Paper Belt on Fire
At a conference at the Sorbonne in August of 1900, the great mathematician David Hilbert challenged his peers to attack twenty-three unsolved problems in the field. It was a bold move to open a new epoch, but owing to his commanding authority—he was the imposing mathematician’s mathematician—his challenge motivated the greats of his era and set their research program over the next four decades. As of today, the consensus holds that eight of Hilbert’s problems have been solved, with nine more solutions holding partial acceptance, leaving four problems left open. (Two of the original twenty-three problems have been deemed too vague to yield an answer.) In one of the more marvelous plot twists in the history of philosophy and mathematics, the otherworldly debate about whether numbers exist independently of the human mind led to the invention of the computer. Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem—demonstrated in 1931—addresses the second question in Hilbert’s problem set and, with John von Neumann, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing building on its dazzling insights, the Incompleteness Theorem opened the door to the invention of modern computing.
Although I do not possess a single atom of Hilbert’s weighty German authority, I seem to have what our time considers a mad man’s faith. I believe there is great merit in specifying, in an encyclopedic fashion, the fundamental problems that need to be solved. There can be no progress without a goal, and, by charting a course, Hilbert’s problem set motivated the whole mathematics community to take action. In this coda, I lay out in summary what may be the top two or three unsolved challenges in various areas of science and technology. If these new problems are solved, many of the major crises of our time will disappear altogether. Some advances may make life much better and longer (as with a cure for cancer) or simply more thrilling (as with supersonic flights). But to keep the bounds somewhat reasonable, I’ve decided the solutions to these problems must also be within reach—say, within fifteen years at the outside. They shouldn’t rest on fantastic assumptions. While I read widely in science fiction, I must therefore leave out far-fetched ideas like time travel, teleportation, and anti-gravity.
I find it surprising how few people work on important problems at a young age. Instead, our education system infantilizes teens and assumes they must wait and pay their wasteful dues. In lieu of any concrete goal, schools encourage vague ambitions like “leadership” and call aimlessness “self-exploration.” They offer the general, abstract promise of preparing students for a shifting landscape, a rapidly changing world, a future that cannot be predicted. This is why schools emphasize that they do not teach people what to think, but how to think. However, as I hope I have shown, these notions are discredited. No wonder so many teens are cynical and apathetic, embarrassed by their advantages and so desperate to hide them. Their formative years are spent working on tasks of little consequence in great comfort towards a larger course of action that everyone pretends to be real but all suspect to be fake.
Even recent grads find themselves in a similar situation. Having joylessly strained to stand out by fitting in, they by and large aim to preserve the abstract promise of their education by pouring into abstract jobs at Wall Street banks, hedge funds in Connecticut, Big Tech in Palo Alto, and management consultancies sprinkled everywhere. Often their purpose is to gain valuable, high-status experience before finally resolving what to do with their lives. Commitment can wait, so they think, as they set forth on careers in invisible services—down the gaping maw they go, into banking, insuring, trading, optimizing, hedging, analyzing—all fluid jobs, hard to assess, difficult to explain to a child, yet commanding of respect and preposterous devotion. These jobs are preoccupied with analysis, but never creation—analysis of trends, analysis of policy, analysis of data, analysis of the opposing analysis. But imagine if, instead of 40–60 percent of every graduating class disgorging itself from the bowels of the Ivy League into analysis, they embarked on the great adventure of trying to solve these fiendishly difficult problems—what would that world look like? We will only know we have turned a cultural corner when Tiger moms glow radiant with pride the day their sons and daughters become plasma physicists or synthetic biologists instead of partners at the white-shoe law firm.
I submit that the best way to do future significant work is to begin working on significant problems now. No one is too young to do so. In this respect, child labor is good.
To accelerate progress, we need young people working at the frontiers of knowledge sooner than they have in the past. They also need greater freedom. What that means is institutions that trust them to take risks and demonstrate some edge control with their research. We must hold it as a fairly predictable law of creativity that the unknown must always pass through the strange before we can understand it.
Universities have served this research function in the past and will continue to do so. But they are plagued by four realities. The first is the slow speed of a formal, credential-based education. It takes four years to earn a bachelor’s degree and then another seven or eight to earn a Ph.D. Second, universities have become hives of groupthink. Third, grant-giving is driven by prestige, credibility, and a cover-your-ass mentality. Fourth, the incentives of academic institutions reward shrewd political calculation, incrementalism, short-term horizons, and a status hierarchy in which demonstrating loyalty earns more reward than advancing knowledge.
Our institutions of learning simply don’t trust younger people to do great work. They must spend all of their twenties gaining credibility through diplomas, recommendations, and grant approvals. Only then might they get the permission and funding to investigate something new. We must break this subservience to power.
1517 is an alternative to the university system that is capable of finding, funding, and supporting young people who could go on to produce Nobel Prize caliber work between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-six. To this end, we’ve started what we’re calling the Invisible College after the underground scientific community of the 17th century, which was a forerunner to the creation of the Royal Society and helped spark the Scientific Revolution.
The original Invisible College was an informal group of natural philosophers, centered around Robert Boyle, who exchanged ideas by letters and encouraged each other as they established the methods of discovery we all take for granted today. They had to keep the society secret because they feared the church, government, and other authorities of the period. The authorities of our own era seem ripe for subversion or end-arounds.
If I could mandate one thing for all universities, labs, startups, and research organizations, it would be that they all must list the top five unsolved problems in their respective field. It is essential that we find solutions to the top unsolved problems in the following fields: energy creation, transportation, health, education, computation, freshwater abundance, increasing crop yields for less, cleaning the air, and, lastly, the problem of human flourishing. There are other concerns besides these, undoubtedly, but I have started here given their importance.
In what follows, I mention established teams and projects that are already trying to make progress in each of these fields. Of course, we should root for them with zeal. But we cannot rest complacent, expecting progress while we await their return from an attempt upon some snowy, distant peak. The sad truth is that most of these teams will fail and never be heard from again. Stagnation is upon us. We should assume these problems are some of the most difficult and complex mankind has ever faced. Some of the teams mentioned here will be out of business by the time this book goes to print, thereby dating the book like a bad ’80s pop song. I don’t care. I admit I still listen to the Thompson Twins. It is worth knowing their approach, and if they fall short, why they did so. For we all die on the march, in our dated fashions, and we must pick up what others have left behind. I list the teams here as a point of reference.
A final word of caution to recall from H. L. Mencken, that great wit and savage curmudgeon: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
Michael Gibson is the cofounder of the venture capital fund 1517, which is devoted to backing dropouts and people who never stepped foot on a college campus.
