The Second Most Important Research Problem

The second most important research problem is understanding cooperation and how to improve cooperation. Most of the problems that face us today (and in the past) can be traced back to conflict between what is good and desirable for society as a whole and what is good and desirable for an individual (climate change, pollution, environmental degradation, resource depletion, poverty, hunger, population growth), or conflict between societies (war, racial hatred), or conflict between species (extinction, habitat destruction, use of animals for food or scientific research). Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation is a solid foundation for a science of cooperation. The success of the open source movement, creative commons licenses, collaborative filtering, and Wikis suggests that we have only just begun to understand the nature of cooperation. Web science is part of this new science of cooperation.

I am not currently working on this problem, but it is related to the problem of understanding analogical thinking. Furthermore, if we are successful in creating artificial intelligence, then cooperation between humans and AIs will be an important issue.