Can we as individuals still blaze new trails with tech?

There's space for what I call bottom feeder ideas. These are the multimillion dollars that VC money won't fund because their model needs a billion dollar hit to break even. Most of these can't hire teams of people.

This could be a better hardware store, some kind of directory, better notekeeping, some kind of text based dating app. I made good money off a recipe app. A lot of the world still runs on spreadsheets, when they shouldn't have to. The key to this is to have a niche enough interest, to get to a point that you see something that should obviously be solved with tech but isn't.

AI opens up a lot of opportunities for automating routine mental tasks. Robots did a good job of automating manual tasks. We still have things like ghostwriting and brainstorming names and designs. Robots do not assemble 100% of a car or chocolate bar, but they do a lot. Right now, AI is doing 0% of some of these, when there's plenty of potential to do 20% or even 70% of the work. People get too hung up on getting it to do all the work. AI won't replace comedians, but it will help them write jokes.

You also can't write a good joke-writing AI unless you have an existing process for writing jokes. So you need to somehow be in the top 20% for comedy writing and 20% of AI development to do this. That's quite a niche. And also not something you can outsource to a team.

Capability Based Security isn't ready for prime time yet, despite being 50ish years old. Trillions of dollars could be made in that space.

There are vast areas up for grabs, in all directions. The best way to start is to build some little project that scratches an itch for yourself, and then share it with others in a community. There are so many virtual and in person communities out there besides the Show feed here on HN.

Nobody is too young, nor too old to be a maker of something cool.

Totally.. I mean things like rails are a bit over 15 year old, but elixir is 10 year old.. GraphQL was 10 years ago too. ReactNative was in 2015, so 7 years. Docker was 2016. Tailwinds was late 2017.

Startups happen all the time, and that includes the creation of new frameworks and new programming languages.

To the "where to find gold"... That I don't have a clue. If I did, I'd be there.

Firstly, Facebook is a unicorn. Secondly, most people are just happy setting up a lifestyle business that generates passive income with little effort, albeit the initial setup of the business will be tough and have many hurdles, but you can 'set and forget' / automate many things if you put in that initial hard work.

Yes, they always are. There are always new technologies with new opportunities and new problems. We're constantly improving the productivity and efficiency - just look at the new startups and things that they can achieve.

Nobody has made a good footmouse yet. There are lots of bad ones.