Democratizing chip manufacturing technology where one could print something at even 10x the cost would be tremendously helpful, for activists and those who speak truth to power.
These guys had the right idea https://libresilicon.com/ Though it looks like work has paused for quite a while now.
- YOLO and let the economy crash fully for once
- Tempering the "line always goes up" attitude in computing tech that has mostly destroyed enrollments for other hard science / engineering courses
- Some sort of global communal breakthrough to render the lack of community participation / "I have friends but they're over there in the good guy lands" obsolete
- Successful, affordable DIY modular robotic assembly line
- Banning all aerated / carbonated / flavored drinks
- Robust, transparent, privacy-respecting media fingerprinting BEFORE AI content vomit takes over the internet
- Good-faith online shamanism (the truth is out there!)
- Transitioning the Earth and its inhabitants away from water-based energy sources (we split atoms to heat water to make electricity to heat water, etc). It's easy because it's THE universal solvent, but changing the input material makes all the other steps alien and (hopefully) less challenging for the environment / other humans to assimilate to.
All the people who homebrew are chuckling at this.
The problem is that it is hard to monetize, so it should in principle be funded by grants and not by VC.
GI Bill?
It seems there's a very small number of people who like their job. All the aptitude stuff today doesn't seem very helpful. I wish I knew what I would be good at so I could stop hating my job and be successful.
To me, the way homes are designed is often backwards. For instance, they're often designed from the outside-in rather than from the inside-out. Instead of starting with a room you want to build and making it the best possible layout for a specific function (say watching movies, or hanging out with friends and talking) houses are often built from the outside-in: they'll usually start with the shell first and then roughly pencil in an area that can be called a "living room" but there's no real care in designing spaces for optimum functionality.
And the way that homes can be laid out relative to other homes can be improved. What about concepts like pocket neighborhoods? Would they work everywhere? I don't know, but they seem like they would be transformative to a lot of peoples' lives.
A system addressing population distribution to adequately balance areas with an excess and deficit of housing would be good. As would something to influence housing preferences, like size and amenities.
Space based gravitational wave sensor.
Fusion (this one has actually had fairly good progress lately).
I'm trying to do it locally on a very tight budget and goodwill
Edit: let me explain. The space elevator necessarily goes to the height of the geostationary orbit, ~36000 km above Earth surface, and placed on equator on the Earth. It will intersect all orbital planes of satellites, and vast majority of satellites flies below GEO. Satellites orbits are not quite predictable in practice, due to fluctuations of forces acting on satellites, so without active avoidance system - which almost all existing satellites lack and new satellites aren't planning to have - eventually satellite will collide with the elevator, at speed which seems to be rather catastrophic to both satellite and the elevator. There were many attempts to solve this problem, but I haven't seen an adequate one so far, and I rather doubt the humanity will replace the satellites with the space elevator (which won't be able to launch long-term satellites for the same reason). So, space elevator won't actually work as intended.