Cool stuff that's still completely unregulated?

Data laundering

This means crawling or using illegally obtained datasets then processing it with "machine learning" until you have enough plausible deniability to use it.

This could be used for bypassing copyrights. For example you can remix stock photos you don't want to pay for. You can crawl a competitor's dating network to build similar looking fake profiles. You can steal writings and automatically paraphrase it. You can steal algorithms by cloning their inputs/outputs. You can generate new porn by swapping faces and background.

An illegal dataset can also be used as a hidden input to improve your core product. For example you can buy up all stolen databases and logs and correlate the users. This can then be used for better ad targeting using data that isn't even available to google and facebook.

I just wanted to say that I love this post.

There is a huge space around """fitness""" devices that are running around the FDA regulatory process. I think there is going to be a huge health revolution by making everybody take their weight, glucose, blood pressure, sleep statistics, and heart rate statistics every day and feed them into an AI.

The major techincal step forward that is happening is microneedles that can draw out interstitial fluid. The patient doesn't feel it, and you can do things like constant glucose monitoring, and constant cortisol monitoring (which is huge) completely uninvasively. It's going to be amazing.

The breakthrough device is going to be a watch that can sense glucose and cortisol all the time. A while ago there was some PG post about wanting a tricorder, well it's coming, and it's going to look like a watch.

Sidenote: if anybody reading this is working in any of the labs working with these microneedles, please contact me, I would love to collaborate with you.

Programming and general computing, it's still possible to write and run any code in your PC, but big companies will be trying to control it.

For example the DRM shenanigans in the GPU, or, when you can't write code for your smartphone unless you have permission from its parent company, and even with permission, you still can't write "any" arbitrary code - only some parts of the system are available to you. I'm aware of the exploits and jailbreaks, but those will not be always available.

International waters. Some regulations but not really enforceable. Less regulated than the air inc orbit and even the moon.

A famous movie director once said the film director is the last truely dictatorial post left. He was wrong. The captain of a vessel in international waters is.

We've seen many businesses attempt to exploit the lack of regulation at their peril. Ride-sharing companies come to mind as one example.

I think it is more useful to think of regulations in the context of history and societal values. For example, an oilspill off the shore of California helped galvanize support for the clean air movement.

Perhaps it is possible to hypergrow a business before regulation catches up. I think expecting such an outcome risks the long-term viability of a business, since ultimately its foundation rests upon trust in its brand. Companies (in a competitive environment at least) must earn goodwill from their customers to do well.

I hope all entrepreneurs think about building businesses that can thrive even as regulations shift as society changes. In other words, build in some resilience into your business model.

For example, you don't have to have a crystal ball to recognize when a business model over-relies on certain power imbalances. If you want to extract value from such power imbalances, don't be surprised when there is a backlash. For example, ride-sharing companies skirted with employee/contractor definitions. Flirting with this boundary is risky -- and naively hoping that one narrow interpretation is shared by society and lawmakers is, frankly, over-optimism.

Realism combined with long-term thinking, I think, tends to lead to similar decisions as "strive to do the right thing".

Cryptocurrency and blockchain are regulated when a true corporation appears, but there exist many entities that are wholly anonymous and unregulated because they simply don’t exist outside of software and the blockchain.

A prime example would be Bisq[0], which is a decentralized exchange that also has a profit-sharing token. If it were a company it would be violating trillions of regulatory laws, such as security and money laundering as its exchange token is obviously a security and it has no KYC, but there is simply nothing to shut down.

The government likes to believe that they have a handle on cryptocurrency but the truth is there is a thriving and growing suite of tools that exist to explicitly be uncensorable.

[0] https://bisq.network

Nice try, government. We're not giving you any more ideas.

To actually answer the question: I'm glad that ad-blocking remains unregulated for the most part. I'm scared that copyright owners could start making a case that the ads are an integral part of any given content (licensed to them at the very least if they aren't first-party ads) and removing them counts as copyright infringement.

Digging holes. It'll depend where you do it but I think most regulative entities don't have explicit regulations on size or direction of excavations.

Same would probably go for heaping all that earth on a mound, I doubt a lot of places will have explicit building regulations on an earth mound

There’s still no regulation on what you can do with machine learning (At least until your deepfakes constitute unlawful use of someone’s likeness, or you use your classifier to make hiring decisions or something, or something like that.)

Private license plate tracking.

At some stage license plates will have to disappear, but then you move to facial recognition for cars and other meta data, they probably have unique sounds for instance.

