Solving problems you didn’t know you had

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Is the the great disconnect of our time the techbro’s relentless quest for solutions with a complete disregard for a pre-existing problem? Artifical intelligence strikes me as exactly the enterprise of creating a solution, and then allowing your imagination to run wild looking for problems. So this is a page dedicated to those noble quixotic attempts to solve with technology, problems that the ordinary old meatware — even woodware — has been solving without the need for a GeForce chip for hundreds, thousands or even millions of years:

Invention	Solution	Existing alternative
Audio enclaves	A way of hearing music that no one else can hear using ultrasound transducers paired with an acoustic metasurface, which emits self-bending beams that intersect at a certain point.	Headphones.
Large language models	Petabytes of new mediocre, space-filling content	The internet.
Lyft Shuttle	A networked pay-to-ride service that lets you pay a fixed rate along predetermined routes	Buses.
Solar-powered flow reactor	Solar-powered reactors to pull carbon dioxide directly from the air and convert it into sustainable fuel	Trees.
Google glass	We don’t need head-up displays to tell us if people are upset	Empathy.
CloudKitchens	Robots who will deliver AI-perfected meals directly to customers on demand.	Cookery.

See also

• Thought leader
• Legaltech
• Data modernism