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What are the Big Problems?
What are the Big Problems? I'm leaving this open-ended, there's no specific criteria for responses.
I'm interested in both your list and the reasons why. Submitting your suggestions before reading others' contributions would be preferred.
Optionally: who is (or isn't) successfully addressing them. Individuals, organizations, companies, governments, other. How and/or why not?
I've asked this question periodically on several forums (G+, Reddit, HN, Tildes) for seven years now.
I've written fairly extensively on my own views, reasonably findable if you wish, but my interest here is in gaining fresh input, resetting my own biases, and not colouring the discussion overly myself.
Not just big, but the biggest problem we face is that the natural environment that supports all life is breaking down more and more rapidly as time goes along, and it's too late to "fix" it. There are multiple issues we face and multiple feedback loops that have been set into motion, any one of which would present a serious challenge but all together paint a grim picture of what's to come.
It's not being addressed on any meaningful level, because doing so would equal less profits for those in power and that's not acceptable for them so it continues accelerating toward a climate that will become more and more inhospitable as time goes along.
It would have been great if our political leaders had acted in the late 70's/early 80's, as that seems to have been the last chance where swift and decisive action by the major polluting countries could have made a difference. But now...well we can still make some difference, but so much damage has been done and for so long that there's no way there won't be a massive die-off in the coming decades.
This certainly qualifies in the impacts, likelihood, and difficulty axes.
More concerning is when financial interests are aligned with not solving the problem. For climate, trillions of dollars in stranded assets.
The silver lining is that flipping the bookkeeping might automatically incentivise solutions. Of course that rule change itself would be problematic.
In my mind, the "Big Problems" are those questions which we seem no closer to answering than when they were first posed, despite century(ies) of work meant to address them.
These strike me as more Big Questions than Big Problems.
Anticipating another set of suggestions: while all Big Problems as both Hard and Unsolved, not all Hard or Unsolved problems are Big.
I'm trying to leave this as unconstrained as possible, but this contribution does stray a bit beyond even those generous bounds.
I feel compelled to push back on this (and not only because those bounds were never defined).
To begin with, I don't think Big Questions and Big Problems mutually exclude each other. While the items I listed might seem purely academic, people have spend their lives trying to address them. If a question resists a lifetime of work, doesn't that elevate the question to a problem?
So far this thread has interpreted the Big Problems as Big Societal Issues. And I agree that those issues are contained within that set of problems. But society only functions so long as everyone has purpose within it. Indeed, humans strive to have meaning! One could even argue that How do we find meaning? is the Big Problem. (After all, why should we care about climate change or systemic racism or right-wing populism if we don't find meaning in any of those things?) Understanding our place in the universe (and, more generally, what the universe even is) brings us closer to addressing that problem, which is why I chose those four questions.
This is a bit tangential, but I think a “What are the Big Questions” sister thread would be totally cool.
Good idea! Maybe I'll start that thread in a couple days (so as to not steal from this thread's thunder).
My favorite answer to #4 is that time does not exist, as we normally understand. It is an emergent property of the universe
The Universe is an emergent property of the Universe.
woah...too deep for me
;)
Does he ever give a definition of what he means by "civilization" a cursory read of his premises list doesn't seem to deliniate it. Is it just large collections of humans?
Money in politics. Adjacent to that, corporate power and the wealth gap. There are lots of potential solutions floating around so I won't restate them.
The environment. The time seems to be approaching ever more rapidly when we'll find out if the human race can unify against an existential threat.
Humanity. Or more specifically how we define ourselves. I think we need to create a culture that prioritizes self exploration. Until we do that we'll remain a largely amygdala based society.
Bigotry. Refer to the zeitgeist with any questions :)
Dogma. We can't solve any of our current problems with externally imposed belief systems.
If they were going to make us not suck you'd think they would have succeeded sometime in the last few thousand years. Instead I think we need to use the impressive and growing body of research in neurobiology and psychology to build a model for what the human race should be striving for based on empirical evidence rather than mythology.
For the first time in history we have the information, spanning a variety of fields, to create such a model.
I think the first step to solving any of our big problems is to look at our daily decisions, what we prioritize, what we talk about, what we celebrate, what we condemn. Collectively that's what makes culture and culture makes the world (the human bit of it anyway).
Good list. Of several threads going on this, you're the first to even mention bigotry (or race, tribalism, prejudice, etc.). That's one of several recently-highlighted concerns I'd have expected to see mentioned.
Dogma is also good. Would you consider questions of "narrative" as related or adjacent?
Narrative is a good word, I used culture instead, since that's where all the external narratives live :)
Which set of beliefs or guidelines can we agree on that will prevent us from hating and killing each other just because we're different?
