> There's a lot of potential for integrating automation into existing heavy industry. Everything from inspection, materials handling, manufacturing, quality assurance. The way forward is 1) knowing an industry well enough to know the pain points, and 2) addressing a pain point in a compelling manner.

One of the top things that comes to mind for me in robotics would be cooking robots. Restaurants have a big "nobody wants to work anymore" problem that I suspect will come back with a vengeance once interest rates go back down. This could eventually be commercialized into a home robot that could save the time wasted preparing meals. Ideally the cooking robot would also be able to handle handwashing dishes.

A machine that could automate laundry would also be really useful. Even one that could just handle the task of running the washer and dryer plus folding once loads were already sorted and knowing when to split an oversized load into 2 loads. Folding and putting away a clean load of laundry alone can easily eat up 15-30 minutes of my time in part because my solution to enable doing laundry less frequently has been to buy more clothes. My guess is a laundry robot could probably be trivially modified to do the Amazon warehouse jobs where they stick people's orders into boxes and it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon is already working on this given the unsustainable rate at which it is running through human workers.

> I want to hear more about this. What can we do in the Sahara or the Mojave (or the American Southwest as a whole)?

I think machines at a large enough scale could alter the atmosphere. For the desert, you'd probably need to modify wind patterns to ensure they get sufficient rain. I'm not sure of the details and obviously you'd need to factor in the species that already live in the desert along with the effects elsewhere.

The more obvious terraforming technology would be a machine that reduces CO2 in the atmosphere much like a dehumidifier reduces water in your indoor air. If a machine can create water out of thin air then I'd imagine there has to be a scientific way to do the same to get rid of carbon dioxide.

> Curious that you mention dating. What would a profitable solution look like in this space?

What I'd see as a solution in this space would be intentionally unprofitable and designed to destroy the profits of Match Group. Basically, the goal would be to get the users into a serious relationship that would lead to a marriage by filtering out users who want casual relationships or to date multiple people at once. Ideally with zero monetization.

The profit from it would be that some group with a vested interest in more marriages happening would make more money selling marital related products and/or baby products. Possible candidates to fund it would be religions, jewelry stores, wedding dress makers or even the US Republican Party (which almost always polls better with married people). It would have to be a non-profit because any for-profit dating app company would inevitably recreate Tinder.

> High speed rail is hard, especially in a place where people would use it. For example, a line from Chicago to Green Bay, to Madison, and then on to MSP would cost billions in property acquisitions or leases. There will be NIMBYs and speculators. Environmentalists will want a pound of flesh. This would be -- probably -- the single hardest thing to do well on your entire list.

I think it's probably something that would need to be backed by a federal government with enough political capital to ignore environmentalists and NIMBYs and eminent domain land away from speculators. You'd probably need a Lincoln or FDR caliber president to make it happen.

Fully autonomous trains would probably be very helpful in terms of making this work and, so long as the track is elevated or underground, probably wouldn't suffer from the safety problems that make fully autonomous cars non-workable. They'd also be quite helpful for restoring slow speed passenger rail to discontinued stations and more frequent rail service to the stations that still have trains. High speed rail would be more palatable once more people were already riding trains.

Disrupting Greyhound and other notoriously terrible inter-city bus services would be much easier in terms of mass transit. A bus company that actually cared about providing a good service that didn't subject its customers to the dregs of society and constantly break down would attract customers who have other options. Especially if it was cheaper than flying or offered more room for luggage. Such buses would be ideal use cases for EVs as long as the routes were within the battery's range.

> How can this be done and still turn investors a profit?

Any kind of organization aimed at helping fix homelessness, mental health and/or drug addiction would probably need to be either a government funded non-profit or a non-profit funded by groups that would profit from having the problem fixed. Either employers that need cheap labor or developers that want to increase property values would be the most likely private investors. If American cities were as safe as Tokyo, almost everybody would want to live in them. But many people don't want to have a homeless encampment or an open air drug market outside their home.

If it isn't government backed, it would be much harder because you can't force people into your program. Which means it would have to be something they actually want. If it is government backed, it's easier because you can use the government to coerce them into the program. It's also easier if you're coercing them to do unethical things so you'd have to be really careful to make sure you're actually helping.

> What would you do?

Robotics projects would be the top choice for me because the time wasted on household tasks is the main pain point for me. I'd ideally like that to be 0 or as close to 0 as possible without another human having to do it for me. That's not a task that I think any human should have to waste time doing. Long term, the goal would be intelligent or possibly even sentient robots but I strongly doubt that can be done today.

The terraforming space would be a second choice for me as a prerequisite for colonizing space. If you want to increase the human population, you then have to find a place for humans to live that isn't Earth. Since I'm not a scientist, such a company would require experts to make the technical decisions. I imagine any excess CO2 sucked out of Earth's atmosphere could be useful for export to Mars (or sold to Elon for that purpose?) to cause global warming there if we don't have any other use for it on Earth. Or maybe there's some way to turn it back into an energy source?

I suspect I'd need to think on this more and do more research into the problem spaces if I were going to do any of this for a company. Above all, I'd want to found a company that actually solves humanity's problems not a company that profits off of creating new problems.