One of the best things for the third world has been the cell phone. What could people do to improve the odds of the next cell phone being invented and promulgated?
5 minutes of thinking yielded only one “next cell phone” candidate: an education system that actually works.
I’d need to research this, but my ignorant guess is that most funding for education in the third world has been aimed at making it more closely resemble first world education. If people’s pet theories about education being broken are correct then we should instead be researching education systems that work, especially those that work given constrained resources. And then fund those.
Not sure if this is what you were getting at, but it at least seemed worth jotting down.
If you’re specifically interested in education, the shortest route might be the Khan Academy—whose effect is amplified by cell phones.
Note that I didn’t say “What’s the next cell phone?”, I said “what improves the odds of the next cell phone?”
Math and/or science and/or engineering research? Free markets? Invent a lot of stuff rather than trying to identify the right thing in advance?
To my mind, the most interesting thing about cell phones is that they increased individual capacity in first world countries by making communication easier, but they increased individual capacity much more in third world countries because cell phones require less infrastructure.
Buckminster Fuller’s idea of ephemeralization (doing more with much less) might be a useful clue.
The other clue might be that people in third world countries may need to have their own capacities increased more than they need help—they have enough intelligence and initiative, they just need better tools.
Yes, I realise that I was interpreting your question at the wrong level. My 5 minutes of thinking were fairly unfocused this time.
My answer to “what improves the odds of the next cell phone” would of course be “create a thriving community of rationalists dedicated to self-improvement and making the world better”. If you’re asking what I’d do other than that then it’s a good question I’d need to think about.
5 minutes of thinking yielded only one “next cell phone” candidate: an education system that actually works.
Actually, I think cell phones will do that. They don’t yet, but as smartphones get cheaper and infrastructure improves, internet access will become a human universal; and at the same time, there are projects like Khan Academy that turn internet access into education. There is still lots of work to be done—the phones themselves are still too expensive, a lot of countries don’t have affordable wireless internet service fast enough for educational videos, and there aren’t enough good videos or translations into enough languages. These developments are probably inevitable, but they can also be sped up.
It’s difficult to know which idea is the correct one as I don’t know what the limiting factor is; why more cell phone-level inventions aren’t already occurring.
Hypotheses are: lack of motivation, lack of ideas, lack of engineering competence, too much risk/startup capital.
For “motivation” the obvious suggestion is some sort of X Prize.
For “ideas” my suggestion would be to develop a speculative fiction subculture, with a utopian/awesomeness/practicality focus. See what ideas pop out of the stories that might actually work.
For “engineering competence” we’re back to education again.
For “business risk” all I could think of was a sort of simulated market ecosystem, where people are modeled as agents seeking health, status and other goals and where new products aren’t introduced into the real marketplace until they show reasonable probability of success in the simulated one.
Another angle about getting in touch with your own inner selfishness.… I doubt that cell phones were invented by people who wanted to make the world a lot better. I suspect they felt personal irritation at being tethered to a location when they wanted to talk on a phone.
There was idealism attached to birth control earlier in the process, but there was still a common human desire to have sex without a high risk of producing children.
Tools for improving the world have to be attractive enough for people to want to use them. What’s been getting on your nerves lately? Can you tell what you used to want, but you’ve gotten resigned to not having it?
The credential problem is one that I think could use some solving, and I have no idea where to start. People spend a tremendous amount on education—and sometimes on “education”, and a lot of it isn’t spent on actually becoming more capable, it’s spent on signalling that one is knowledgeable and conscientious enough (and possibly capable of learning quickly enough) to be worth hiring.
I’m not saying that everything spent on education is wasted, but a lot of it is, and capable people who can’t afford education have their talents wasted.
It’s possible that credentials are the wrong end of the problem to attack. People behave as though there’s a capital shortage, which could also be expressed as a people surplus relative to capital. Maybe what we need is more capital.
Some of the Thiel fellows are working on combating the credential problem. Dale Stephens is the only one I know off the top of my head, but I think there might be others.