I'd try and do a app like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_barcode_games

You should know how to monetize it.

(Obviously facial recognition works equally well here, but there is some regulatory attention, although none that would stop you)

I'd also look at things like using neural nets to detect race and/or underlying genetic structure from visual, audio and other metadata.

Paramotors are deregulated in the U.K. (and US I believe). It’s one of the very few forms of flight where a license isn’t required. You have to adhere to air law (like flying close to certain objects) but there are no licenses required to fly.

You’d be stupid to do it but you could buy a machine on eBay and start flying (or try to at least)

I am personally seeing more and more electric skateboards here in the Bay Area. Not sure if they got cheaper or enough people bought and stuck with it so now I see more. Or Baeder-Meinhof.

I think they are stupid, but people queue for an escalator while a perfectly fine stair is empty right next to it. And while e-scooter as an industry like Lime and Bird is getting regulation all around the world, not sure about these skateboards, maybe with the exception of top speed.

Not exactly early, but hopefully growing: gardening, minimalism, exercise, reading, writing, playing instruments, sports, cooking, dating, arts, crafts, and other similar activities. I'd say sex, but I don't know if I can distinguish the kinds that aren't regulated.

Naively I would say cybernetics. To my knowledge I don't think there are many regulations governing the types of things that people can implant in themselves. If you try to market a device as a cybernetic or make health claims about it then the FDA will come after you, but self implantation of hardware is likely not regulated much.

Something to consider in addition to unregulated industries, are industries where the regulatory burden can be isolated to a few buy-in technologies. An example is that the regulatory burden for an electronic product is greatly reduced (not eliminated) if the product runs on an approved power supply rather than directly from the AC mains.

Also, any business becomes regulated if it gets big enough to have investors or employees.

Is this a question of whether some law is on the books or is it a combination of regulation and enforcement?

For example, there are regulations in most states about ebikes, their motor capability and whether they have throttle.

But these are also very regularly entirely unenforced (nyc not withstanding)

It seems often interesting phenomena may have _some_ regulation but it is not remotely enforced. In my mind this meets the threshold of cool unregulated stuff.

Persuasion and behavior modification. Particularly in regards to labor regulations.

Offensive cyber weapons and their relationship with international arms control agreements, or the lack thereof. Old school, stateless arms brokers like the infamous Viktor Bout are being disrupted by digital as much as hotels and taxis. Code doesn’t need fake air transport documents or any mothballed Soviet aircraft at all. Oh, and pretty much all of IoT as we’ll come to know it. Regs are coming fast and hard for crypto.

Lucid dreaming is still unregulated.

All manner of world record attempts. Speed record attempts seem particularly lethal.

Apologies for the listicle: https://www.toptenz.net/top-10-deadliest-attempts-break-worl...

For some definition of completely unregulated: the open ocean / international waters, use of the radio spectrum from those locations, space, virtual reality, software in general (though that's changing), and in much of the world education and religion.

Honesty. Acts of kindness. Ad blocking.

Not cool, its still widely permitted to burn stuff in your fireplace or garden in most parts of the world. Gathering wood in the forest or ordering a truckload of coal or taking your trash to burn for the annoyance of everyone else.

1. General compute: this will become a big deal as quantum supremacy approaches, with more ability to compute there will be a general consensus in how to deal with individuals with incredible computing power. Since, it is very clear how that can be weaponized.

2. Consequently, companies like Amazon as challenged by Andrew Yang should be regulated upon inspecting their earnings. This might be more common in the future.

I don't particularly find these cool but you may.

A) Nootropics & performance enhancing/herbal supplements B) (regulation is attemped but limited on) Research Chemicals aka designer drugs

These are still fairly "wild west" but will not always be. I had a friend who manufactured herbal supplements and made a killing before selling his business and retiring. His factory was... interesting.

Medium to high-power lasers. Every part of a firearm that's not the receiver. More military hardware than you'd think. Indian reservations. Bir Tawil.

Robots.

I just realized: Why aren't remote controlled robots more of a thing? Like surgeons who can do remote surgery, but for everyday tasks in a remote location. Vacuuming, doing laundry (because the tenant is elderly etc). I guess it's just too expensive still.

Teledildonics.

Pretty much any sort of non-institutional educational topic is unregulated. Language-learning in particular is an interesting area, as you have a wide variety of individuals and companies providing different products.

Javascript!!!

Simple AC transformers. (ba boom cha!)

IT process frameworks. Make a new one up! We have Scrum, ITIL, TOGAF etc. for some inspiration.

