Ask HN: What to Pursue?

I'm tired of making stuff (software) that has no impact on anyone's lives. Ultimately I'd like to pursue AI research and/or to build the future of humanity in some manner, but meanwhile I also need some money to live.

I've been bouncing off various ideas, but either I'm prematurely killing them, or they haven't had any (apparently) feasible target markets:

- a service to save 2-factor authentication backup codes with client-side encryption - I couldn't convince myself finishing this was worth the effort

- a personal analytics service, taking in "the kitchen sink" from health devices and other data sources, drawing up correlations, etc. -- it didn't seem like anyone would pay for this

- a service to lend expertise on demand inside software engineering teams, like a 'virtual engineer' inside a client team (I figured there are loads of inefficiencies in software development) -- I couldn't find a way to even start this. I think the 'silos' separating companies from the outside are probably considered a feature so there's no chance even for this

- an index of all geospatial open(/closed) datasets -- I made some preliminary work here but ultimately I fail to see who would possibly pay for this in some way

- tools for geospatial processing -- GDAL/OSGeo/QGIS/rasterio came short so I made some of my own for joining datasets and such -- also doesn't seem monetizable easily?

- reproducible datasets and computation -- this also didn't seem worth the effort

Am I just prematurely killing off all my ideas without finding a single customer?

Is there some productive way to refine ideas and find better ones?

Should I find a different viewpoint to this entirely?