What would you be working on if money were no object?
What would you be working on if money were no object?
http://myhopeforthe.world - ultra large scale climate refugee handling systems.
I've run it as a hobby for 20 years over four careers. You might have seen my Hexayurts at Burning Man - they were the starting point of the project.
I knew that was the only way to keep it alive for the three decades I expected to take it to work.
Technology that actually serves the individual that paid for it and respects privacy. We are capable of so much yet we collectively fail miserably on things such as this (climate is another example) in a race to the bottom chasing investor returns at all costs.
2nd answer - I'd love to build supply chain 2.0. An open source, well documented, creative commons licensed guide to making everything, along with an actual chain of suppliers, that is independent to a sufficient degree.
It would be awesome if there could be many of these, in smaller and smaller cells around the world as time went on, such that any disruption could be handled, to prevent an 1177 BC style civilizational collapse.
I would try to solve the worlds' plastic problem. As most of us know, most plastic ends up in a landfill. I think we need to be conscious about what happens to our purchases after its lifespan.
At the end of a tree's life, it is decomposed and turned into fertile soil that will feed future generations of the forest. This is a sustainable cycle.
I think we need to develop a plastic alternative, say X, that can be used to make products such that at the end of the products' life, the product can be converted back into X. Then, X can be reused to make new products creating a sustainable cycle.
Crappy video games. Stuff that most people probably wouldn't like playing. Not that I like making garbage, I'm just no good at most creative arts, so my output is mostly bad. Naturally, I can't get paid for it, but I still want to build the ideas I have kicking around in my head.
I love orgs such as The Internet Archive and The Long Now Foundation. So maybe I would work on stuff like that.
Or maybe teaching tech to youths.
A new browser written ground up, where each html tag and css directive are classes in a decorator design pattern. No js at first, and total control over cookies. Code so clean that even a toddler could follow it so that one cant hide ugly behaviour in there.
I'd be working on tools that allow users to design furniture online and have it automatically manufactured and sent to them.
I love this stuff but the cost of setting it up is in the millions.
A drone that could fly into a disorderly forest of random fruit trees, and pick and collect all the ripe fruit.
Probably something to do with nuclear policy, public perception is a big blocker to replacing fossil fuels with nuclear as a cleaner baseline.
The last 2 decades have seen a fall in large scale infrastructure projects as the will to “kick the can down the road” has only increased. This makes the environment for longer term building of things like nuclear plants, much less appealing.
The lack of will to do things on a medium term timeline is going to reduce how long our long term timeline will be.
An alternative to the Apple ecosystem. Same functionality and range of products, different design choices.
e.g. laptops with matte displays and columnar layout keyboards. Think different.
Ultrawideband cooperative/cognitive free space communication. We're stuck in a paradigm of radio communication (clear channel) that is 100 years out of date.
Something to do with carbon capture, to extract already emitted C02 out of the air
I want to automate the writing of genre novels. Think Louis L'Amour westerns or Barbara Cartland romance novels. It's a massive and truly daunting piece of work, and it might not even be possible, but I have some ideas about how I would go about it.
And by novels I mean a "shitty first draft," not a publishable work.
I've made a start on it, but I get side tracked by having to make money.
My tan.
Less flippantly, I'd probably spend my time writing free speech therapy apps for kids with autism. I might even become a speech therapist myself.
I would open/start a music studio. Fill the space with great gear and still cater to the “in the box” software approach to recording and composition, but also make it a great creative space and a place to get demos and ideas into finished records. I’d be in house engineer and more producer than technical engineer, assisting on songwriting and sound design etc. I would aim to make the rates affordable and would actively try and engage less fortunate communities and artists with discounted pricing and/or free workshops and sessions.
Naturally this costs quite a lot of start up money and doesn’t tend to generate much in the way of cash flow, so I think it will just be a dream, unless money were no object!
If I won a significant amount of money I would open a BnB or pub. Ideally I'd grow my own food too.
"Same thing I do every day, Pinky, try to take over the world!"
This coincidentally is basically the underpinnings of every startup plan I've ever seen, at least the good ones anyway.
Free and World Class Primary Education for developing World. I truly believe Education is one of the biggest ways out of Poverty and it should start with Primary Education.
Working on going to the coffeeshop every morning, reading, exercising, relaxing, watching TV, and going to the movies.
Would never put any effort into anything meaningful again.
AI creativity. Where AI can work on a kind of mental assembly line and humans are there to figure out the specifications of the thing to be built.
For example, I'd love to see humans write an outline of a book then feed it to AI who writes the book in full, using a consistent writing style.
Or say, you have a business idea. You can brainstorm a (domain) name with the AI, brainstorm a pitch, the pitch deck, the company colors, and so on.
Probably something that uses tamper-proof hardware and blockchain tech to have a trustless ledger of pollution from the source, so that negative externalities of pollution can be properly attributed to their makers/sources.
We need to have the cost of pollution properly factored in to the price of things, to the taxes individuals pay, etc... so that they are offset.
Porting old unix programs to 64bit linux/unix.
An operating system with a bulletproof sandbox that allows anyone to run any program against any data without risking their computer.
I'm fairly certain it's currently impossible with Linux, Windows, etc. I'd like to get us back up to at least the safety we used to have with an IBM PC XT, 2 Floppy drives, running MS-DOS, with stacks of write protectable floppy disks
Human-Machine interfaces. Keyboards are limiting, VR is imperfect and clunky. Mice literally hurt long-time users.
I want to make a physical device to control spotify connect. It’d have a slot where you insert a card that has the name of the song / playlist / album written on it, and the device would ocr that and send it to spotify. That way my 2 year old can use it without a smart phone
Catch up on years of neglected reading, language learning and playing music.
I would build solar-powered airships and cruise around the world slowly. Would want something with living space equal to a campervan or small yacht, so you could live aboard indefinitely.
1. Aerobatics starting with the sportsman routine in a Decathlon
2. Some game in a Lisp
3. Working out regularly and getting in good shape, and having a rock solid sleep schedule
4. Drums
5. Learning the math for general relativity and general relativity
I would love to organize and orchestrate buddhist-/hinduist-inspired, but ultimately faith-independent meditation and philosophy retreats.
Minimizing existential risk
Maximizing human-computer bandwidth/throughput
Education
Mathematics
1. Music
2. Tabletop roleplaying games
3. Various environmental and social causes
Money were no object, then I would work on an open, free alternative to sites like Ticketmaster.
Probably something in the realm of new visible light communications technology or security research.
1. Amateur fossil collecting
2. Figuring out reverse engineering of malware somehow
3. Data engineering for some start-ups
I'd buy a coffee plantation and then work on increasing the quality of the beans
Winery/vineyard, stone sculpture, permaculture experimentation, architecture.
My own little farm and a couple of small app/IoT ideas.
bottom up molecular machinery
Climate change mitigation.
writing fiction and creating video games...
tracking and controlling algal blooms
gardening in public spaces .