Ask HN: What Needs to Be Automated?

[jbot27]

Chat GPT and Stable Diffusion are really cool, but outside of Alpha Fold, AI hasn't, to me, yet brought a ton of value to humanity.

I have been thinking about what would really be a game changer to people's lives to have automated processes.

Would it be food production, medical care, or education? Insulin production, maybe?

Putting aside if the tools are ready or not, what would be a high-leverage area that, if there were automation at some level, would have a huge positive impact on people's lives?

[dave4420]

Financial products. Start with cheaper advice (which mortgage/insurance/pension product should I get given all this context about my life?)

But then give an AI access to your bank statements to get personalised suggestions on how to make your money go further.

Maybe eventually something like recommending home improvements — if I want to get my kitchen and bathroom redone, what’s the best order to tackle them in? Does the answer change if we’re going away for two weeks in July? And can it organise builders to come in and get the work done?

[jbot27]

That is a good one. I think it is hard to make long term financial decisions. Should I buy a house or keep renting for a bit longer. What impact would this purchase have on my financial health.

[toomuchtodo]

https://maybe.co/ might be what you’re looking for? Doesn’t really call for AI, more a fancy spreadsheet and easy/numerous modeling.

(no affiliation, beta user, built by the founder of baremetrics)

[moomoo11]

Food ordering that makes a custom meal for me. “I’m hungry” and based on my dietician/nutritional information it will send an order to some ghost kitchen (maybe it has like 20 standard ingredients used in various dishes) that makes a meal tailored for my requirements.

Running low on fiber today? Here’s more veggies than usual. Idk.

Or something in the sustainable space. It would be awesome to have AI help us promote reuse and reduce waste by analyzing the stuff we have and also somehow enabling a sharing culture within the community by intelligently allocating used resources.

[karmakaze]

Up until recently it was software production with ever increasing demands for developers. I don't expect this to stop, software is eating the world (for better and/or worse). This parallels the adoption of telephones where there was so much demand for operators to connected calls that "everyone would have to become a switchboard operator"--then phones got dialers.

Software should be customizable by its users to a much greater degree than we produce today.

[samsquire]

Software Packaging: creating packages for software products is painful and tedious. Packaging for Linux requires a lot of work. (See snaps, flatpaks or appimages)

CICD pipelines

Robustness of software

[nextos]

> Software Packaging

Nix & Guix solve this reasonably well, without most Flatpak pitfalls, and are available for nearly all distributions. Plus, Nix also targets macOS.

[inphovore]

We should stop going on about this sham of “AI”, and discuss Behavioral Intelligence.

The question you might ask is “what intelligent behaviors do we need?”

I think modern ML is suitable for building a tricorder like devices. Color test paint, check wear through resonance, interpret x-rays or infra-red patterns.

A self balancing hammer?

Novelty in application is endless. Knowing what you want before seeing it is hard.

[jbot27]

Exactly. That is my point. AGI would be great but there could be things we could apply ML or AI that would be a really helpful to people.

[NoZZz]

Protein reactors for the home, energy and plant waste in, wheat / milk paste out

[BizarroLand]

Food based 3d printers would be a game changer.

And I don't mean something like a CNC cookie froster, but a machine that would have a Protein / carb / fat / vitamin slurry mix as the "filament" that could then combine the filament slurries into a wide variety of food textures.

Probably something like beyond meats reconstituted on the fly from dry ingredients and water.

Add in the convenience of a microwave / air fryer & a grill plate and you could essentially end world hunger even if most people would prefer authentic foodstuffs.

I don't even think anyone is authentically conceptualizing such a device, much less attempting to prototype one, but it would be the most powerful and life transforming food-related invention since the microwave.

The engineering issues to overcome are substantial, probably within an order of magnitude of the amount of work needed for space flight to become possible.

The costs to first develop the processes, then a machine that could run them, and then miniaturize such a machine to fit into the average home would be astronomical.

Being able to convert easily growable food stock into shelf-stable reconsitutable materials for such machines would resolve a lot of the food supply chain issues in the world.

Every family would have one because while you may use it even more rarely than your crock pot it sure would be handy to have around.

You could set it on a timer alongside your coffee pot and have a freshly made hot breakfast sandwich waiting on you when you wake up in the morning, and thanks to a subscription service or a simple library of available recipes you could have a freshly made dinner waiting on you when you got home from work.

And of course, it wouldn't eliminate the want or need for fresh veggies and meats and dairy products, or the desire to cook fun and interesting foods at home for you and your family, at least not for most people.

I'll stop my rant now, but it's an amazing idea to me and I hope someone will read this and get inspired.

[jaredhallen]

Laundry and dishes.

[kleer001]

dusting, cleaning in general

child care /s

[satvikpendem]

Everything should be automated, then we can live in a post scarcity society. Or so the theory goes.

[markus_zhang]

Society will always have some scarcity. That's the way the elites want with the non elites, since some 5000 years ago.

[29athrowaway]

There's no such thing as a post-scarcity society.

Only a society that decides to ignore scarcity and natural limits.

[slater]

Lawyerin'

[jbot27]

Yeah. Legal expertise is really expensive.