New Requests for Startups

Doesn't this already exist, in the form of the bicycle?

- When should I buy a ticket, what is the punishment for not buying right now?

Kayak has a "when to buy" feature, but I can't think of anyone else. Microsoft Travel stopped doing it and even then there's was only for US.

- How often is the flight I'm booking delayed? For how long? Airport or Airline fault?

Some Airlines show you the delay/arrival percentage but its not aggregated anywhere AFAICT. Also I believe airplanes have a lot of leeway before a flight is considered "delayed" Also people suggest never to land/fly out of O'Hare in Chicago if possible but is there evidence for this? Would someone outside the US who is not a frequent flyer even know about this?

- How much space does this airline's seat provide?

I'm willing to spend a little more for more space on longer flights...

- Does this plane have power outlets? And not the ones that EmPower plugs, those don't count. I'm looking at you United!

The problem is there's actually very little accurate information except the cost of the flight, and thats what most people choose to pick their flight. Sometimes even willing to take weird layovers/extra stops to do it. If it can be shown that your comfort and stress would be better cared for by purchasing a ticket that cost $50 by next Wednesday.... well no one has done that.

It seems like the question can be rephrased as, "At any point in history, have humans been able to advance technology in a substantial way simply because they wanted to, rather than by stumbling upon a way to do it?"

Most technology is incremental. Take flight, for example. The glider had already been around for a substantial amount of time before the Wright brothers solved the "control problem" and the engine problem. Those two problems were the only two left before powered flight was a reality, and the Wright brothers knew it.

For the singularity, on the other hand, there's no clear laundry list of problems to solve in order to achieve it. In fact, there's no clear way to even define AI, or at least define it in a way that can be meaningfully translated into current technology.

Maybe the advent of quantum computing will change this. I've suspected that AI is fundamentally impossible to implement on a Von Neumann architecture. But this is very easy to say from the point of view of a society which hasn't remotely discovered how to make AI work yet. It's similar in spirit to someone from the 1500s saying "I think electricity is fundamentally impossible to harness, because there's no proper medium to channel it" even though metal was quite widespread at the time. Humans just hadn't figured out how to fashion wires yet.

The only thing we can say for certain is that we don't know what we need to know in order to make the singularity a reality, let alone how long it will take.

In decades, if not years, you will look back and laugh at yourself for this.