How does a democracy deal with having a large voting population of right wing authoritarians undermining that democracy, without compromising on its democratic values? It's a problem that's been around for a long time, but it's obviously got some renewed urgency of late. Education is the usual long term answer, but it almost requires the problem already be solved, since authoritarian forces in government will try to make education less accessible, or narrow its scope to mere technical skills that leave students ill-equiped for intellectually engaging with society.
Energy, energy, energy. Everything we need or want, and every solution we'd like to implement, comes back to energy costs eventually. The best solutions to our big problems (such as food shortages, fossil fuels, and climate change) all wind back to that core issue and can't be implemented economically without big changes in the costs of energy production.
We also have big problems with access to clean energy - many parts of the world are starving for it, others have an overabundance, and everyone should have abundance if we're serious about making the world better. We will make little to no progress on these problems until we've dealt with the energy supply issue. There's a lot of work to be done with the distribution network as well - power systems need to operate like the internet does with power routing like packets and that means we've got a lot of grid upgrades in our future.
Lucky for us the hardest part of this problem has been solved in theory. Now it's just a question of startup funding. If Indonesia's government opts for this solution over coal, we'll be looking at a nuclear powered future with all the energy we could need or want available. The power plants will be rolling off the assembly line in less than ten years.
There are too many big problems which leads to apathy, polarization, and dread. With so many big problems, it's easy for us (humanity) to get spread too thin because each big problem is weighted differently to the individual which is a big problem.
Racism and bigotry - it allows people to be dismissed without need for critical thought towards their ideas - it allows scapegoating without the need to reflect deeper - it keeps us divided and easier to control.
We're on the road to environmental collapse - leading to huge migrations of people seeking new homes and resources, what will those that have them do? What will those migrating do?
Inequality - leading to power over those that are less equal : financial power, racial power, gender power geopolitical power, and etc. - Usually this leads to the will of those in power being forced on those without it.
Violence (physical and psychological) - It seems like a fair number of humans are predisposed to it, and that it is accepted as part of the human condition. It leads to such things as war, human trafficking, prisons, child abuse, spousal abuse, rape, genocide, and etc. and of course it begets more violence.
One of the ones I find the most interesting (and seems to be a concern unique to me for some reason I hopefully haven't been told yet) is how should we address population and the age pyramid (if we should.) Birth rates are down basically everywhere globally and it's predicted that global population will decrease somewhere in mid-century, but in some places like Japan and Hungary it's already happening.
If we let the population decline (see climate change and human consumption), what are the consequences of a perhaps indefinitely aging society, and are we ready to handle them? We can certainly do a lot to mitigate aging of all kinds for a pretty long time, it's not like we can just do that indefinitely, right?
If we do choose to keep our population as-is and push our birth rates to replacement level (not above, just in case anyone is not sure), how do we do that? Places with vastly better child support like Scandinavia seem to have equal or lower birth rates than places like the US and none over replacement so better childcare and general healthcare so parenting is less expensive doesn't seem to be the answer. If people just don't want to have/take care of children and the solution is not welfare to make children cheaper and free time for parenting, what do we do?
It seems to me that the planet can't sustain eight billion people permanently. @Qis is right that you have to be really careful about how to handle this. My solution is that we continue to become a sustainable civilization as quickly as we can and don't worry about birth rates for a long time. I think we already have the resources to give everyone in an aging population a decent life, we just need to change how we live and how we use our resources (I recognize that the just is doing a lot of work in that statement). I don't think we'd even have to move away from capitalism to do it, we'd just have to have stronger safety nets and live more efficiently. Once the population of the world gets down to a billion, or maybe even less, then we can start talking about bringing the fertility rate back up to replacement. But to worry about that right now when we're in the middle of an environmental collapse caused partially by the amount of people in the world feels like misplaced priorities to me.
That sort of question leads almost immediately to very dangerous considerations. If you start thinking that people are the problem you need to back up to your assumptions -- about what kind of authorities can be cobbled together from our many divisions; about what kinds of resources can be distributed fairly and which cause conflict as they move and why; and how you came to concern about the number of people in the first place. Birth and death rates are effects of conditions which we have an extremely incomplete picture of -- thinking about population dynamics requires a kind of remove that we struggle to manage ethically. Of course we can anticipate the needs of large areas using demographic analyses, but it's really another thing entirely to consider tuning population as some kind of dial.
BTW, I agree with a few things here:
I agree with your first point that this is talking of a fundamental reshaping of society and very large and broad groups within it and anything of the sort can imply and result in dystopia.
I agree with you (@moonbathers, I'm gonna reply to both of you here) that this is mainly a ~-2050 and onwards problem rather than a 2020 problem, although some places are closer to dealing with aging than that. I'm not entirely convinced that there's too many people on the planet though. Stuff like lab grown meat can replace a lot of our worst polluters like industrial farms, right? It's not everything (I do think that we might need to put an end to rural life and then repopulate those areas with trees to get there and get cities to be more dense and just do everything to not use oil) but it will bide us some amount of time, right?
