Technologies I'm excited about

Lighting

The brightness of the outdoors on a cloudy day is 10,000 lux. The average indoor room is only 100 lux. A conservative estimate is that it is an order of magnitude brighter outdoors than it is indoors. This has far reaching implications for our health, as it affects our circadian regulation, mood, focus, even eyesight.

I feel confident that 100 years from now we will have a much brighter indoors, but it's not an easy problem. Just buying a ton more lightbulb is cost prohibitive, and there are tradeoffs to light quality and diffusion (it's quite unpleasant to have an extremely bright light in your home).

Technology driven education

There exists so much room for technology to track the learning state of a student and create the most efficient path forward. For some reason most of our learning technology does not intelligently track this learning state, but has you go through lessons in a pre-determined order. This is wildly inefficient. You should only be spending your time and mental effort on things that yield the greatest return.

I've written a proposal that explores how efficient learning systems of the future might work.

Math Academy and similar platforms have made great strides, and I think this is really a great step forward for society, but it does concern me that maybe we are focused on teaching the wrong things. Most platforms seem a little bit over-indexed on teaching people to past standardized tests, and not enough on asking "do these standardize tests even matter?" and "what should we be making people good at?" and "how do we know that this is the right thing to make someone good at?"

It does seem like teaching children how to read / teaching second languages has clear utility, but making someone really good at passing standardized math tests seems to have a questionable impact on them being really good at solving problems in the real world.