

Vote on Google's Project 10 to the 100 - vijayr
http://www.project10tothe100.com/vote.html

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dfranke
They're trying to improve global welfare as much as possible, and this is what
they come up with? Improved online banking? Seriously?

Ranking global priorities is a hard problem, but it's one that a lot of smart
people have already put a lot of thought into. The Copenhagen Consensus
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_consensus>) has come up with what I
think is a pretty good set of answers.

Here's one item that I'd add to the list, which Copenhagen didn't consider:
autonomous vehicle research. Car accidents kill about 42,000 people per year
in the US alone, and injure 2.9 million. Sufficiently advanced autonomous
vehicles could prevent virtually all of these.

Then of course there are all the "Singularity" ideas: prevention of aging,
Friendly AGI, consciousness uploading, and so forth, but most of these aren't
going to be accelerated much just by throwing more money at them.

~~~
MikeCapone
"Then of course there are all the "Singularity" ideas: prevention of aging,
Friendly AGI, consciousness uploading, and so forth, but most of these aren't
going to be accelerated much just by throwing more money at them."

Actually, the implementation of the SENS plan would benefit from having more
money. Aubrey de Grey has said a few times recently that they basically have
more leads to follow than money to do it. www.sens.org

Aging kills between 100-200k people PER DAY (not to mention all the suffering
of people around and loss of knowledge and expertise).

~~~
amalcon
To be fair, the guy works on aging research. Someone who works on aging
research isn't likely to say "Aging research doesn't really need any more
money."

~~~
MikeCapone
Indeed, but it does check out. Every time they've got new funding they've
branched out in new directions, and they're pretty transparent in what they
fund so that everybody can see that they're not just duplicating work done
elsewhere or wasting the money.

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reasonattlm
Hmm; I see that all the practical, do-something project ideas with measurable
results were somehow distilled into a collection of woo-woo and vague feel-
good umbrella designations.

My prediction: based on what is telegraphed from the 10^100 site now, this
initiative won't go anywhere, won't create anything meaningful, and won't
significantly change anything.

~~~
sketerpot
My prediction: Google will fund _something_ useful, and it will bear a vague
resemblance to one or more things on this list if you squint at it hard
enough.

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thaumaturgy
I'm _really_ excited to see "Build [a] real-time, user-reported news service"
on there.

Because that's exactly what we're doing.

And these potential projects only showed up because people asked for them.

Google has pretty much just helped validate our market for us.

This is so awesome!

~~~
anigbrowl
Please post about it when you can. This was my vote, since I believe an
informed populace is an empowered one.

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jpwagner
Holy crap: 110,000,000 undetected landmines out there! I had no idea that was
a problem.

Such an unnecessary problem!

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pizza
I voted for making online education free. I believe that this should _also_
mean better education for children in developing countries. As long as there
is one computer with internet access and a village puts it to good use, it has
succeeded.

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dzlobin
Did anyone vote for the 'make science seem cooler' option? It's seems
incredibly trivial when compared to the rest of the problems, but it's a bit
frightening with the declining rates of students graduating with science and
engineering degrees. If there are fewer and fewer people to fix these
problems, what will we do then?

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YvesDr
What a joke! On top of their very bad communication and challenge management,
Google has a curious opinion on what will change and improve the world.

There were different categories and it seems that only one has been retained
(social, education).

They have even not published a simple list of submitted project by categories.

By the end of the submission period, they have blocked access to the original
pages and now they have flushed their cache.

Challenge categories:

Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect
unique cultures?

Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their
families?

Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?

Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global
ecosystem?

Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?

Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?

Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?

Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all.

I'm now convinced that this game was setup by Google to grab or better to
harvest ideas for free and take patents to make business.

I invite everyone to monitor the patents issuing rate from Google since a few
months and in the near future.

As an example, I've submitted the Energy meter at the beginning of the game
and 4 months later the Google Power meter was published with exactly the same
features.

Very sad.

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matt1
Note that if you refresh the page it reorders the list.

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lazyant
I don't know how this would hook up with google or a web app, but I'm missing
in the list a law/records-related tool. I have the prejudice that in many poor
countries a big hurdle to creating wealth is the lack of paperwork and
records; a gang with guns can show up and take away the land that your family
has been farming for centuries.

Also it's been mentioned the transparent government; hopefully this will help
a bit in curbing the corruption.

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Mouli
Please do vote for the Banking theme.. That which will help millions of people
to get access to various financial products and services

Mouli

