"We need most of our population working full time to keep ourselves fed because running a farm is really hard" is a technical problem, not a societal one. You can solve it with fertilizer and the cotton gin or whatever.
"There's a bunch of us now and barter isn't cutting it anymore" is a technical problem, not a societal one. You can solve it with coinage and banks or whatever.
"The internet used to be fun and useful but now it sucks" is a societal problem, not a technical one. You can't solve it with a federated twitter clone or yet another secure messaging protocol or whatever.
What? Why? Why would those first two be "technical problems" that we can "solve" with innovation, but that last example isn't? What makes something a technical problem vs. a societal problem?
Generally, if you're targeting behavior of the people or the masses, you're targeting a societal problem.
People bullying other people is not a technical problem. People driving dangerously is not a technical problem. People shoplifting is not a technical problem. All of them have different reasons deep down, and preventing the symptom doesn't solve the problem.
When you effectively prevent bullying, the bully might damage something else or may do self-harm to soothe their demons. Same for people driving dangerously or have to shoplift to survive.
When you cure the root problem, which is generally harder BTW, the problem you're technically trying to prevent disappears, too.
Hope this helps.
Taxing the bots for UBI would help more people than it would harm.
> People driving dangerously is not a technical problem.
Complete bullshit. This problem can be completely solved by a technical, not societal solution: actually working self-driving cars. Once they are available, all your imperfect societal solutions to the problem are not needed anymore.
Yeah, that future is certainly here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-FXvRHHjXSU
I don't believe many understands the complexity of a self-driving car. It's not like programming a couple of agents with simulated sensors on a computer.
That future is not here yet, but my point still stands: once they are sufficiently developed (it's only a matter of time, perhaps 5 years, perhaps 20 years), your societal problem suddenly has a technological solution. QED.
"Sufficiently developed" seems like a cheap proof. There are still many non-technological problems above and below it.
For example, how do you ensure everyone on the road has a self-driving car? We've sufficiently developed electric cars, but they're not nearly the majority.
> We've sufficiently developed electric cars, but they're not nearly the majority.
Just to further support your point, sufficiently developed electric cars' batteries still doesn't have the energy density of fossil fuels, so they can't replace any and every use case.
For example, can we carry or generate the energy these cars requires to move unimpeded like ICE vehicles yet? Or, did we improve the procedures and materials so these cars can be extinguished faster, more reliably and securely then their previous generation counterparts? Or did battery recycling methods became cheap and efficient enough yet, so we can reuse these batteries and at least not increase mining on our planet? Etc. Etc.
I'm not against renewables or electric cars, but even in their current form, we need to solve many problems to make them more practical and even less impactful when compared to their ICE counterparts.