What about things like credit card rewards? Lots of companies just keep competing by giving better offers and cashbacks etc.

Also another thing is funding for startups. Smaller companies don't stand a chance against giants like Amazon because of the way they crush startups or just acquire them.

I used to work in the physics industry (cryogenics specifically). There was/is practically zero regulation at the scale we were at & lots of room for innovation. The market is pretty small though so you have to be at a company that is good at selling to academia.

I don't think CRISPR gene editing is regulated, except by convention in the scientific community, and by the ethics boards of individual labs/universities. But there may come a day when we realize this tool is too dangerous to leave unregulated.

E-Scooter, car sharing and bike sharing are still not regulated everywhere

I believe meditation is not regulated? Can one advertise the healing powers of their flavor of meditation willy nilly?

Same goes for some forms of alternative medicine, such as crystal and Reiki healing (I think)

Smart things, like smart plugs, bulbs, locks or everything that is remotely controllable and manageable via App or Cloud.

It is not regulated what happens in the case that the vendor isn't able or willing to support those devices anymore. Keeping Apps up to date and new apps if new Mobile OSes arise or keep the light on in general. Right now it all depends on the goodwill of the vendor.

If the provider decides to not support anymore for whatever reason you have a smart brick!

(Gosh, I saw this post a few days ago and I can't stop thinking about it.)

Why?

Regulations exist for a reason. Complaining about regulations is like complaining that eating bacon 3 times a day isn't healthy. (Or, to put it another way, the people who complain about regulations are basically complaining that they can't screw people over. No sympathy here!)

Furthermore, this kind of thread implies that you're trying to do something unethical.

So what is it that you're really trying to do?

Really interesting post. My suggestion: Hacking the stock market with AI's, algos, and current results from neural-science research, and large, accurate historical datasets and analytic models. There are lots of regs that mandate "prudent man" behaviour for agents and brokers, and myriad regs around capital required to execute or margin trades - but the domain of research-gathering prior to trade execution - is essentially wide open for "outsiders". Company officers face restrictions on when they can buy or sell company stock - but non-insiders have wide latitude, and in most cases are free to make buy/sell decisions whenever, and at any rate they wish to pay for. You are free to invest and speculate - and lose - your own money. And the neural-science on this is interesting. Most wealthy speculators in commodity markets, mostly lose. Most gamblers at casinos mostly lose. If you have wealth, you are able to give it away (or piss it away), without restriction, unless your family members can get you declared "mentally not competent". Also, environments where very complex regulations exist, allow and encourage "regulatory arbitrage" - structures can be created which take advantage of various regime differences. But the fact remains, few regulations exist which can effectively prevent someone giving away, or destroying their own wealth. (I recall a fellow in Sweden, who was ordered by a divorce court to turn over half his wealth to a former wife. He withdrew over $100,000 in life savings in cash, and carefully burned it all.) People face few restrictions in disposing of wealth. Charities exploit this fact relentlessly. Also, there are few restrictions on attending school, or gaining education - except in truly horrible societies, such as religiously deluded cultures, which for example, prevent women from gaining education to maintain breeding stock. But civilized societies encourage education, and often subsidize it. The existence of unlocked libraries (in ancient times, they were almost always locked), and our western-cultural concept of freely available science information, remains the greatest unregulated open space. It is also where the greatest opportunity resides. Western culture is unique, in that it "deregulated" knowledge acquisition, and scientific inquiry in the early 1600's. And there remains a risk of "re-regulation" of science inquiry. Imagine a world run by book-burning god-believers. You don't have to imagine. You can study the historical examples. Quite possible that science knowledge may be restricted and access regulated in the future. But for now, gaining knowledge, using that knowledge to get rich, and then giving away the wealth accumulated, remains an essentially unregulated activity.

tDCS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZyT_TiPSHw Make the device look cool and you could sell it to millions of gullible chess players and exam-taking students around the world.

Not sure if they fall in the e-bike category, but "electric scooters and hover boards."

Software engineering.

As far as I'm aware, natural medicines are still largely unregulated.

"Lawyers" everywhere.

Political damages.

C++ programming.

Almost all spot markets of anything.

Metals, minerals, lithium you name it. Feds only regulate their financial products derived from the current value of them (“derivatives”).

Why do you just seek out areas that lack regulation, as if there’s no such thing as an opportunity within a regulated field?

Putting up ads on your house or property is widely permitted, for the annoyance of everyone passing by.