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🌎 I've Got Questions
What it feels like inside my 8 year old's brain before I've had coffee
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Welcome back, Shit Givers.
I am traveling this week so this week’s essay is 1) a little late and 2) not an essay. I opted instead to share my to-do list, and I’m sorry/you’re welcome.
Please drop your constructive/thoughtful responses in the comments (click the “Comment” button below the essay and then scroll down to the comments section) so we can get down to business.
I’m Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit.
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I’VE GOT QUESTIONS
So I have previously shared some of the (unhinged but productive) ways I think about today’s problems and opportunities.
I have even written — twice, kind of — about the most important meta question of all (probably worth reading before you dive in today). This question is the foundation of my work, and usually the first question I ask people when they come to us asking “What can I do?”
Today, in lieu of an essay, I am sharing a completely unorganized, non-exhaustive list of the big questions which bounce around my brain and off each other like pinballs throughout my days and nights.
I do not work on many of these directly, as longtime readers know I’m dangerously unqualified to do so. But I do help other people work on them, or fund existing or new efforts to fix them. That’s Compound Action.
Though I began tracking this list long before I read it, a slightly modified quote from MIT undergirds many of the items below:
“What are the hardest problems at the intersection of technology and society that deserve most of our attention?”
I will warn you that I have not edited this list in the slightest — some of them are a single word which you, reader, might understandably read as a “problem”, while another could be taken as a “solution”.
They are neither here nor there, they are both at the same time, one does not exist without the other. They are written the way you see them here because those are the original words that fell down the stairs, out of my rickety brain, and into an unformatted Apple Note.
I have explored, challenge, connected, and mind-mapped many of these — it’s my favorite party trick to perform live — but I won’t share that chaos today. I’ll let you connect some of the dots for yourself (more on that below, though).
None of these are new ideas or questions. Many, if not most, boil down to how we have made our four most fundamental needs — air, water, food, shelter — more expensive, less accessible, less reliable, and less healthy.
Even more fall into one or (usually) more of our shared secondary needs: power, education, health care, public health, family planning, land-use, etc.
We have been deliberately misinforming each other for many thousands of years, but have somehow also closed a lot of very dangerous and scary loops like horrific childhood life expectancy, or the o-zone layer. Only recently though have we become more self-aware that most of these issues exist because we are who we thought we were.
Clearly some of these can and should be prioritized over others (from urgent potential impact to political feasibility — pragmatism is the name of the game), should be in direct support of already-engaged stakeholders, and developed and/or expanded to reflect current evidence-based policies and the political/policy landscape.
I am an idealist but we have to actually get shit done.
The other more practical reason I am sharing these with you today is because I am curious for ideas about how we as a community could make this list, and related problems and opportunities, into some sort of relational wiki or something. I am profoundly disinterested in moderating UGC, but there may be some way to keep it from getting out of control, and still collaborate to make progress through a living, breathing foundation of our great challenges.
Ok, so, here we go, and please again remember this list is not in any particular order and not at all exhaustive:
Clean energy and storage mineral replacements
Energy storage
Energy transmission
Medicine supply chains and storage/delivery infrastructure over new medicines
Food supply chains
Young white men education
Affordable & accessible (drastically expanded) mental health services, especially in the context of technology-related stressors
Indoor air standards
Public sector AI research and compute capabilities
Groundwater
Digital public infrastructure
Baby bonds/wealth gap/Reconstruction
Sponge cities
Micromobility incentives, rebates, etc (units and infrastructure)
Reverse Citizens United
Algorithmic bias and discrimination in AI used for public services and decision-making
Sea level rise and infrastructure (airports, saltwater intrusion to freshwater, etc)
AI copilot vs autopilot
Rainwater storage/flooding
Aging China
Digital inclusion and literacy programs for marginalized communities
Heat-driven migration
TB
Alignment problem but on steroids
Microplastics
Really all plastics
Age limits for elected officials
Societal change before new tech tools
Trains
Drought
Modern nuclear power
Over-collection, storage, and sales of personal data
Disability reporting as Long COVID base grows
Recycling isn’t real
Baseline cultural, ethics, and psychological preparation for AI (and universal coding of self-AI)
Bird flu
Humanities training for VC’s, technologists, founders
Search engines that produce their own answers and not results
Flooding
Dynamically taxing driving distance to replace gas tax revenue
Localized solar and geothermal networks
AI-enhanced persuasive messaging
Agrovoltaics/more sheep/end lawns
Rice
Local journalism
Non-profit journalism
Community-owned and operated solar, battery storage, and broadband networks in underserved areas
Voting rights
ASML-TSMC bottleneck
Unlocking systemic structural inequalities and inequities
Food waste - penalties?
Loneliness
High skilled immigration
School lunches
School breakfasts
Climate migration
Long COVID
Teaching probabilistic thinking/numeration
Groundwater supplies
Unions (gig economy protections too)
Cognitive liberty from AI
Coffee crop/farmers
School bus drivers/participation incentives to reduce car dropoffs
Chocolate
Cigarettes
120v heat pumps and heat pump water heaters
Alcohol
Disaster/emergency info post-Twitter/public API’s
Meat
Generative disinformation
Battery mineral recycling
Dismantling factory farms
Dwindling South Korea
Trade schools
Insular Japan
Policy intersection of maximizing innovation and usefulness with proactive reducing societal harm
Burying power lines
Gen A personal LLM’s
Funding more basic research
Primary care
Replacing lead pipes
Interoperable smaller online forums
Breaking up the FDA so both parts actually work
Clean concrete and steel
Rural broadband
Leveraging skills of elders
Paid homeworkers
Clinical trials
Community health clinics/workers
Recruiting and training electricians, especially women
5x US teacher pay
Wastewater capture, monitoring, and recycling
— Quinn
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