[donaldguy]

My hypothesis, which I am not doing the best job of working in harmony with, is that the effort that's gonna have the most positive impact is proactive thinking and experimentation around both hastening and potentiating/spreading but also _planning for_ a post-scarce economy and society

My cynical view is that hardline capitalism operates on a faulty assumption of unlimited opportunity and unlimited growth. I believe that between population growth and accelerating automation, that barring a major casualty event such as a large-scale pandemic, the number of people will eventually outnumber the number of useful jobs that legitimately need doing. (or that worse the resource burn to sustain the model will undermine its feasibility and that of "good life" in general).

To this end, I think we need good minds figuring out how a world works in which people are less busy and own less. I don't know how that works but I think it involves education, maybe art, and also probably a greater popularization of mindfulness and contentment-first thinking.

This isn't to say there aren't big "hard" problems to tackle as well. In my eyes they are mostly the resource-management ones:

  - Alternative energy
  - Waste management and improved recycling tech
  - Space exploration?

And probably too the health ones, though population age bolstering is a real double edged sword:

  - cancer treatment
  - antibiotic alternatives (in the face of resistance)
  - better, more pleasant contraception?

I also have strong beliefs in the inherent good of technologies that can improve large scale understanding and communication:

  - machine translation (accounting for cultural factors too)
  - software for sensemaking and fair/just governance
  - more far-afield: neuro-analysis and possibly "telepathy" tech

... and yet for some reason I work on the infrastructure for a marketing platform :-/