Most interesting thing in the world right now?

[EyeSeeCold]

What is the most important or interesting thing to you that is currently happening in the world or in your country?

Or what do you think will be the most important / interesting thing in the coming years?

 

[Ex-User (9062)]

Macro-economics and geo-politics.

 

[BigApplePi]

1. In the U.S. how climate change will affect us economically.
2. In the world, whether there will be any unpredictible changes to Islamic politics and national boundaries including Israel.
3. What progress there will be on a "Theory of Everything."
4. Whether China will take steps to devalue the dollar.
5. Whether or not I will find my lost pocket knife.

 

[Spocksleftball]

I'm horny

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles

Return to 80s dance music


Flying cars

 

[Grayman]

Mostly what is "out of this world". You know...Mars. It's just out of this world, and not just literally!

 

[Ribald]

1. The singularity. If you haven't read The Singularity Is Near, I basically consider you illiterate in any way that matters.

2. The singularity.

3. AI

4. Nanotechnology (Nanofactory Movie - YouTube - you're welcome for blowing your fucking mind)

5. SENS and the work of Aubrey de Gray on defeating aging

6. David Pearce, the Hedonistic Imperative, paradise engineering - should be further up the list but oh well too late.

7. The singularity

8. UAVs / drones

9. Self driving cars and in vitro meat.

10. Materials science, specifically graphene, carbon nanotubes, etc.

 

[Ex-User (9062)]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

 

[Pyropyro]

1. The Muslim south and the Christian north have finally signed a peace agreement. I hope it lasts. I'm really tired of hearing about how we're raping and killing each other's people.

2. The Commies are upset that the Muslims are being okay with the rest of the country and disrupted a peaceful rally. They're also upset that the gov't caught their #1 and #2 (who backed out of the peace process and proceeded with mass killings). Apparently the capture was against human rights but they're perfectly okay with not honoring the rights of the people they buried (hopefully dead) in mass graves.

3. The US and the Philippines are considering re-installing military bases against an increasingly hostile China. It's probably the lesser of the two evils.

 

[EyeSeeCold]

4. Whether China will take steps to devalue the dollar.

Isn't that against their interests with US national debt in mind?

Flying cars

Seems this will come after self-driving vehicles. I imagine there would be special places you can go to self-pilot your vehicle for recreation with most flyways restricted to auto-pilot.

8. UAVs / drones

10. Materials science, specifically graphene, carbon nanotubes, etc.

I can't remember the exact documentary I was watching but it was on drones and they showed some aerial photos of a city (I believe in the U.S.) taken by a UAV, it's crazy how precise and clear the images were. I think there are tons of cool possibilities for drones but you know how militaries are when it comes to powerful technology, and U.S. intelligence agencies seem more shameless than ever about their spying.

I have heard of graphene being the revolutionary component for many innovative technologies but I have no idea about graphene itself or how its potential is so flexible.

 

[bemused]

Why two migraine Excedrin are not getting rid of headache

 

[Ex-User (8886)]

neuroscience

 

[Grayman]

Currently the most interesting thing in the world is the INTP forum. If anything else where more interesting, I would probably be doing that instead.

 

[Steven Gerrard]

I want to make a musical rpg with dice, and paper and a pencil. I must be able to play this game by myself.
Measure’s of six beats sound very interesting. I will use math and such with pre-agreed themes and have the people with instruements play characters. I want to develop a computer program like Microsoft Word that will help me quickly and clearly notate what I want.
I want to have musical statements or phrases declare the structure for what is going to be played next and by whom/which instruemnets. And who will be silent.

For example the bass can dictate who is going to be silent during which measures and everyone will have when they play dictated to them by the bass during one turn, while the guitar dictates which notes are going to played or are forbidden. Players will improvise in these parameters. If a player breaks what is forbidden for example- the guitar will have to try and overpower or undermine what that player is playing, or he can pass along his consent. Which thus triggers something else. Perhaps the beginning of a new turn.
I want a warehouse to live in and experiment. I want to build and take apart instruments, I want to sleep on a bed of feedback.
“Describe the previous phrase”- I want to come up with a musical phrase that is that and then keep doing that to the previous phrase- keep improvising it on a piano in the moment and see how it morphs.
Something like this. But it's so hard to get work done.

 

[Architect]

1. The singularity. If you haven't read The Singularity Is Near, I basically consider you illiterate in any way that matters.

2. The singularity.

3. AI

4. Nanotechnology

5. SENS and the work of Aubrey de Gray on defeating aging

6. David Pearce, the Hedonistic Imperative

7. The singularity

8. UAVs / drones

9. Self driving cars and in vitro meat.

10. Materials science, specifically graphene, carbon nanotubes, etc.

++

 

[Analyzer]

Decentralization of industries due to technology and software. Currently it's money - Bitcoin. What's next?

