Who defines that the "important problems" are? And what about the people who, even with all the commitment in the world, can't make it to a level where they can contribute to the solution of these "important problems"?

A person on benefits could try out different things until they found something that works for them. This would allow them to explore a set of disciplines and problems far larger than what people are able to explore today. If they embrace failure and move on to something that fascinates them next, I think they'd be very likely to eventually succeed. Bottom line is that even if not everyone does, we'll all be a lot better off.

There's no one who can't contribute to important problems. You assume that they are all related to intelligence but you are wrong. Wal-Mart Greeters and nursery caregivers and hospital candystripers are all solving important, impossible to automate problems in our society. All they need is the ability to care about other people and perform fairly simple tasks and provide a warm, human presence when that is called for.

That's true. However most people are just completely beside the point, because they are not capable of making real changes happen, and don't really care. Don't put in the effort. For 99% of San Franciscans, climate change activism's purpose is meeting a boy/girlfriend and/or getting votes, not actually doing anything about the climate. So we should really, really, really make sure people get force-fed some basic economics, and stop all this obnoxious efforts that cannot succeed. Right now pretty much all efforts to "fight climate change" are not Nash equilibria. As such, they can only fail (except, of course, when it comes to delivering boy/girlfriends/votes).

It is blatantly obvious what we need. We need an economically sound reason to fight climate change (e.g. "solar is cheaper", but can only work if next point is addressed), and we need improved energy storage facilities, at the very least matching oil. There are so many things that could work it's hard to choose where to focus, but looking at actual efforts in these spaces, the effort spent there is dismal. E.g. improve the fisher-tropsch process to produce oil from sunlight + water + co2. Build denser batteries. Improve supercapacitors. Build a viable flywheel battery.

But the 999th convention in some clubhouse preaching to the choir about "the need for urgent action", and laws that just make everyone's situation worse while encouraging outsourcing ... that we do not need.

Also, given that they do cost resources and cause problems, it would be better not to have anything done at all, when it comes to laws and treaties and preaching. Most of these efforts run afoul of the broken window fallacy : as long as you can't deal with the problem as a whole in a way that doesn't depend on government intervention, or only depends on world-wide inescapable government intervention, anything you do damages some subset of society in some way. So it is NOT a positive.

As long as some people don't care about climate, or some governments (ie. China, Indonesia, Malaysia, ...) resist, any effort to fight climate change through treaties and laws is useless and counter-productive.

The problem, of course, is that all the real problems are hard. Finding a Nash-equilibrium given all the parameters is not something anybody has been able to do so far (though, if not for the energy storage problem, solar could be a very good answer). So here's what people should do : they should, first, learn economics, physics, chemistry, ..., second, find a way to make this happen.

I'm very hopeful for massive solar installations, but that is pretty much the only effort I see to have any hope of success at this point. Contribute to that. Buy some solar city stock, at the very fucking least.

Preferably HN, but I'm open to suggestions ;-)

However, the sad truth is that most people do not have the intellectual capabilities to do significant research in those hard problems. So I agree with the grandparent post.

Intellectual capability is not a fixed parameter for every person. If there is anything we're better at than the current automation, it is the ability to adapt.

Are you seriously claiming that a large fraction of the population can, with some elbow grease, do cutting edge research? Most people I know struggle with the science they have to learn in school.

I'm claiming that with some elbow grease people can increase the fraction of the population which can do the research. I'm not sure what the upper bound on the fraction would be, but so far historical record shows it steadily increasing.

We should work at it and see where we can get.

(And hopefully by the time we bump against the ceiling implants and genetics will come to our aid.)

I think more importantly, the cost for participating in such work is way too high.

Imagine that you're one in the small percent of people with the capacity to do this work. (Some of you may be in that group.) Think about how hard it would be to try to participate, assuming you're not 'in the network'.

Again, intellectual capabilities are not what makes you immune to automation. We can make smart robots. We can't make those smart robots visit cancer patients in a hospital, or serve me food while playing a violin at a restaurant at my tenth wedding anniversary, or perform a moving and/or erotic song and dance at a concert. Well, we could, but none of those things would go over well or have the desired effect. We also can't make a robot to make startling leaps like "hey, I think the PHASES OF THE MOON are controlling the strength of the tides! Holy crap!"

only one of those three jobs is necessarily a product of intelligence.

> We can't make those smart robots visit cancer patients in a hospital,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7tYwnqot6M

> or serve me food while playing a violin at a restaurant at my tenth wedding anniversary,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOLL59nIkrA

> or perform a moving and/or erotic song and dance at a concert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kM3n64WJmo

> Well, we could, but none of those things would go over well or have the desired effect.

People seem to be enjoying the last 2 robots plenty. As for the first one, robot nurses, I think they'll massively prefer it over not having anyone. Baby boomers didn't have nearly enough kids, so they won't have any reasonable amount of attendants during old age. People that were never born can't take care of them. This is especially true in Europe, but even in America it's a pretty reasonable argument to make.

> We also can't make a robot to make startling leaps like "hey, I think the PHASES OF THE MOON are controlling the strength of the tides! Holy crap!"

I think you need to visit a university. Or even better, a pharma company, or an oil company. The times of people making those associations are long, long over. Now people clean databases before they get fed into the computers that make the real discoveries, and fix any blockages in the equipment. Oh and implement the bureaucracy, of course.

Mathematical discoveries, it's been 2 years now since one was actually made by a human. It's been decades since the last real mathematical discovery that wasn't at least "proof-assisted". Same goes for physics and it's becoming more and more true in chemistry (it's already true in commercial chemistry and pharma).

Hatsune Miku is far from erotic except to a specific subset of fetishists, the robot restaurant is a gimmick, and study after study has demonstrated that people need actual human contact in the nursery and in times of stress or illness. People who are raised by machines fail to thrive. People who are visited and cared for by human beings recover better from all manner of illnesses. When I said that we could automate these jobs but they would fail, I was not speaking from ignorance.

> Hatsune Miku is far from erotic except to a specific subset of fetishists,

At the very least she shows the potential for it. Besides. Google "actroid" and tell me you don't find those things at least a bit attractive ?

> the robot restaurant is a gimmick,

True. There are better ones though, and every 2-3 years seems to bring a better one.

> and study after study has demonstrated that people need actual human contact in the nursery and in times of stress or illness. People who are raised by machines fail to thrive.

If that's true, then the future will suck. People that were never born can't care for anyone, and the babyboomers didn't have anywhere near the numbers of kids necessary to care for them. So this will happen, good or bad.

> People who are visited and cared for by human beings recover better from all manner of illnesses. When I said that we could automate these jobs but they would fail, I was not speaking from ignorance.

Again, sounds cool, but very impractical.