Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

You are contradicting yourself. On one hand, you state that a "killer app", i.e. something that everyone would use is cryptography. On the other hand, you state that the vast majority of people trust a squiggle on paper, rather than actual crypto. If the average joe doesn't care about crypto, why would a crypto email be interesting?

You'd need to find a way to make crypto interesting. Lots of email don't have crypto, so if you sell something that does crypto well, then you can corner the newly created crypto market.

A peer-to-peer system for sharing music/films that does good strong crypto (and faster than tor) would do the job.

I've been thinking about the 'Kill the state' idea for a while. It just makes sense. I have more in common with the average person in Germany than I do with the average person in Kansas or Alabama (not necessarily politically, but culturally). With online communities and instantaneous worldwide communication, I am also more closely in touch with my global counterparts than a significant portion of people in my own country.

In short, nation boundaries are slowly becoming outdated. We will probably have to wait for actual teleportation before this fully comes to pass :)

I'm not understanding where you figured my point was that the list was not exhaustive enough; my point was you left out robotics and kept search and email in.

Robotics actually, is an area where something huge seems right over the horizon. I'd certainly bet on the next game changer coming from robotics before any equally revolutionary activity comes from search or email.

I don't necassarily disagree with what you do say about the two, I just don consider advances in these areas terribly important in the grand scheme of things.

I agree that nitpicking is unhelpful, but you're wrong about singular they. It goes back at least to Chaucer and is as English as can be. Shakespeare used it ("God send every one their heart's desire") and Jane Austen way used it (http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austhlis.html). No one can accuse Austen of "silly new grammar".

The point is that all the good writers have used it forever. That includes Byron ("Nobody here seems to look into an Author, ancient or modern, if they can avoid it") and Wilde ("Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes") and, as Geoff Pullum wonderfully discovered, E.B. White: http://books.google.com/books?id=aqe9RoZorLIC&lpg=PA109&...

The kicker is that the real PC silliness turns out to have been generic he, which was imposed 200 years ago by grammarians who wanted to make English more proper and Latin-like. It never fully took, and now it's fading as social norms shift. If those meddling ideologues had left well enough alone in the first place, we wouldn't be having tedious pronoun battles today. Given the history, though, it's pretty clear that English is slowly reverting to what the real masters have been doing all along. Sounds fine to me.

Good comment. This is definitely a huge issue that is going to need serious thought in the coming years.

We're going to need to do some more serious big thinking about more than "work", which is too narrow now. We need to figure how how we're going to "occupy" people in the transition from post-industrial/service/information technology society to a roboticized, post-scarcity, arts and leisure society. If handled poorly, "social unrest", mass protests, and outright violence may be become a regular part of the landscape, what with millions of always-idle, impoverished people just sitting on the sidelines, ignored. How long could this last? One hundred years, perhaps? That's a really long time to have constant social upheaval.

Sci-fi has dystopias full of rebellious robots, human vs. robot warfare, grappling with what it means to be sentient, etc. but have startlingly little that deals with a much more realistic question: what does a society where human labor is being made redundant look like in terms of day-to-day human behavior? Over the coming years, the consequences of mass automation and even "stupid" AI are going to come to a fore.

Ok, so what are things we're going to need to do? Encouraging the arts and music, competitive games, and various leisure activities, are probably a given (and not much encouragement is likely to even be necessary, since many will do these things on their own given the ability to do so.) The other piece of the puzzle is the one that's really going to need a great deal of thought: how do we support them, and just as importantly, how do we run an economy where 40, 50, 60 of the population does not work (and thus, under the current system, have no income)? The most obvious answer is to move towards a massive expansion of what we currently call the "welfare" state along with planned population policies (hard, but probably necessary.) The big difference? We'll be not just supporting jobless people, but the economy itself (we can call it econofare or something.) What kind of economy can you have with few consumers? Not much of one. It will require a completely different perspective, one where it's not a bunch of unfortunate (or lazy, depending on your perspective) jobless people, but a bunch of people we essentially pay to be consumers. Items which are scarce will need special handling for sure (hopefully things like food and shelter can be made superabundant sooner than later), but for everything else, it'll be all about simply keeping the flow of money going. The main policy prescription here is the tax-free guaranteed income, like they have in certain Scandinavian countries (someone else in these comments mentioned this.)

That all said, the two types of jobs I would put on "won't be automated anytime soon" list:

1) Jobs that exist to make others feel powerful/superior. Waiters, house-servants, massage therapists. They do have jobs that could certainly be automated, but you don't get the same feeling of "lording over" others with robots that you do with people. Robots /will/ do these jobs for many, perhaps even most people on a day-to-day basis, but there will likely still be people who pay for this as an "experience."

2) Interdisciplinary generalists (i.e., modern Jacks-of-all-trades.) This job isn't a single "job" at all, but a collection of jobs requiring the understanding and ability to synthesize knowledge from different (and sometimes disparate) areas. We will continue to automate parts of specific types of cross-discipline "tasks", but we won't be automating the big-picture viewers.