Tunnels are Underrated

Lots of people working on securing the oceans, air and land. But who is securing the subterranean? Good, cheap and fast tunnel boring robots will help us secure supply lines in war zones (drones will get you if you go above), solve traffic, transport desalinated water, deliver packages directly to your apartment building in minutes, etc.

Fix the baby supply chain

Make it easy to have more babies! How do we make it easier to conceive, deliver, and raise children? Essentially building the foundations for 1 Trillion Humans across our galaxy.

• ”Costs of child care now outpace college tuition in 38 states, analysis finds”
• There needs to be more of a social movement around this. For ex: Airlines have known for decades that flying with babies is difficult, yet they haven't done anything. Why?
• Oh also, fertility numbers have fallen dramatically in most countries. Not good not good!

New Types of Guns

I fundamentally believe in the right to self defense. But guns seem like a primitive way of defending yourself and your family. Sure given the technology we have, they are the most cost effective but we should make guns that are non-lethal and neutralize evil instantly. Like: instant temporarily paralysis, tranquilize, etc.

Synthetic meat is lazy

We should think of food from first principles. Also, we should make really good food for astronauts!

New types of clothes

Why are clothes so boring? Feels like we have regressed. Why don't the big designers make more technologically advanced clothes? I wanna see Off White Iron Man Nanotech Hoodies, Tom Ford bulletproof men's suit, t-shirts covered in solar panels, full camouflage quarter zips, indestructible shoes, Dior skin tight overalls for Amazonian exploration such that no insects can bite you, etc. at the Met Gala. (like edna from Incredibles)

I have beef with IKEA

Midjourney is already so good at designing novel interior, furniture, clothes, accessories, etc. Now how do we productize this? Maximize experimentation, chaos, and beauty. Fight back against mass manufactured standardized slop (IKEA)!

Exoskeletons are Underrated

• Chinese tourists are using robotic exoskeletons to climb a popular mountain

IRL Pokemons: Make Robot Pets

• Animatronics for different form factors (see how the disney robot communicates via its gait, head bopping, sounds, etc.)
• Fun idea: How do we do collect pet dog/cat data and use that to make robot pets?
• Even more fun: Your robot pet levels up as it interacts with other robot pets. It unlocks new skills, techniques, voices, etc.
• if not physical: foundation models for dog motion/voice, this decade's talking tom

Why is my toilet so dumb, how do we make it smarter?

Better Health Tools For Women

I've been dating my gf for ~7 years, and have seen how bad period pain can be. Why aren't there better health tools for this?

Daily life health optimization tools are non existent

Everyday is different, how do you make it so that you are ~100% optimized everyday? at home testing, diagnosis, custom med delivery, food recommendation, etc. 1. imagine if your organs could talk to you and tell you how they are doing. i mean this quite literally

• A device in every starbucks that you can go to every morning, it scans your blood, figures out the vitamins/minerals you need to be at peak performance and makes it for you!

Books -> Movies

I want to see and feel what it must be like for Juan Trippe to build Pan Am. Imagine the crowd, the excitement, and the curiosity of seeing a metal bird for the first time and humans come out of it! Imagine what it must be like to fly in the glory days of flying. Imagine the conversation with FDR that led to the creation of Intercontinental Hotels!

I want to upload a book and get a movie in the way I like it!

Better HVAC systems

1. Biosecurity
   1. How do we make HVAC systems that can detect, identify, and analyze pathogens? Imagine if HVAC systems at major airports alerted us in 2018 of new types of viruses.
2. UVC: UVC Light can kill all sorts of microorganisms. We don't know for certain if we can put them safely around humans, so just put them in the HVAC system!
3. How do HVAC systems change as we move to solar?
4. Can they help us fix the mold problem? Is there an insurance play here?
5. Could a better HVAC system have detected the early signs of a COVID leak inside the Wuhan lab? Why didn't it?
6. I suspect that the bathroom hand dryers are actually pretty useless since they they dont't really kill germs/remove odor. I bet we can install technology I mentioned above here as well. Moreover, bathrooms are likely very good places to detect outbreaks.

