Just for fun, here are the top 10 problems I deal with every day. Are there technologies that solve these? If not, why?
1. Getting up in the morning earlier than my body wants to. I think I need to go to bed earlier but find myself watching TV or surfing social media/news.
2. Much of my work consists of repairing technical debt from stuff done 3-5 years ago with the best of intentions. There appears to be more money in this than architecting new software.
3. For lunch I go home and make a sandwich. This may very well be the highlight of my day. Is there a sandwich making machine?
4. I go back to work and work later than expected, usually leaving around 7 PM. The timer says I got 6 billable hours in, but I spent a day to do it. Is there technology that makes billable hours work better or is my efficiency really 50% or whatever. I don't know.
5. I go to the gym 5 days a week for 1.5 to 2 hours which includes 0.5 hours of cardio. I'm getting stronger but generally always look the same, and so does everybody else. I've been doing this for 20 years.
6. I go to the store on the way home and always get the same things. I could maybe set up some kind of delivery service. I worry that automation will put grocery stores out of business someday but am sick of going to the store constantly.
7. I drink a beer and watch Netflix all night. This is awesome. But is this the pinnacle of civilization? I don't know.
8. I see members of my family roughly once per week or less. They all live within 50 miles. Time becomes an inexorable march of lost days, each lost day growing more pressing in my mind as I fall asleep each night. The future implications of this are too painful to contemplate, so thoughts are troubled and fleeting.
9. I started a TODO list of inventions, projects I'd like to work on, etc. I stopped when it reached roughly 200 items. That was a decade ago, and I'd be surprised if more than a handful of items have been crossed off. Is there some kind of a machine that can lower my obligations each day to perhaps 2-4 hours so I can work on the things that might actually help the world? Or is this vanity, is it better to wait for them to spring themselves into existence within 2 weeks or 2 years, sometimes by just mentioning them on the internet?
10. Weekends are the hardest. The yawning mouth of obligation to family, friends and home maintenance stretches like a tunnel to infinity from which no light can be seen brimming from its depths. Holidays become a 2-3 month marathon of reactionary mode optimizing of the things that must be done like last year. A point is reached at which the distraction of daily minutia frees the mind from worrying about the things that will never be. As if all the technology in the world led to a place of maximum distraction, dilution and ineffectualism, each layer cementing the exhaustion beneath the one before. Where is the technology that gives me the time, that pays me the money so that I don't have to run the rat race anymore? If that doesn't exist, then is what we have now really technology?