Solving old problems
Old problems & quasi solutions.
Scale versus Genesis
A lot of hard problems are problems of scale and not of genesis. Let me explain this through an example. Alternating Current was discovered around 1830 and has been since then gradually improved upon for widespread domestic and commercial use. AC is the form of current that we understand most of our modern electricity to be. Over the years, after the discovery of the concept of AC – all problems have been of scaling up - of how to take this technology from small use to wider use without efficiency loss (widely used as efficiency of solution implementation, but with electricity, efficiency losses are a real technical issue), or unintended consequences/problems. So in that sense, no one has had to re think AC in its entirety, but has only had to innovate on expanding scale. Of course scaling up means solving brand new problems that are unique to the process, but such problems are not of the same class as the original problem. They’re probably a bit easier.
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The Context
I have very little expertise on electricity, or till recently even the incentive to think about it. But this summer has forced me to think about it more often. I live in a town/village in Jammu & Kashmir. And this summer we are facing huge power cuts. The local concerned department recently released a power cut schedule. It lists the timings when there will be a power cut in my locality. According to the schedule for the month of June – 4 hours of power cut were mandatory every day, and on some other days around 4-14 hours (unofficially). There is a term for this lack of electricity (and much more) – energy poverty. And my town is not even the bottom half of total distribution of energy poverty in India, let alone the world. Worldwide, 940 million people still live without electricity. In India, 29 million people live without electricity as per 2019 World Bank figures.
Why won’t more people solve old problems of scale?
Coming back to problem solving. As we prosper and advance, our priorities change as a civilization. We start to find newer problems and try to solve them, having assumed that challenges of yesterday have been solved or sufficiently taken care of. But it is not quite so. The first thing we need to understand is that the people who are at the lead of solving new age problems by default are likely to live in a place where the previous order problems (water supply, electricity, internet etc.) are likely to have been solved. What this does, is that since such people never experience the lack of basic order things such as water supply, electricity or internet in their lives – they are very less likely to recognize the scope and order of the problem itself. Which in turn makes it less probable for them to work on these problems.
What this means is that the smartest people with the most resources (be it capital, social capital or sheer brain power) are likely to spend less time working on scaling up solutions for old problems. For example, Patrick Collison (CEO, Stripe) thinks deeply about payment integration on the Internet and not perhaps about lack of electricity in rural India or lack of clean drinking water in Africa. It is because the problem that Patrick saw in the first place as a problem was payments integration, presumably because water, electricity and internet supply weren’t big issues for him. In simple terms, people in Silicon Valley or Bangalore are less likely to think about the old problem of expanding electricity to more villages in rural Bihar or Rajasthan than they are likely to think about new problems such as how to integrate better payment gateways using AI into e-commerce websites. Maybe solving old age problems of scale is boring to some of them because these problems have been with us for multiple decades and thus has lost its glamour. But I suppose it is most probably because of the experiential removal from these issues that accounts for the lack of motivation or innovation. Unless you have struggled with a specific problem, you probably will not think deeply about solving it. Exceptions exist.
Solved? Or quasi solved?
That is an issue. It is an issue because these old age problems are still very much problems in the sense that they haven’t been solved for most, or even majority of the population. With electricity, is also the safe drinking water problem, sanitation problem, internet access problem etc. Old age problems of scale. They are problems of scale because we have been able to solve these issues for a lot of people. Even despite living in a small town in India, I do not have much problem accessing clean drinking water. So it is not as if we haven’t made advances in these fields. We came up with the inverter and battery, didn’t we? I, and countless others are still able to work despite power cuts due to this technology. But is it really a solution?
To answer that we must understand one fundamental aspect of solutions. And that is that they are global. In the sense that it is only a solution if it solves the problem for all, or at least the vast majority of people. If the solution is accessible to only a few people, it is a quasi- solution. So to say that inverters and batteries have solved the electricity problem is much alike saying solar panels have solved the electricity problem. Neither of them are solutions because they do not meet our global adoption criteria. Both of them are too expensive for most people to access. The real solution to the problem is to have continuous supply of electricity through the main power source – power grids and stations. And that requires solving hard problems of scale and power generation. Scaling electricity involves a range of highly technical problems that I will not discuss here. But they are hard, and there are many.
Blinding lights of new problems
Sam Altman recently released a post titled ‘Moore’s Law for all’ in which he argues for conceptualizing a new world for everyone’s betterment by leveraging the upcoming AI revolution. The post talks about the need for concomitant radical policy changes to radical new advancements in Science and technology. Sam is solving new age hard problems. But the fanfare and the glamour of this sometimes falsely convinces us that we have solved old age problems. We haven’t. At the very least it diverts our attention from old age problems of scale to exciting new problems of concept. We still haven’t solved world hunger, world poverty, energy poverty, water poverty etc.
A solution that cannot be scaled up is a bad solution. We only have bad solutions to these problems as of now. We need smart people thinking deeply about solving these issues. That is not to say that technological innovation or priority should be linear i.e. only after we completely solve the old age problems, should we start to solve new age problems. It always happens simultaneously and laterally. But what is important that we do not forget they are pertinent problems nonetheless. Scaling up matters. Solutions to age old problems require new scaling methods. And that requires paying attention to the fact that we haven’t solved these problems, not even close.
I thank Vidushi Dembi for reading earlier drafts of this piece.
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