Cure UC

More than 5 million people have Ulcerative Colitis (someone very close to me also has it)

Social App but invert everything

take all the facts about how social media thinks it should be and invert it, an extremely ‘anti’ social media / reddit:

• don't fight bots, bots as participants and mods
• bot: community notes, fact checkers, if your thing doesnt add any value bot will remove it or fight back
• like the opposite of safe and positive, the real test is if women use it.
• maybe: going viral costs you something but is highly coveted

Practice negotiation with real consequences

Simplest version is where you have to stake money and negotiate against one/many llms. Use LLM hallucinations as a feature to make it more chaotic/unpredictable.

Could also be a fun "game show like project": Depending upon the money u stake, we can craft elaborate timelines/stories/roleplay and u can have a global leaderboard so that at a given time everyone's results are posted online and they win a 80% of the pool. so the more people pay, the more they win?

Drone ideas

• Is it possible to mass manufacture extremely strong and light nets to put around public areas, expensive assets, etc?

Company Archivist

We should do a better job of archiving the history & stories of companies! The characters involved, core events, etc. Wikipedia captures little of it and is often outdated. There should be a platform where one can read Walter Isaacson style biographies of all major companies! I think llms can help a lot here! Imagine if you could just digest all published news and continuously update each company’s record!

(there is still no authoritative and comprehensive book on the development, history, and people behind Pokemon!)

Better Wargaming Environments

We can now make incredibly complex environments using llms to simulate different scenarios and training. Current wargaming software is likely not dynamic and intelligent. You could make a really really good game with this too!

Credit card router

I have multiple credit cards, and for every purchase, there's an optimal card to use based on the points I'll earn. Every hotel and airline I book has its own rewards program. Credit cards and travel loyalty programs have complex, constantly changing rules. I hate dealing with this. It's a huge time sink, and I don't want to spend even a second optimizing which card to use. There should be one card in my wallet that connects to all my other cards and loyalty programs behind the scenes. It should automatically figure out which card to charge based on the purchase category.

AGI Questions & Trades

• What will the internet look like in five years when bots account for more than 90% of traffic (~50% right now)?
  • Number of bits per second will increase by a lot? Internet is going to be so much bigger! Meter, Cloudflare, etc. companies that make bits move will do well.
• AI models are going to be everywhere, and my bias is to 10x whatever people think the demand for inference is going to be. The entire supply chain to construct and supply power to a data center needs to be looked at.
• Good questions: https://dcgross.com/agitrades
• How is the world going to look like when labor (humanoids or task specific embodiments) cost <1k?
• What do browsers and websites look like when everyone has a personal AI agent?
  • Purely from a speed perspective calling 1 api is better than clicking 10 buttons. So how does your agent use the internet and find info? How do websites tell you this?
  • Should websites have micropayments to allow bots to use them?
  • How do I make it so that my personal assistant llm tells the website my preferences?* The website llm asks questions and there is a 2-way communication to show me the best content and ads.
  • Marketplace of specialized ai agents:* When you ask your agent a question, instead of googling, it goes to this marketplace, chooses the best ‘docgpt’, ‘lawyergpt’, etc. pays it, and returns the answer?
  • Was the Mighty browser ahead of its time? A browser in the cloud with a gpu attached to it that runs a personalized model would be very useful. Long live Mighty! Broswer = OS
• Building things for the AIs keeping their personalities and preferences in mind. Treating them like entities vs tools
• The context storage problem: soon I am going to be generating infinitely more data than I do right now from my toothbrush, toilet, wearables (and implants) to track biomarkers, sunglasses (that record everything) to the conversations i have about my work and personal life with different llms.
  • Now, the funny thing here is that all these data points need each other to give me the best answers. For example: If my health assistant does not have my toothbrush data then it will likely miss something!
  • Also, you have a dynamic where you have a lot of “appliance” businesses that sell me good hardware and collect my data. But if only they have this data, then that is useless to me. I want the consumer apps built on top of this data, the health, personal, and business assistants that use this data!
  • So who owns this data? How do they talk to each other? How do they compensate each other? Where is it stored? Should every human get some dedicated compute/storage?

World's Getting Older! What happens next?

• Long companies catering to old people given an aging population? esp food, drugs, services, and housing tailored to their needs
• What happens to life insurance companies (and Bermuda)?
• Aging population -> more demand for exoskeletons to move around?

Solar & Future of Petrochemicals

How do petrochemical margins change with increase in demand for renewables? Which ones do we not have alternatives for? What are the downstream economic and n-order effects?

