment, clear tangible outcomes over a period of decades.