Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?
One thing we see over and over again leading to social injustice is the externalization of costs.Examples:* burning fossil fuels externalizes the cost of dealing with climate change* during the housing market crash of 2007, lots of risks were ultimately externalized to the state* plastic waste ending up in the ocean means somebody[tm] externalized the cost of not properly disposing of / recycling their waste... and so on, once you think in these terms, you find that pattern nearly everywhere.If we had some kind of software solution to track externalized costs, that would be a huge step towards reducing it.I know, this is very abstract, and I don't even know what a software solution for that would look like, but if somebody comes up with a really good of tracking that, it could have a huge impact on society in the long run.Try to think of a society where nobody could quietly externalize a cost, and we had an effective way of tracking who externalizes how much, and go after the big offenders in a very data-driven way. There could even be general laws that make certain externalizations illegal, in a much broader way than current regulations do.