One of the best things for the third world has been the cell phone. What could people do to improve the odds of the next cell phone being invented and promulgated?
5 minutes of thinking yielded only one “next cell phone” candidate: an education system that actually works.
I’d need to research this, but my ignorant guess is that most funding for education in the third world has been aimed at making it more closely resemble first world education. If people’s pet theories about education being broken are correct then we should instead be researching education systems that work, especially those that work given constrained resources. And then fund those.
Not sure if this is what you were getting at, but it at least seemed worth jotting down.
If you’re specifically interested in education, the shortest route might be the Khan Academy—whose effect is amplified by cell phones.
Note that I didn’t say “What’s the next cell phone?”, I said “what improves the odds of the next cell phone?”
Math and/or science and/or engineering research? Free markets? Invent a lot of stuff rather than trying to identify the right thing in advance?
To my mind, the most interesting thing about cell phones is that they increased individual capacity in first world countries by making communication easier, but they increased individual capacity much more in third world countries because cell phones require less infrastructure.
Buckminster Fuller’s idea of ephemeralization (doing more with much less) might be a useful clue.
The other clue might be that people in third world countries may need to have their own capacities increased more than they need help—they have enough intelligence and initiative, they just need better tools.
Yes, I realise that I was interpreting your question at the wrong level. My 5 minutes of thinking were fairly unfocused this time.
My answer to “what improves the odds of the next cell phone” would of course be “create a thriving community of rationalists dedicated to self-improvement and making the world better”. If you’re asking what I’d do other than that then it’s a good question I’d need to think about.
If we had a huge community of those rationalists, what more would we need?
Actually, I think cell phones will do that. They don’t yet, but as smartphones get cheaper and infrastructure improves, internet access will become a human universal; and at the same time, there are projects like Khan Academy that turn internet access into education. There is still lots of work to be done—the phones themselves are still too expensive, a lot of countries don’t have affordable wireless internet service fast enough for educational videos, and there aren’t enough good videos or translations into enough languages. These developments are probably inevitable, but they can also be sped up.
OK I’ll answer your actual question this time.
It’s difficult to know which idea is the correct one as I don’t know what the limiting factor is; why more cell phone-level inventions aren’t already occurring.
Hypotheses are: lack of motivation, lack of ideas, lack of engineering competence, too much risk/startup capital.
For “motivation” the obvious suggestion is some sort of X Prize.
For “ideas” my suggestion would be to develop a speculative fiction subculture, with a utopian/awesomeness/practicality focus. See what ideas pop out of the stories that might actually work.
For “engineering competence” we’re back to education again.
For “business risk” all I could think of was a sort of simulated market ecosystem, where people are modeled as agents seeking health, status and other goals and where new products aren’t introduced into the real marketplace until they show reasonable probability of success in the simulated one.
Another angle about getting in touch with your own inner selfishness.… I doubt that cell phones were invented by people who wanted to make the world a lot better. I suspect they felt personal irritation at being tethered to a location when they wanted to talk on a phone.
There was idealism attached to birth control earlier in the process, but there was still a common human desire to have sex without a high risk of producing children.
Tools for improving the world have to be attractive enough for people to want to use them. What’s been getting on your nerves lately? Can you tell what you used to want, but you’ve gotten resigned to not having it?
The credential problem is one that I think could use some solving, and I have no idea where to start. People spend a tremendous amount on education—and sometimes on “education”, and a lot of it isn’t spent on actually becoming more capable, it’s spent on signalling that one is knowledgeable and conscientious enough (and possibly capable of learning quickly enough) to be worth hiring.
I’m not saying that everything spent on education is wasted, but a lot of it is, and capable people who can’t afford education have their talents wasted.
It’s possible that credentials are the wrong end of the problem to attack. People behave as though there’s a capital shortage, which could also be expressed as a people surplus relative to capital. Maybe what we need is more capital.
Some of the Thiel fellows are working on combating the credential problem. Dale Stephens is the only one I know off the top of my head, but I think there might be others.
I like your thinking