Why shouldn't they?

Also, wouldn't anyone with half a brain use the human-free system to produce another human-free system that was no longer controlled by the "small number of 'people'"?

Making progress requires first not dismissing your ideological outgroup along such lines, and instead trying to understand what actually motivates them.

> The solution to most of these problems lies in policy, not in new tech advancements.

That is not mutually exclusive. If technological advances result in a given technology becoming cheaper, more scalable, and easier to deploy, they also make it easier to advocate for and implement the relevant policies.

You can think of it like this: our "political technology" is not good enough to use solar energy at its current prices to replace fossil fuels as fast as we would like. Well, what about if we cut the price of solar by a factor of five? Perhaps it will be good enough then.

Policy and funding. One of which will be sucked up by this venture.

Hey now, our biggest companies do more than suck up to science denying wackos, don't be so unfair... sometimes our biggest companies fund their wacko superpacs!

I do not see how the second sentence follows from the first.

I would think the claim in the second sentence would only be relevant in case of the inverse of the claim in the first sentence.

It's a total delusion to think that the key to reverse-engineering the brain or producing energy from fusion is policy.

It also happens to be the favorite pretext for people to seize more political power and launder more money through nonprofits though.

> other than suck up to science denying wackos

The science denying wacko is a but like drunk homeless guy on street while you have your Ferrari parked in the driveway. The wacko has a golf club. There is too much to lose by pickup a fight. You might win eventually but the next wacko shows up with another golf club soon.

Definitely pretty far along imo. But maybe they consider the progress bar to be at 75% or 80% rather than 100%.

Not enough. The more economical it is, the better.

People on HN keep saying it is, but I'm still not seeing it. Companies are building datacenters in vast, sun-blasted deserts and still choosing to power those with natural gas. This in turn makes people complain about emissions pledges being reversed, but if it were economical, no pledge would be needed.

Of course, USA has cheaper oil/gas than other countries. But if you look elsewhere, rich countries are subsidizing solar, poor ones are basically not using it.

Many of these problems don't seem scientific at all, but rather a problem of political will.

As you said, Solar power is incredibly economical. There are plenty of ideas around putting them over farms, or parking lots en-masse to provide cleaner energy.

Access to clean drinking water, while certainly scientific in some situations, is also a problem of political will and money.

Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure - It's infrastructure week!

Seems to have been developed in 2008 (continuing through 2017), which explains the "economical" framing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Academy_of_Engineerin...

In some regions, but it would be great if it was economical in cloudy Seattle and not just the sunbelt

At this point the Hard Problem is policy to get out of solar's way.

  3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods

Why not just add 'mind control' while you're at it.

Only death stops stagnation in the end. Without death, especially if death can be avoided by the rich and powerful but not the poor, life will get much, much worse for the average person (until only the rich and their automated capital remain I suppose, in which scenario they will simply turn on each other).

When one of them dies, they want to leave behind a puzzle so complex that entire groups of the population dedicate their lives to solving it within the virtual world. They look old enough to have a lot of favorite 1980’s and 90’s pop culture references, so those will probably be the clues.

Higher-fidelity telepresence could be as significant as the recent COVID work-from-home wave.

I guess if we failed to Prevent Nuclear Terror the bunker denizens of the future are gonna need somewhere to hang out.

I'm guessing this might be about "teleoperation" (like remote surgery via robots + VR) and being able to remote training as well. The binocular vision VR gives you compared to flat screens help a lot with depth perception for precision of incisions for example.

Satellite/drone detection of nuclear material? Shooting missiles out of the sky?

> For what purpose?

To understand, same reason you reverse engineer anything. Doesn't have to have a further goal than that, understanding the brain better helps in so many ways. But like most technology, obviously can be used for bad too. Should we just skip researching some topics then?

We have a good understanding of the function (and more importantly dysfunction of) kidneys, lungs, heart, etc. from high level to cellular level.

For brain, our understanding is fuzzy, more like "this part is important for that behavior" or "here is how neuron works" but we don't have a holistic understanding.

If we had that, we could more easily diagnose and treat neurological disorder.

I imagine a good model of the brain would contribute enormously to alleviating psychiatric/mental health disorders.

To do human brain activities at scale.

agreed

Idk, they never struck me as being into eugenics.

What the fuck man? I really don't want some tech startup trying to "fix" my neurodivergence.

Google stock would drop big if this new company was being funded by competitors

and... the VC is Google.

Gotta compensate them somehow.

Sometimes you got to find a way to buy the silence of your top employee, to prevent them from going to the competition. This "start-up" is shallow as hell

These people are all already making 9 figure compensation packages, I think if they thought they could do the work they wanted at Google, they would.

My thoughts exactly

For all we know, they could have been successfully working on "10. Prevent Nuclear Terror" for the last 80+ years.