• Buy land? There's probably a finite number of prime locations for solar farms
• China currently dominates the supply chain (and deployment) of solar panels
• Bikes and mopeds going electric
• Consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimates about 24% of global petrochemical capacity is at risk of permanent closure by 2028 amid weak margins.
• Cheap chinese solar in Pakistan is terrible for its grid. What happens to the grid in other countries similar to Pakistan? rich people + industry stops using grid electricity -> less money flows in -> fewer upgrades, stuff decays -> power outage, poor ppl without electricity, defaults on loans?
• https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/05/22/the-solar-industrial-revolution-is-the-biggest-investment-opportunity-in-history/
• The future of plastics is interesting. If the cultural reaction to microplastics is extremely negative, then will we start phasing them out slowly? Obviously, it will take a long time and it is unclear what the replacement will be but will likely coincide with petrochemicals getting more expensive.
• Will the price of jet fuel go up? If so air travel is going to be so much more miserable
• HUH: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/One-in-Five-Refineries-Faces-Shutdown-Despite-Rising-Fuel-Demand.amp.html
• If Solar keeps ripping, then the current state of geopolitics backed by US energy exports also changes?
• For Africa: Does this help the continent? Cheap electricity everywhere without depending too much on any external power?

Arctic's warming up! What's the trade?

• new shipping routes -> ports, infra, ships, fuel, insurance, etc
• interesting:
  • The region harbors roughly a quarter of the unexplored oil and natural gas reserves on earth, as well as 150 rare earth deposits, valued at around $1 trillion
  • The Arctic Sea, roughly 1.5 times the size of the United States, is relatively shallow, making it amenable to exploitation, climatic conditions permitting, with 240 species of fish in ample quantities, adding to all the inanimate resources.
  • Most importantly, the US has failed to build up its domestic icebreaker capacity, nor has it begun developing related naval capabilities that would allow it to actively contest and contain the rapid Russian and Chinese buildup along the Arctic sea lanes. And it has done remarkably little, until lately, to support its friends in the Arctic with respect to infrastructure investment support. The US, for example, has no Arctic deepwater ports to host heavy container ships. Canada has only one, lying 500 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Even though Russia now has over 40 icebreakers, several of nuclear-powered, and an active building program, the United States presently lacks even a single heavy or medium-duty icebreaker active in the Arctic. US icebreaker capacity, such as it is, is concentrated entirely in the Great Lakes.
  • The Arctic is a vast, unexploited storehouse of raw materials critical to 21st century competition. The region harbors roughly a quarter of the unexplored oil and natural gas reserves on earth, as well as 150 rare earth deposits, valued at around $1 trillion. Platinum, nickel, and other rare metals stored below the ocean are crucial to high-tech industries, and therefore to the countries and companies seeking to preserve industrial power status. The Arctic Sea, roughly 1.5 times the size of the United States, is relatively shallow, making it amenable to exploitation, climatic conditions permitting, with 240 species of fish in ample quantities, adding to all the inanimate resources. Most importantly, the US has failed to build up its domestic icebreaker capacity, nor has it begun developing related naval capabilities that would allow it to actively contest and contain the rapid Russian and Chinese buildup along the Arctic sea lanes. And it has done remarkably little, until lately, to support its friends in the Arctic with respect to infrastructure investment support. The US, for example, has no Arctic deepwater ports to host heavy container ships. Canada has only one, lying 500 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Even though Russia now has over 40 icebreakers, several of nuclear-powered, and an active building program, the United States presently lacks even a single heavy or medium-duty icebreaker active in the Arctic. US icebreaker capacity, such as it is, is concentrated entirely in the Great Lakes.

Hyperlocal Geoengineering

How do we reduce the temperature of a city by 10 degrees celsius for 10 days? Cities in India already hit 50 degrees (celcius) during the summer months. Millions of people live in these cities. There isn't really an option here? Either we learn how to do this or let hundreds of millions of people live in extreme heat with thousands of deaths every summer.

• Plus, we should learn how to terraform planets. Earth and Mars both need it. The closest other planet is Venus, we should use it as a testbed to experiment with planet scale geoengineering.
• Could an adversary take out your solar farms by basically sending a big cloud or making it rain a lot? Best to develop capabilities to understand the weather better, manipulate it more precisely, and defend against it at a moment's notice.

Prune Laws

How do we prune laws and "dead code" laws to make government, tax code, etc. more efficient?

