A few weeks ago I was helping interview some potential hires for a new position. One of the questions the hiring manager asked us to relay to the candidates was this:

If you had no limits whatsoever, what problem would you want to work on?

I thought it was a really good question, and over the next few days I found myself coming back to it, asking myself the same thing. If there were no limitations, what problems would I spend my time working on? I narrowed it down to a few things that I feel strongly about, and I wanted to write them down here as a way of examining them myself right now, and to look back on them later and see how my views have changed.

Individual Development

This is something I’m working on at work right now, and it’s something I’ve spent a lot of time studying for the past … not quite a decade, I guess.

People are amazing, and I love how someone put in the right situation can just … bloom. But the more I look at it, the more I wonder what it is that leads to the blooming. Is it the situation? Support? Insight? Educational Material they’re referred to? And why do people plateau? Why do others seem to never stop growing?

There are also more practical questions — much of growth comes from experience, but there are limited experiences to go around. How do you get people the growth promoting experiences they need, when so many people could use them?

This is an incredibly urgent problem in Cyber Security specifically. There are tons of open job positions, but most of them are very senior. Most of the people actively looking for jobs are very junior (we got over a hundred applicants for a Cyber Security internship position in just a week). How can you get junior position people the experience they need to become the senior people that the market needs, if people are only looking for senior resources?

So far I’ve focused my efforts on:

• Individual Development (including basic instruction we might normally expect from universities)
• Mentoring/Coaching
• Organizational Structure
• Recruiting/Placement efforts

Somewhere in there is a better way to do this.

Infinite Scale

I’ve written about this before, but there is a problem with Elon Musk’s plan to colonize mars to create redundancy for the planet earth. If, in a hundred years, Mars is colonized and earth is hit by a meteor or something, everyone on mars would end up dead. Supply chains supporting life would undoubtedly extend back to earth, so the Martians may live another decade, or even century, but eventually they would run out of the things they relied on Earth to provide.

The only way to make an actually redundant colony on mars would be if it were completely self-sufficient. The technology to do so doesn’t exist because all of our modern technology relies on incredibly long, complicated and fragile supply chains.

So this project would be to create an entirely self sustaining colony here on earth. Basically you would create a small colony with what you think they need, and then iterate until you’ve created something that could last on another planet. An escalation like this might work:

• A colony somewhere remote in the US (like the middle of the desert Nevada, Arizona or Utah). This would allow you to experiment in a harsh environment, but there would be support and aid close by, and shipping things there would be relatively inexpensive.
• A colony somewhere remote and mountainous outside of the US (andes, Himalayas, etc.). A harsher environment, and way more expensive to ship to, but medical help would still likely be a helicopter ride away.
• A colony somewhere in Antarctica. About the harshest environment we can get on our planet, way WAY more expensive to ship to and run, medical help would be extremely difficult to get but would still be available. Furthermore, the antarctic colony could be built underground or in a sealed habitat — testing the long term viability of producing breathable air, while still having the backstop of breathable (although extremely cold) air just outside.

We would need huge advances in things like bioplastics, food, and things like microchip production. Could you create microchips in Antarctica? If not, you’d better find a different way to control your complex devices that keep you alive. Or maybe simplify the devices themselves.

By the end of the Antarctica colony you would hopefully have a blueprint for a mars colony (made significantly better than if you actually sent version 1 to Mars to see how it worked) that could provide real species redundancy.

But you would also have developed technologies that would help literally everyone else on the planet. Imagine if we could make technology that provided the necessities of life and could function in the harshest possible environments. That same technology could be deployed all over the world, shortening supply chains to everything a community needed could potentially be made in the community. Not only would this help small communities that already exist, but it would help slow down developed nations from outsourcing their pollution to less developed nations (potentially).

Political de-Polarization

I’m not going to get as in depth here, except to say a few things that I think are true:

• Almost all people try to do what they believe is right
• The best decision making (and governing) happens when ideas are put through rigorous debate between people who have differing viewpoints, but also have a strong desire to compromise in order to make progress
• Political polarization is a product of our primary system in the US electing ever more extreme candidates who are only concerned with appealing to their own base
• Most people don’t want this, but also don’t want to participate in primaries
• An organization the motivated more people with less extreme viewpoints to participate in primaries would have a positive influence on American politics
• This influence would be strongest if people were encouraged to only vote for primary candidates who:
  • Never dehumanize any group
  • Are motivated to find good solutions through compromise (their success might be judged by how much of their governing is done in conjunction with the other party)
    

Cyber security for everyone

Most cybersecurity tools and services are EXPENSIVE! This is because they are technically sophisticated, and undergoing constant development because malicious actors never take a break.

But most hacks happen to smaller organizations that can’t afford these tools, or lack the IT knowledge to know what they need, and how to do it.

I’ve been working with some friends on an idea for how to make cyber security more approachable for organizations of every kind, but work has had me so busy I haven’t had time to keep working on it. Still, I think this is an area that’s worth investing in.

Final Thoughts

It’s funny that only two of the projects I would like to tackle are related to my current job, and both are related in kind of strange ways. I really appreciate that about my job — that I have the flexibility to approach things from unique angles. Those are the two projects I have the highest possibility of making progress on.

The de-polarization idea I think would be useful, and is doable, but also feels like so much to me. It feels so far out of my comfort zone that just thinking about it makes me anxious.

Ironically, Infinite Scale feels a lot more doable to me. When you zoom way out, it’s actually just about processes, technology, and iteration and these are all things I’m good at. I mean, I’m not good at the specific technology in question, but there are people out there who ARE, so it wouldn’t be a matter of inventing things so much as giving direction to the inventors and then empowering them (and providing an actual testbed).

I mean, it feels a lot more doable in that I know how I would approach it. Unfortunately it is the least doable in terms of actual funding — I could do any of the other projects on a small scale and then expand, but that one feels like it would have to start on a fairly large scale, and then … still expand to a gigantic scale.

I think it’s funny that I always find myself drawn to root causes. It’s not enough to just do my job well, I have to know why I do it well, I have to know how I can help other people do it well, I have to know how I can help other people do ANY job well. You know? Same with the political idea — I can’t just find a cause and work on it, I feel like I have to find the root that would fix a lot of causes and work on THAT. I want to work on the underlying system, not a piece in the system, if that makes sense.

It’s weird. I don’t know … it’s interesting to try and think “How could I make progress on these ridiculous ideas?” How could I eat the elephant?