I don't understand what you are trying to say with your answer, as the person said "we used to be working on important problems" and you responded with a list of random technologies. Technologies can sometimes be "problems", and sadly often are :/, but that means that they were failed solutions.
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 :(.
Many of those are problems, not technologies. Saying Blockchains is just a technology is like saying Operating Systems or Compilers are just a technology. They are an active area of computer science research.
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.
I am pretty damned certain that the "important problems" being referenced here, and the ones we thought we would be able to affect in the heyday of computing, were not "we need to learn how to make a faster compiler" but "we are going to change the world". You seem to have conflated "interesting" with "important".
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.
Well, we can eat and enjoy a lot of things we enjoy because people who also "had to eat" and also "had families and mortgages" did their part, and even sacrificed their lives, for making things better.
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.
To satisfy your imagination, let's coerce everyone to believe we can be a multi-planetary species, nevermind that we only know of one planet that support us without extensive engineering effort.
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.
It's hard to be excited about that list when so much of it seems like technology that will be used against me. For example, by businesses to further reduce the freedoms we have when using proprietary software.
I'd look at research efforts that have been focusing on revising the heart & original spirit of computing. YC's HARC especially - harc.ycr.org
Bret's talk about their group's vision for computing - https://vimeo.com/115154289 - really helps people who think computing is "done" and all the interesting stuff is figured out.
Like with all the sciences, the role of the individual has been diminished. Interesting technology may be seeded by some individual genius but it takes a huge number of people coordinating to build something like a self-driving car, a breakthrough AI, the LHC. And it takes a lot of really smart people spending most of their time doing relatively banal tasks to pull these off. I think the bar for innovation is just so much higher than it used to be, there is so much knowledge required across so many fields that you either end up a generalist, who rarely gets a chance to dive deep into any one thing, or a specialist who is forever stuck in their one area of expertise.
The sad reality is that most software engineers want to work on these problems, but instead have to work on pumping out CRUD apps and proprietary APIs of questionable social value to pay the bills.
Who is working on better routing protocols? Displacing BGP seems like a monumental task so it seems like bgpsec is about as good as we are going to get. Would love to be proved wrong though.
Scion is a clean slate internet architecture research design (including routing)[0].
>It seems like bgpsec is about as good as we are going to get.
I was author on a paper [1] that reduced some of the downsides to the RPKI (the PKI BGPSEC relies on).
There is also interesting work on getting most of the security from BGPSEC without complete BGPSEC deployment [2].
In a different direction, as we build the internet of the inner solar system we will need protocols with different properties than those we needed for terrestrial networks.
I've seen scion before but IMO "clean slate" protocols are DOA when it comes to displacing BGP. Just look at the mailing list. A protocol with an integration model of forming an overlay has no integration model. ETHZ and Co have been marketing that at all kinds of academic conferences and it's seen approximately 0 uptake outside of organizations that volunteer to run it as an experiment.
Sorry about the rant, but I get the impression that the authors of replacement protocols like these are more interested in becoming academically famous for being the inventor of the Internet (i.e. The next Vincent Cerf) rather than proposing solutions to existing systems.
I would be interested in new protocols for super high latency networks (i.e. The solar system model).
The RPKI work and path end validation work is interesting and I haven't seen those papers before (been disconnected from publications recently). Thanks for the links.
1. Blockchains/smart contracts,
2. Garbled circuits/Snarks/MPC (Multi-Party Computation)
3. IO/VBB Program obfuscation,
4. FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption),
5. Machine Learning/Vision,
6. Global/Solar-scale performant and secure routing protocols,
7. TEE (Trusted Execution Environments),
8. Advanced P2P systems like IPFS,
9. Bioinfomatiks.
...