Please make me some AI that can clean my toilet, do my laundry and make me a ham sandwich. This will be the revolution.
It's the epitome of fitting a solution to a problem. Cooking and cleaning are simple tasks that any able bodied person can do themselves. There is no shortage of able bodied people in the world.
In this case, clothes washing machines and vacuum cleaners seem to fit your thesis.
On a tangent: How was wall-to-wall carpeting cleaned before the invention of the Hoover? Did it just not exist before then? Or it just collected dirt until it was replaced?
Still useful for collecting crumbs around restaurant tables.
Washing machines freeing enormous amount of time for people (particularly mothers, who could use that time to e.g. read books to children or educate themselves) are one example. The other I like is the Reformation: why did Martin Luther succeed where previous attempts at reforming the Church have failed? Because the newly invented printing press allowed for the theses to spread across the Old World much faster than the Church could control it.
Nuclear power was an existential threat to coal mining but was derailed almost completely by manipulating people's beliefs.
The economist Dierdre McCloskey, for instance, argues forcefully that the revolution started with the idea that all souls weigh the same -- i.e., people are all equal under God. [1]
That conviction led to the belief that people should be allowed to read the Bible for themselves, which led to widespread literacy, which led to a demand for books, which allowed the printing press to survive and spread.
After much to-ing and fro-ing I think I'm more inclined to McCloskey's view, that cultural beliefs and values determine institutions, and so determine which technologies survive and which die out.
Of course these things are not one-way. Technology affects beliefs and institutions. But other things do, too, and McCloskey thinks the other things are at least equally as important.
[1] McCloskey D., Bourgeois Equality.
I'd gladly give up houshold chores if it was cheap and wouldn't require a person coming in my home.
I’d buy a robot though.
House chores and maintenance are two big things that are yet to be tackled by technology. They're quite literally life wasters - things you must do in order to get the things you want to do. Prime candidates for automating away, the opposite of "fitting a solution to a problem".
Where I live everyone has a robotic robotic lawn mower.
But cutting out laundry, dishwashing and lawn mowing still leaves some time sinks. Like cooking, where machines currently solve the ingredient prep and the actual cooking parts, but do not help much with cleaning up the mess afterwards (beyond the baseline of using a dishwasher). Or dusting, laundry folding, general cleaning. These tasks I'd wish they could disappear.
And then there's the general category of maintenance - most of the products around us require regular care. Which gets annoying rather quickly.
The tech we have is cool, but there's so much more to be done! I'm hoping the future will eventually bring self-cleaning and self-repairing materials.
Wait... Isn't fitting a solution to a problem exactly the right way to do things?