THE MOTIVATION
The ideas section is a place to offload and share various ideas I’ve come up. Although these are only the ideas that have already been implemented, tested, something I’m not interested in doing, or technically incomplete (meaning there’s various technical progress that needs to be accomplished before it’s applicable), however, it has definitely been conceived by me independently. Then there’s the secret ideas that I can’t quite reveal yet because I want to develop it first or because it maybe patentable and I want to protect my ability to patent it and open source it globally. Overall, these ideas serve to share the kind of practical imagination I have but also to share the journey into the future:
Aiding developing countries
One idea to improve the welfare of a countries citizens is to encourage urbanization. This concentrates the problem of supplying utilities and infrastructure while allowing greater economies of scale. Also citizens in cities are often more productive than those in a rural setting. And urbanization is a natural byproduct of increased development anyways. One way to encourage urbanization is by providing microloans or travel vouchers for those in rural settings to migrate into cities paying for transportation and initial lodgings until they find a local job.
Another way to improve the welfare of a countries citizens is to focus on just expanding digital citizenry, basically get more people online where they can learn from the internet and be connected to each other by it. People are vastly more productive with the internet. Think of the simple problem of finding a job without or without the internet. With the internet a person can find a job anywhere in their country sorted based on the skills unique to them and the job requirements, whereas without the internet they’re looking door to door.
Fingerprinting children
Children should be fingerprinted at birth so that if they ever get separated and brought to the police, they can track down their identity and parents. This is vastly more accurate then filing a missing child report and could also remove malicious avenues where parents dump their children.
How consciousness is created
Consciousness is the ability to reflect on what you’ve done, thought of, and received from the senses. It’s a feedback loop basically. My definition of reflection does not have to be deliberate, it is the mere act of the feedback loop existing. It also allows consciousness to exist on a spectrum from insects and robots to humans. What separates lower levels of consciousness from higher levels of consciousness is the breadth and depth of thought along with freedom to act. Insects can have large freedom to act but have limited breadth and depth of thought. Robots can have large breadth and depth of thought but have limited freedom to act.
High resolution IPSC generation
Run yamanaka factors on population of somatic cells and at various timepoints with high temporal-resolution in the dedifferentiation process take a subset of the cells and using single-cell sequencing check what genes are being expressed and what is its epigenetic age. Maybe epigenetic age is reset before dedifferentiation is complete and maybe the genes expressed during that zero age stage is necessary to reset epigenetic age. It appears this study that combines high temporal resolution along with single cell epigenetic age and transcriptome profiling during OSKM induction hasn’t been done yet, and the data would be very useful.
Blocking cellular reprogramming
Understand why the majority of cells do not dedifferentiate with OSKM induction and use that knowledge to purposefully block dedifferentiation but allow epigenetic reprogramming to reset epigenetic age.
Gmail native burner addresses
Basically take Apple’s “Hide my email” feature to create unique random email addresses you can turn off at will and implement it natively into Gmail. Software like a password manager could autofill these email addresses using a gmail API. And this could be a paid Gmail feature.
Hide my phone number
Basically Apple’s “Hide my email” applied to phone numbers. The limiting factor as to why it hasn’t been implemented yet is the sheer number of phone numbers you’d need per person compared to the total limit of the number of phone numbers with the current system. But that can be fixed with moves to longer alphanumeric phone numbers, it’s not technically unfeasible and the transition can be seamless since we’re moving from restrictive 10-digit phone numbers to longer alphanumeric ones. And we really need this solution. Currently spam/phishing calls/texts is a huge problem, representing not only wasted time checking it but also billions of dollars lost to crime. Being able to turn off a phone number that has been stolen/sold to spammers/phishers is priceless.
Building strong legal institutions
This is particularly for developing nations still trying to build strong legal institutions. But basically, judges that have too many rulings overturned by a higher court should be fired or put on review. Then just pick the supreme court justices carefully to implement top down reform. This way the lower court justices are supervised by the mid-level justices, and the mid-level justices are supervised by the supreme court justices. The overturn rate doesn’t need to be zero, it can be based on the average number of cases overturned per judge, so that only judges greatly exceeding the number get reviewed. But overall, this would develop very importantly a consistent legal system.
Teacher mental health upcertification
What if teachers could take mental health certifications to broaden their skill set and be paid more, especially since they’re already somewhat expected to be a therapist anyways it just provides the visible justification as to why to be paid more. Plus students benefit from having a more skilled teacher overall.