Many of the problems you listed are likely only solvable by large scale social movements. Solutions to important technology problems change the landscape over which progress is made but they are not social movements themselves.
>It was just so much harder for people to abuse the crap out of us when the concept of a computer was something that, even if it could connect to other computers to get information, was not something that fundamentally relied on other computers and which stored all of its information on other computers and could be remotely controlled by other computers.
The cloud is the new word for mainframe. The PC pushed things away from mainframes then the internet/cloud pushed back. Blockchains are interesting space between these extremes.
If anything, we agree on one point: that computers failed to solve those problems, and where we thought they would--Twitter being a great example--they quite arguably made the problem much much worse.
That is why I will argue computers feel so much more depressing today: we have been slowly coming to the realization--not just in the past few years but since at least the 50s (if not the turn of the last century)--that the entire concept of a utopian technofuture is probably a fantasy and dystopias now seem so close that we barely find the idea compelling to talk about anymore.
Not dying should be the first on that list, for obvious reasons, and becoming multi-planetary reduces the chance of (all the) humans dying exponentially for each planet colonized.
Are we even the same species with any of the same concerns by the time we get to Alpha Centauri planet?
These notions still coming from the mouths of my generation are getting a bit bonkers to me as I age.
Let's work towards a goal we'll never be able to validate actually happens, as we'll be dead before we get close. Let's build a system that coerces people towards that goal.
Let's chew up more and more of this planet researching and building towards technologies and fucking over the next gen of humans here.
Because a generation that grew up watching Star Trek wished it would happen real bad!
1. The earth will still be inhabitable in the short run. Even with worst case global warming x10. It will be a lot different, and probably not better, but we can still survive here.
2. 99% of human history people lived without liberties or human rights that became a theme of anti-autocratic philosophies and cultures that grew out of The Enlightenment to make the modern day world possible. Alan Turing would have been tortured to death in earlier years. These last few hundred years may very well be an anamoly, and while we know humans exhibit a tendency towards immoral, autocraric leadership, we should take advantage of the fact we live in the best 0.1% of time in history to develop such technology. It may be that in the short run is the only foreseeable possibile time to become inter-planetary.
3. Competition is what propels human progress
4. Global warming bureaucracies have the same problems the War on Poverty, War on Drugs, and prohibition democracies have. All these problems could be solved by your standard intelligent young adult, but they aren't because of bureaucratic inertia and politics. They are problems of people and human culture of greed.
5. I don't watch Star Trek
While management is cluelessly guiding what software is developed, we'll never put the requisite effort into those problems.
They want return on investment, not idealism.
A list of hard problems we could be tackling: 1) the world is going to run out of fossil fuels, 2) we are destroying the human ecosystem by global warming, 3) there exists a very large amount of inequality between the upper and lower class in our society and the gap is only increasing, 4) we have more and more humans of whom society demands "work" to get "pay" in order to survive even as we come up with ways of replacing more and more "jobs" with "automation", 5) there are many subsets of our population divided by axes such as race and sexuality which are discriminated against by others in both direct and indirect systematic ways, 6) we have a limited number of antibiotics that are generally safe for widespread usage and pathogens are adapting, 7) for numerous and potentially diverse reasons an increasingly large fraction of our society is being turned off of science and has stopped believing in basic things like the benefits of even our oldest and most trusted vaccinations, 8) humans continue to die from diseases like cancer, 9) governments and companies have begun to usher in a dystopian era of surveillance under the guise of protecting us from terrorists and spam and serving us advertisements.
A couple of these problems can be addressed with the technologies you listed, but even in the core of some of these communities that want to address problems 5, 7, and 9 you honestly just end up finding a lot of people who are exacerbating problems 2, 3, 4, and (annoyingly) 9.
I despise the cloud :(. It was just so much harder for people to abuse the crap out of us when the concept of a computer was something that, even if it could connect to other computers to get information, was not something that fundamentally relied on other computers and which stored all of its information on other computers and could be remotely controlled by other computers. We are to the point where arguing that I "own" the device on which I am typing this message almost doesn't make sense: I am borrowing it from Apple and I can only hope that they don't screw me too hard :(.