GLP-1 Endgame

• What new brands/consumer apps come up with rise in ozempic?
• The No-Hunger Games: How GLP-1 Medication Adoption is Changing Consumer Food Purchases
• https://wildfirelabs.substack.com/p/the-100-trillion-disruption-the-unforeseen
• https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00404-9
• What happens after everyone is thin?
  • I Don’t Need Ozempic. But I Want It.
• “The rise of weight-loss drugs could upend the pensions industry, actuaries warned. Pension providers estimate how long the average person will live after retirement, and manage their funds accordingly. But Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs could significantly increase life expectancies: Obesity raises the risk of a host of diseases, and around 6% of US citizens already take some form of weight-loss drug. Actuaries assume life expectancies will go up, a Financial Times columnist noted, but there are hints that the GLP-1 revolution could have as big an impact as the decline in smoking, but in a more concentrated time, and pension companies are already seeing the topic crop up in results calls with analysts.”

Finding new things in existing datasets with LLMs

What domains have large, poorly-organized digital datasets that likely contain undiscovered insights, similar to how:

1. Six new tree species identified in Columbia and Panama were found in existing botanical data
2. AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purposewere discovered in existing survey data
3. What other fields might yield similar breakthroughs through pure brute force analysis by LLMs?
   1. lots of other archeological stuff?
4. can we organize, clean and expand the world’s datasets? what are the most imp datasets in each field?
5. finding flaws in existing papers: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00648-5
6. can we use llms to solve mh370?

Information backup to restart civilization

1. Snapshot, compress and store the internet every day in a secure facility. Like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, construct a backup for all of the world's information.
2. A good way to do this would be to fork wikipedia and have AI Agents continuously update and create new pages based on things that happen everyday.
3. We can document all movies, shows, recipes, videos, etc. like this
4. also u want to get the hidden info as well like food recipes!
5. Lots of interesting problems in compression, how do you store info, how do you communicate this info, how will people find it, etc.

Vaping became popular ~10 years ago

How many more years before we see an explosion in related health issues and what might they be?

Strengthen civilization infrastructure

You don't have to look too hard to realize that it is a miracle that anything works. We really really need to strengthen the core services our lives depend on like water, food, sewage, medicine, electricity, etc.

Things NASA should’ve done but hasn't

• Congress tasked NASA to find >90% of NEOs (bigger than 140m) by 2020 in 2005, but as of 2020, we are only tracking ~43% of them. will NEO surveyor cover the rest?
• Important climate satellites are going to die soon: Three NASA Climate Satellites Are Dying. There’s No Plan to Replace Them

Bio ideas

(caution: i don’t know too much about this field)

• Someone very close to me has an auto immune condition. My understanding is that this happens due to error in the genetic code which causes the immune system to do things it is not supposed to. Can we do this:
  • Every year you get a full “code snapshot” of your body
  • If something happens, you can look at the current code vs the previous checkpoint and simply restore it!
• How do we strengthen our bodies? We are so weak physically! How do i make it so that i can get hit by a car and simply dust it off.

Agriculture ideas

(caution: i don’t know too much about this field)

• I want new types of fruits/vegetables!
• What is the future of the ABCD’s and the seed oligopolies? What is the “alphafold” moment for seeds?
• Does the vertical farming business change if placed next to a massive solar farm?
• Technology makes the non-scalable, scalable. Right now, we monitor/harvest/plant/fertilize farms at scale vs at the level of each individual plant. What would be a good reason to NOT focus on such technologies?
• Also, i know that soil erosion is a massive problem. What is the solution?

Movie ideas

1. [disney style movie, a fly’s perspective/universe] fly and its family live close to airport, airport is forbidden area, fly and its friends sneak in one day, make their way on a plane, transported to a different country and have to make their way back!

Food science is one of the most underrated fields of study

1. It’s kinda funny how little we know about food.
2. It’s also kinda funny that we just eat random food everyday. Why? Why is there nothing out there that can “recommend” me specific products from specific stores near me that will be good for me based on my health markers, my goals, and how I am feeling today? Why does personalized food not exist (the answer is not “hire a chef”, technology makes the non-scalable, scalable. I’m more interested in technology answers)
3. Also, how much do we actually know about each vegetable/fruit? Why don’t we have chefs that are also engineers/scientists? I want new recipes that go beyond mixing ingredients. I want to taste flavors that nobody in history has tasted!! For ex: cook ingredient X at a specific temperature, and chemical reaction Y happens that will produce a wonderful smell!