What is humankind's greatest challenge?

As of now, it is fair to say that humankind is facing a few challenges. We have a serious ecological crisis, a number of ongoing wars, a suboptimal economic system, widespread world hunger, quite the number of impressively unpleasant diseases, religious and political extremism, and so on.

My question is the following: as of now, what should be our greatest priority? If you were writing humankind's to-do list, what would you put in the first place? And which steps do you suggest might be useful to address the problem?

As for me, I am not entirely sure of my choice, but I think that education should be the top issue. Especially literacy and basic mathematical and scientific knowledge.

And as to what to do to address the issue... I am not entirely sure. Perhaps one should take one step back, and focus not so much on teaching as on teaching teachers. Allow talented people from underdeveloped regions to receive a top of the class education, but only if they then spend 10+ years teaching basic stuff to other people of their regions. Rinse and repeat.

It's not a perfect solution, and it is costly, and it does not address directly all the other people; but my reasoning if we can give more opportunities to people to have a good education, we get more people who can take a stab at the other problems too.

What about you?

edited 11th May '12 12:13:04 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Checking the power of business. When the people who make the rules are all paid off by a small but immensely powerful cabal to make more rules that favor them, nothing gets done. Anywhere.

I don't really think humanity has any major issue it needs to deal with right here right now in order to fix itself. Really, the world has just been getting better and better and this trend will continue into the future. However, I do think the biggest problem is miscommunication. People don't seem to usually understand another person's point of view all the time, or if they do they just don't care and think they're right anyway. If more people learned to just get along with one another and understand where others are coming from then this world will be a much better place to live in. Of course it won't fix every problem we have but it will help.

I'd say it's figuring ourselves out from top to bottom rather than anything else. The more we know about ourselves, the more able we'd be to solve problems with our interactions with the world. But, then, I would say that.

Greatest in what sense?

Greatest in "best able to help us solve our other problems"? That'd be putting checks and balances on the wealthy and powerful, and educating the disadvantaged, thus helping our societies to make better decisions overall.

Greatest in "we're the most screwed if we don't fix this RIGHT NOW"? Dropping our fossil fuel usage and commencing large scale geoengineering projects to get that carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere. Anthropogenic global warming is the one ecological crisis that could send mankind back to the Stone Age; thousands of years of progress down the tubes because we have to redo our agricultural systems from scratch. We're heading for atmospheric CO 2 levels of >500 ppm, that shit needs to turn around pronto.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

I echo RT's sentiment of splitting this into immediate crisis and long-term improvement we must strive for. As for the former, I certainly do think it's global warming and peak oil. As for the latter, well, I would sum it up with 'learning empathy'.

As I see it, we face two major challenges; they're definitely connected to one another. They should be worked on simultaneously, with more or less equal priority.

• Fixing the ridiculously unequal distribution of political and economic power. Hundreds of millions of people are still oppressed, exploited and underfed. Every human being should have enough to eat, have access to decent modern medicine, and be allowed to speak freely and to elect his country's leaders. This is technically possible, but it will require major reform of institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, strict international regulations on fair trade, heavy policing of multinational corporations and much more serious international co-operation in general.
• Transforming our decidedly unsustainable economy into a sustainable one. We consume resources (especially fossil fuels) much faster than they are generated, pollute the environment much faster than it is cleaned up and destroy nature much faster than it is rebuilt. This needs to change, or society will collapse eventually - be it in 50 years or in 500 years. Governments should implement very aggressive policies to stimulate recycling, wildlife conservation and sustainable energy generation.

It could be phrased as 'a) sharing the pie more fairly, and b) ensuring that there's any pie left a hundred years from now'.

Mache dich, mein Herze, rein...

Ridding our culture of selfishness. Economic and enviromental problems will vanish naturally after that. I have absolutely no idea how to do step #1 though.

Laws are made to be broken. You're next, thermodynamics.

Getting rid of our bullshit credit system.

Carcio, I don't think offering someone a top line education only if they spend ten years teaching themselves is such a great idea. For one, some people just make absolutely terrible teachers not matter how well they're taught to teach. For two, what exactly are they getting educated in? For three, that's kind of limiting their options for a good portion of their lives. And frankly you shouldn't limit who gets the education in poorer regions like that at fucking all. If you're going to address the issue of education you do it thusly; stop basing how much money a school gets on fucking local property values like they do here in the US right now. You make sure that all schools get adequately funded enough to be able to hire the necessary amount of teachers (and possibly hire aids and such for the younger grades) and so they have the necessary equipment for all the extracurriculars.

As for how to do it in other countries; That's going to require that those schools actually get the money. And negotiations with the governments of those countries. I'm not even sure how you can force someone else in another country to become a teacher when they'd rather be a surgeon or something.

In any case; we don't have any one greatest challenge really. It's a combination of varying things. Some more pressing than others, but there is no one thing that by itself can topple us. It's a combination of all of them.

Removing humanity from the decision making process. Humans seem to fundamentally lack the ability to make good decisions unless they've already been lucked into, so designing a machine to make decisions should help the most.

Fight smart, not fair.

Okay, I really can't tell if you're joking or not Deboss. Given the extreme positions you've taken on some things and turned out to be serious makes it impossible to tell when you're not making a serious statement.

