
Hilbert’s list - slyall
https://seths.blog/2018/12/hilberts-list/
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Lerc
The purely technical achievements I think have a much better chance than the
ones that have a social component.

Issues where you have a human adversary are much harder. Each advance may be
met by the adversary advancing to maintain their advantage. Human Trafficking
is an obvious example where there is an active adversary, but recent times
have particularly shown the vulnerability of Democracy to malicious actors.

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z3phyr
We need a microprocessor revolution of energy storage and dissipation (getting
smaller but storing twice more every two years kind) to actually fulfill most
of the other things in the list.

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rs86
Great idea for a post, but the list is awfully undecidable

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valar_m
It seems like that was indeed one of his points -- that perhaps the future now
depends on solving problems that do not have objective measures of success:

> Our next steps might be far more effective than simple resolutions, which
> are easily ignored or pushed aside.

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foxes
That seems naive at best. How can you even judge what is effective with out
some sort of metric? Seems like it would lead to alot of wasted effort.

As an aside,usually the tools and techniques used to solve a well defined
problem become pretty important. They lead to other well defined questions and
then further objective progress.

I also think the major problems we face are reasonably well defined, for
example climate change and emission targets. Even then we struggle to actually
solve some of them. Being nebulous will just make progress harder.

Really is a bit rich to compare yourself in some way to Hilbert while being so
hand wavy.

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miguelrochefort
> Beneficial man/machine interface (post Xerox Parc)

Amen

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yuchi
That one hit for me too. We mostly stopped at 1995 with a small leap in 2007
(ZUIs coming from iPhone OS).

Current experiments are more or less a remix of those two — interface less
(assistants) are incredibly far away in the future to be able to replace
current UIs completely.

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donclark
I think that AR has a strong possibility of becoming more commonplace within 5
years. VRs future, Im not so sure of.

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miguelrochefort
I expected a better list from Seth. Seems poorly thought out and quickly put
together.

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dmurray
This is a shitty replacement for Hilbert's list. Hilbert had 25 problems in
mathematics: when you solved them, you knew you had, or at worst you would
wait for peer review to confirm you got it.

No one will ever solve, to pick one, "Alternatives to paid labor for most
humans". It's already happened for some people, will never happen for some
people, and won't necessarily be a good thing if it happens for many people.
The items on this list are overwhelmingly people and political problems and -
even if they are laudable goals in general - don't belong in the same breath
as Hilbert's.

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dvt
Let alone that some are just dubiously ambiguous. What does "transmutation of
matter to different elements and structures" mean? We've already done this via
hydrogen bombs and particle accelerators, it's just very (very) expensive or
very (very) destructive. Or does the author mean something different -- maybe
more like the alchemy of the Dark Ages? What does the author even mean by
"structures"?

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Alex3917
I don't think he necessarily means elements in the chemistry sense of the
word. By elements he probably just means new physical materials (e.g.
graphene), and by structures he's probably talking about things like nanobots
or 3D chips. (I could be completely wrong, but just a guess.)