I say education, health care, then energy and ultimately the government/state.

 

[Ex-User (9062)]

Decentralization of industries due to technology and software. Currently it's money - Bitcoin. What's next?

I say education, health care, then energy and ultimately the government/state.

The ultimate goal of the current program is to create a "mirror world", that is: virtualize everything in terms of institutions in the physical world, train the monkeys to use the mirror world, let the monkeys who can not or refuse to use the mirror world die out and then gradually remove the institutions from the physical world...

 

[Brontosaurie]

drugs and exformation

 

[Cherry Cola]

drugs and cool animals which you can speculate about how they'd do in battles, especially ones you can potentially aquire and house as pets and have murder other peoples pets in confrontations

I want a capybara weighing 90kg and then it will kill a bunch of stupid dogs who attempt to challenge it cause its fucking 90kg and its bite pwns a dog bite so hard its hilariously funny

 

[NormannTheDoorman]

Guam lacks any variety.

-Tax refunds
-Tourism
-Meth lab explosion in Dededo ( I call it Ghettodo)
-Grass fire


Then it has its moments like a small water spout but that was a one time occurrence.

 

[Analyzer]

The ultimate goal of the current program is to create a "mirror world", that is: virtualize everything in terms of institutions in the physical world, train the monkeys to use the mirror world, let the monkeys who can not or refuse to use the mirror world die out and then gradually remove the institutions from the physical world...

Interesting so are you basically saying technology has little effect on real social changes?

 

[Redfire]

++

+++

 

[Ex-User (9062)]

Interesting so are you basically saying technology has little effect on real social changes?

on the contrary, technology is the social engineering tool of the 21st century.
the question is "who holds the tool?".

 

[Polaris]

^ I can see this being a possible problem/issue. Any monkey potentially being able to access hack tools in order to manipulate every technological system possible. In other words, a virtual anarchy building up, which is probably and more realistically what is happening right now.

Not that there was anything other than anarchy - I guess democracy is just another anarchy masked as a controlled system. If there was a fully efficient government system, it would probably be quite oppressive.

I agree with Analyzer on education, energy solutions and the health system.

Aging populations in the more affluent parts of the world is going to be a major challenge, while rapid catching up to living standards in developing countries is just as interesting. I wonder if the increased living standards and higher proportions of affluent and educated people will gradually lead to decreased birth rates in these countries. It will also be interesting to see the alternative energy solutions that will inevitably be the result of this progress, and how that will affect the economy.

What intrigues me the most though is how we are going to deal with the side effects of progress (rapid alteration and destruction of ecosystems), and whether we've actually missed that train already.

Somehow, I think we have.

 

[EyeSeeCold]

Decentralization of industries due to technology and software. Currently it's money - Bitcoin. What's next?

I say education, health care, then energy and ultimately the government/state.

On the topic of decentralization there is the developing technology of 3D printers which could be applied to various markets.

drugs

drugs

In the U.S. I don't know which states are currently preparing marijuana legalization reforms, but I am definitely interested in the California vote. Supposedly our proposal failed last time because of poor construction, but after Colorado and Washington there's no way we will let it slip this time.

As for federal legalization I think it would take foreign countries (those under the international agreements) pressuring the U.S. along with state-wide support before that happens.

 

[Rook]

Life.

 

[TBerg]

Whether the model of liberalism will survive as an aspiration.

Whether Russia will be able to take advantage of opportunity after opportunity to expand.

Whether the National Security State is really going to be pushed away from expansive ease of intrusive methods.

Whether political correctness is going to swing towards the order of a new total puritanism.

Whether the United States Congress is ever going to work again.

Whether Islamists will lose their upper hand in the Middle East.

 

[BigApplePi]

If any single person or group of people will find a solution to the world's most famous unsolved mathematical problem: The Riemann Hypothesis. It's a problem about the distribution of primes.

A piece of the problem involves an infinite sum which was shown equal to an infinite product proved a few hundred years ago by Leonhard Euler. The interesting thing about this equation is the sum uses fractions of all the positive integers while the product involves only fractions with prime numbers. The fractions of all the positive integers are raised to a power. When summed if the power is one you get infinity so the power is not allowed to be one. If the power is greater than one, the sum converges (is finite). When the powers are complex numbers you now have a statement involving the Riemann Hypothesis.

No one knows whether the RH is true. The answer determines whether a whole bunch of other proposed theorems are true or not. Note that I've not stated exactly what the RH is. That is for another day.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

the world and not an image of it