We can't relax. Solving problems on tight deadlines means that we are inherently paranoid about doomsday scenario. But at the same time, no need to be overly pessimistic :)
>But oh, hey, you just bought a vacuum cleaner? I know what you would really like! MORE VACUUMS!
I have worked on the same recommendation systems. It's also the most often oncall issue. The problem is mostly due to lag in event processing (especially orders).
Sorry for kinda hijacking this, but it is the main reason I am building trydeepwork.com, to actually put deep work or deliberate practice into actual "practice".
Do you think of deep work (as described by Cal Newport) and deliberate practice as being similar or connected? I could see deliberate practice being deep work, but deep work doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with deliberate practice.
We still are crowded with low hanging fruit, but apparently, it's invisible to the majority. Existing low hanging fruit off the top of my head:
* air quality, safety and more sophisticated air management indoors is a virtually untapped field; as air borne viruses become more of an issue in our denser population, this issue is peer with water and food quality.
* how to promote secondary thinking, soas to prevent public manipulation and abuse.
* interpersonal rights management - systematic abuse of personal rights is institutionalized by modern corporate business and legal procedures; how to frame and formalize so this can be named, addressed, eliminated and the institutional abusers identified and dealt. I'm talking everything from entire industries that overwork, to leased prison labor.
* interpersonal communication management - in the technology industries issues such as Imposter Syndrome and bully behavior is common; this has as a core underlying aspect deceptive language in a individual's self conversation - which can be addressed, corrected, and a level of personal wellness achieved while that individual becomes significantly more accepted and integrated socially.
* Professional communications for scientific and technology careers: our industries are largely populated by gifted individuals who have not received any professional communications training, so our industries are ripe with confusion and miscommunication. How to impress the value of formal communication within the scientific and technology industries, and how to do so without the typical lame ineffectual methods that do not work now.
Those are all highly worthwhile problems to work on...
...but I'm not convinced any of them are low-hanging fruit. Almost everything on this list would require sustained R&D across several fields of expertise, and many of them have the significant added challenge of overcoming entrenched interests / power structures.
That's not to say we shouldn't try! Solving even a small part of anything here would materially improve quality of life for a lot of people - but these are not "I could solve this in a weekend" problems; these are generational problems, towards which meaningful effort could easily be measured in thousands of person-years from entire teams / organisations / ecosystems of smart people, and where even a chance at success would require a steady supply of adequate resources that is durable across periodic economic shocks.
CERN is the closest thing I can think of as a useful mental model here: sustained cooperation across multiple nations, massive amounts of public investment, clear tangible outcomes over a period of decades.
The geniuses can still make very valuable contributions to humanity. It's just that the general public will have a hard time understanding a new achievement. We already see this everywhere. "Higgs Teilchen" and so on. The media showed it, nobody cared and everyone was confused (found at the CERN in geneva). It only makes sense.
We still make immense progress, but in very detaily branches often, that people just want to use but not having to know about, because of the sheer complexity.
I wonder where the borders of humans will be. :) We might not be far from them anymore. Nowadays, to get into unknows territory, you need to do scientific research for decades often and an exceptional brain. Because you need to get the basics first, to which others created the paths.
The next real innovation I see will be affordable space travelling and populating other planets. Other than that, some minor stuff will be implemented like nuclear fusion reactors and the like.
The hardest thing will be to define "individuals" who contributed some of that stuff alone, as it used to be in the past (more or less).
> We still make immense progress, but in very detaily branches often
That's what the idea is. Once someone has figured out the basics eg energy conservation, relativity, etc, what's the next guy going to do? Put a small wrinkle on it at best. So the detaily thing is actually not immense progress, it's some small modification or application to a niche area.
Of course, but those contributions are more often to the edge of our knowledge and done by a large professional research team, as opposed to a smart aristocrat in their spare time. That's the difference.
The closest equivalent I can think of these days is Satoshi Nakamoto - assuming it's one person. But even their discovery is in a subfield of a subfield.
Yeah, come on and label at least one unofficial, FOSS, non-corporate-owned option for users. Discord will be the next Slack; folks will want out after the hype dies down and more interest in protecting one's person data continues to rise.