Anyway.
I'm assuming by this you mean "what kinds of people can people/society at large trust?"
Most of them, with the exception of land derived resources and the not unmanageable but very high amount of effort/time/resources it takes to build infrastructure.
Most resources that are derived from the ground/sky/nature (agriculture/livestock, extracted resources, water), because they are... tied to the ground and you can't really change the ground without very heavy consequences (climate change, again.) If someone dams your river water for energy, you can't really get more. Wealth does that, but with way less violence, at least with wealthy areas.
Primarily because we kind of are society?
But population is kind of separate from and secondary of my main concern which is that the world's populations could get older indefinitely, and that's would be a big deal, right? ( I admit, that probably wasn't clear. )
While I agree with @moonbathers that we can do many things to limit aging, bodily and mental weardown and we don't need to cut welfare, if anything we need to expand it indefinitely to keep up with a likely ever increasing share (not number) of old people, but if it is ever increasing, that's not ideal either, right? If you look at Germany and Japan for example, their median ages have been going up for 50 and 70 years respectively, to a median age of around 47 years old. In 50 or 70 years, will it have kept going up to 50, 55, or 60? Because, unless we have bigger problems in our hands like dictatorship (not discounting that as unlikely because it isn't unlikely) medicine is not gonna get worse/less advanced and life expectancy is not gonna decrease.
But aging isn't gonna change either, and it can make learning, remembering, staying healthy and a lot of things harder and more and if a continually larger share of people are under or risking those effects, and until there is some sort of big advance to stop it and vastly increase our lifespans and that's better than trying to keep our current population, aging is gonna be an increasingly big deal that needs to be continually adressed and with some bad luck/shit politics, a threat to society, right?
I don't have good evidence on hand that there are too many people on the planet, I say that based off of feelings about what I've seen about our impact on the environment. I have to imagine lab-grown meat would be way more energy and resource efficient than raising livestock.
For a society to be completely sustainable, it has to do the following:
I think (but I'm not positive) these four things cover all aspects of society. All metals are non-renewable and we'll have to recycle them, which includes the cobalt and lithium used in electronics. If we want to continue to make new electronics, we'll have to salvage old electronics and we might as well start doing that as soon as we can to minimize both the human and environmental impacts of mining. Biological resources like trees have to be replanted at a rate so that there are always the same number of trees at each stage of maturity. We have to do this for every aspect of society. That means we'll have to recycle pretty much everything, restore the land as accurately as we can after we're done with it, etc.
My stance on the economic aspect of an aging population is that we already have the technology and financial resources to sustain people working less. The last time this subject came up, I looked at Wikipedia and found that about 35 countries have a GDP per capita of at least $40,000 per year, adjusted for purchasing power. That's enough to live a decent if not extravagant life, at least in theory. I don't think we even necessarily need to leave capitalism behind to not have to force old people to work longer; we just need to put social safety nets in place and reduce income/wealth inequality by raising taxes.
I do also think that we're overdue to rethink the 40-hour work week and thankfully that's been gaining a little momentum. We produce so many resources that aren't being used meaningfully (by which I mean a lot of the new wealth made goes to the rich, who don't use it nearly as much as not-rich people) that if we changed where those resources are going we could reduce how many hours people work and most of us wouldn't notice the difference in how much we're getting paid. You can also argue this point from the angle that a lot of jobs only exist in the amount that they do because people are busy working, like childcare and cleaning services, and from the angle that if people didn't feel the pressure to buy as many things as they do that they would both buy fewer things (which results in needing less money) and retail places at least wouldn't need to be staffed as much.
I imagine the average life expectancy of people will max out at between 90 and 100 barring breakthroughs that we shouldn't count on. The maximum lifespan of a person hasn't really changed in the last couple thousand years, we've just gotten really good at keeping people alive past childbirth and reducing the external factors that reduce life expectancy.
We have to minimize the amount of resources that we use both to ensure that we are sustainable and to minimize the amount of damage we cause until we get there. Fortunately a lot of these things feed off of each other. For example, reducing urban sprawl as you've mentioned, accomplishes:
I'm not an economist and I'm not a scientist, but I really do think it's possible for humanity to have a good standard of living, even with a less pronounced population pyramid, while being completely sustainable with our level of technology, if not with most of our cultures. We just need to get there.
The idea that aging populations pose a challenge to public health has merit, but the idea that aging is a process of worsening or becoming more burdensome has some unfortunate baggage. Countries with older populations aren't necessarily facing crises, and in any case anticipating these changes doesn't require especially exotic solutions. Many senses in which we can prepare are decently outlined at the bottom of this WHO page.
Watch out for arguments that trade in hypothetical expressions of fundamentality or naturalness or goodness -- those values are much more real and useful when applied to specific, practical contexts.