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.
"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).
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."
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.
I added the qualifier of "most" because I wasn't sure about that one. I'm not a biologist so I have to rely fully on the opinions of others to tell me what avenues of aging research are likely to pay off and how soon. But anyway, I'm pretty confident that the biggest problem all these fields face are their public image. Fix that and the money will follow.
I hate having a car. I would love to see autonomous vehicles...but 40,000 deaths with 3 million injuries is not a big enough target when 3 Billion people on this planet live on less that $2.50/day. We have bigger problems to solve. I put my vote on improving "Government Transparency".
The world has bigger problems than car accidents, but think in terms of bang for your buck. Fighting poverty is hard and expensive. Autonomous vehicle technology could be had for a fraction of what gets spent on pork projects during any given week that congress is in session.
Don't think of Online Banking as something that just allows you to not go into the bank, if you do, you're thinking in terms of a first world experience. There are billions of people in this world who have no access to banks, or would not dare trust their money to unregulated and corrupt individuals that head these so called banks. Heck, I have in-laws that keep the bulk of their money in a stove on their balcony of their apartment...and that's in Kiev, Ukraine!
I totally agree with you there are millions...billions who have no access to banking...We are working on how that can change...and how the millions can actually get on to a platform which will enable democratization of the entire banking and other wealth creation processes
PS; So request you to take a minute and vote for 'Build better banking tools for everyone' at Project10tothe100.com
One of the things that keeps poor people poor is transaction fees, high interest rates on loans and, most importantly, difficulty understanding and accessing more advanced financial tools and tax rebates.
I voted for this one over other more noble causes, because this is one area where Google has the capabilities needed to make a difference.
Not everybody thinks the Copenhagen "Consensus" has the best answers, despite it's name. My impression is that they completely neglect the economic basis for squalor (they suggest better nutrients, de-worming and so on, but don't address why people are in that situation to begin with).
I think you two have this completely wrong. Falling death rates produce a population explosion, but only for a generation or two. After that, birth rates fall in line and things level off. China and India have already seen this play out.
The worst effect of malnutrition is that it damages brain development. What could possibly be a better way to get people out of poverty than to make them smarter?
I am not sure what is cause and effect here. To my mind, the Copenhagen thing does not address the reasons for people being poor. I don't think they are poor because malnutrition damaged their brains.
I think the Copenhagen thingy is superficial and sensationalist.
Falling death rates produce a population explosion, but only for a generation or two. After that, birth rates fall in line and things level off.
So the first part says population increases due to reduced death rate. The second clause that this effect is limited to about 30-40 years. The next sentence that birth rates "fall in line" which I read to mean decline to account for the reduced death rate. Finally "things level off" meaning that the rate of change of population is reduced to 0, a plateau on a population graph.
Which overall I read to mean that whilst there is a short ("generation or two") increase this is rapidly accounted for by falling birthrates and the overall population growth is near zero, ie population is not increasing.
By "level off" I meant "return to a growth rate comparable to before the boom", though in actually it sometimes ends up negative -- Japan and much of Europe is breeding below replacement rates (read: committing cultural suicide). But more importantly, I never said that this has played out everywhere in the world; in fact I've strongly implied the opposite.
Now about this "strongly implied the opposite" the area encompassed included at least China and India as subregions and didn't appear to have a disclaimer - if any region was implied then it would have to be Asia, but I assumed the whole world. Which words "implied the opposite"?
I think in Europe the situation is that endemic populations are breeding below replacement rates (good IMO) but that immigrant populations are cancelling out any benefit and themselves breeding way ahead of the endemic rate. At the same time the countries they are emigrating from are exploding in population and the emigration is not sufficient to level off the population - ie that Worldwide population growth rates are positive but as you note but that the native populations of certain regions are not contributing to the procession towards untenable over-population.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.