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Vote on Google's Project 10 to the 100

39 points by vijayr 17y ago

dfranke 17y ago
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 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.
- BigCanOfTuna 17y ago
  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!
  - Mouli 17y ago
    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
- BigCanOfTuna 17y ago
  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".
  - dfranke 17y ago
    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.
    - BigCanOfTuna 17y ago
      And that's why "Improving Government Transparency" is a good place to put your vote.
- Tichy 17y ago
  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).
  - pavel_lishin 17y ago
    Good point. Give poor people more nutrients and better health... and they'll produce more poor people, who then will run out of nutrients and health care.
    - dfranke 17y ago
      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?
      - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
        So what you're saying is global population is not increasing?
        dfranke 17y ago
        I haven't the slightest clue how you extracted that conclusion from anything I've said.
        pbhjpbhj 17y ago
        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. Do I take it you didn't mean to say that?
- pavel_lishin 17y ago
  Sufficiently effective public transportation would be better than autonomous vehicles. (Though of course it's not an either-or proposition.)
- MikeCapone 17y ago
  "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).
  - dfranke 17y ago
    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.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - amalcon 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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.
- akamaka 17y ago
  I voted for banking. 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.
dzlobin 17y ago
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?
reasonattlm 17y ago
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.
- BigCanOfTuna 17y ago
  Sadly, I couldn't agree more.
- sketerpot 17y ago
  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.
- Mouli 17y ago
  I agree that some of the ideas look quite wide and too daunting to be taken on... But do consider 'Build better banking tools for everyone' for your vote
thaumaturgy 17y ago
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 17y ago
  Please post about it when you can. This was my vote, since I believe an informed populace is an empowered one.
jpwagner 17y ago
Holy crap: 110,000,000 undetected landmines out there! I had no idea that was a problem. Such an unnecessary problem!
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
pizza 17y ago
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.
matt1 17y ago
Note that if you refresh the page it reorders the list.
lazyant 17y ago
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.
YvesDr 17y ago
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.
Mouli 17y ago
Please do vote for the Banking theme.. That which will help millions of people to get access to various financial products and services Mouli

39 points by vijayr 17y ago

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 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.

BigCanOfTuna 17y ago
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!
- Mouli 17y ago
  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
BigCanOfTuna 17y ago
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".
- dfranke 17y ago
  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.
  - BigCanOfTuna 17y ago
    And that's why "Improving Government Transparency" is a good place to put your vote.
Tichy 17y ago
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).
- pavel_lishin 17y ago
  Good point. Give poor people more nutrients and better health... and they'll produce more poor people, who then will run out of nutrients and health care.
  - dfranke 17y ago
    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?
    - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
      So what you're saying is global population is not increasing?
      - dfranke 17y ago
        I haven't the slightest clue how you extracted that conclusion from anything I've said.
        pbhjpbhj 17y ago
        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. Do I take it you didn't mean to say that?
pavel_lishin 17y ago
Sufficiently effective public transportation would be better than autonomous vehicles. (Though of course it's not an either-or proposition.)
MikeCapone 17y ago
"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).
- dfranke 17y ago
  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.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- amalcon 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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.
akamaka 17y ago
I voted for banking. 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.

dzlobin 17y ago

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?

reasonattlm 17y ago

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.

BigCanOfTuna 17y ago
Sadly, I couldn't agree more.
sketerpot 17y ago
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.
Mouli 17y ago
I agree that some of the ideas look quite wide and too daunting to be taken on... But do consider 'Build better banking tools for everyone' for your vote

thaumaturgy 17y ago

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 17y ago
Please post about it when you can. This was my vote, since I believe an informed populace is an empowered one.

jpwagner 17y ago

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

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

pizza 17y ago

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.

matt1 17y ago

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

lazyant 17y ago

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.

YvesDr 17y ago

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.

Mouli 17y ago

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