I'll also add that anything designed by human minds is going to be inherently imperfect and thus not actually solve the problem in the way that you've described. And also they can be hacked or designed in such a way to favor certain solutions over others that end up terribly.

What if the machine was a process? Humans are certainly capable of designing flawless mathematical theories or even simple machines. If we're talking a theory about how the earth should be run, and a process (maybe even enforced by humans who follow the rules of the process) to ensure it happens it should be possible.

But that's off topic.

I see the future of Earth as the priority a lot like Midnight Rambler, so we should refocus on correcting that first and foremost, and bending all other systems to this goal, with many secondary goals to follow.

The Earth needs a good shakeup to accomplish this though. Humans are certainly more flexible then the systems they have put in place currently.

And as Albert Eistein said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

"Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri, quo me cumque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes."

True. Some would fail the course. Others would succeed and then be bad teachers. Still, better than nothing, I think.

Everything they want, but with a focus on teaching.

As I see it, this would give them another option. If they don't want to, they can pursue other avenues; but if they want to get a top education and they are OK with being teachers in their homecountry, that's a possibility.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

It may be imperfect, but it can improve. Unlike a human, it wouldn't have a twenty year write cycle either and then cease all improvement eighty years later. Computers are bigger and better than human brains, I see no reason not to use them to actively seek out ways to analyze things to derive improved performance.

Fight smart, not fair.

As the Friendly AI crowd is quick to point out, a hypothetical self-improving AI (which is what you'd need for your suggestion) would also be a huge possible risk. If its interests are perfectly aligned with human interests, great; but otherwise, it would be a formidable adversary for the whole of humankind.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

[citation needed]

The most advanced supercomputer in the world is a toaster compared to the human brain. A real-life Multivac would be great, but it's a sci-fi concept and not something we're likely to see in our lifetime. Plus, Skynet...

I would rather say that at the moment computers and brains are complementary. There are things that any human being does routinely that no computer is capable of emulating yet; and even a simple computer can do things that are beyond any human mind, for example in the realm of quick calculation.

I think that humans and computers can be thought of as entities in a symbiotic relationship. We are a part of the computers' reproductive cycle, after all...

And to be honest, I personally think that the most interesting thing to study nowadays is not how to get computers to behave like human beings, but rather how to get humans and computers to cooperate more closely — tighter interfaces, ubiquitous computing, this sort of stuff.

edited 12th May '12 1:15:00 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Neural implants? :p

I vowed, and so did you: Beyond this wall- we would make it through.

If that can be done in a safe and reversible way, why not

But I think that much could be done even with current technology. It's a problem of designing useful interfaces (I like the idea of using voice and gesture recognition more heavily, but I am not an expert), finding useful problems that computers can solve for us, and doing that.

It took centuries to people to understand some of the possible applications of basic "levers, wheels and pulleys" mechanics, and we are not done yet. I cannot think that we already found out all possible applications for the kind of computer that we have available right now.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Ok, I could come up with half-a-dozen policy suggestions, but really, in the end...it all comes down to "learn to love one another". Always has been humankind's greatest challenge, always will be.

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

To me, mankind's only true issue is whereas we want peace or freedom.

As much as we delude ourselves, we can't have both, and so far not having chosen one or the other has only caused societal schizophrenia

A single phrase renders Christianity a delusional cult

I think the entire humanity's greatest challenge is to come to terms that they are but very, very harmful inhabitants of planet Earth. The Earth keeps tossing crap at us because we as a whole can't manage ourselves and the planet appropriately, causing things like ecological imbalances and sudden seismic movements (admit it, mining does have its aftershocks)

What use is there for us to study constellations, stars and come up with space travel when we can't take care of our own home planet? What use is there for us to protest and change governments when the entire societal structure is flawed beyond repair? If there are aliens who are notches above our status, they would just laugh at us for being unable to overcome this greatest challenge.

After all, "one's worst enemy is oneself"

What profit is it to a man, when he gains his money, but loses his internet? Anonymous 16:26 I believe...

@Carcio; You said they'd only be able to get that education if they decided beforehand they were going to spend a significant portion of their lives teaching, which they very well might not want to do. Just give them the goddamned education without the requirement that they have to teach, and then see what they do with it. There's more than one way to give back to their communities. (Starting businesses or becoming civil engineers or doctors. Or whatever it is that their particular region needs.)

@Deboss; We're not going to have anything like what you suggested for decades, at the soonest. We need suggestions we can actually implement in the here and now, or we might not get to your ridiculous AI run utopia at all. Or any future with fully functioning AI.

You know, I'm pretty damn sure that any alien species that gets into space will have gone through a similar period like what we have now. IF any of them pay attention to history classes I don't think they'd laugh at us. And also irrelevant.

How irrelevant? Also what are the chances of other intelligent species having gone through the same evolution drama we did? But the question will not be answered before we come clean about ourselves

We pollute, we populate, we consume, we give crap back. We're doing worse than what wild animals are already doing, and all our achievements mean nothing to the planet we live on. Greatest challenge is to challenge self in a direction of improvement, instead of a direction of accomplishment

What profit is it to a man, when he gains his money, but loses his internet? Anonymous 16:26 I believe...