Huge ideas &
opportunities

Smart Shopping Carts

App-Based Shopping Cart Experience for Frictionless Retail

Transform grocery shopping through smart carts that authenticate shoppers via mobile app, creating a seamless shopping experience where items passing through the cart's sensor barrier automatically populate a digital cart, enabling real-time purchase decisions and eliminating checkout lines while avoiding the complexity of camera-based systems.

Date

Nov 12, 2024

Challenge

Current self-checkout solutions rely heavily on fixed infrastructure, cameras, or honor systems, creating friction points and high implementation costs while still requiring significant customer effort.

Solution

Deploy shopping carts with integrated sensor barriers that detect products as they enter the cart, tied to a mobile app-based authentication system that maintains a real-time digital twin of cart contents.

Insights

  • Mobile payment authentication before shopping creates accountability without surveillance
  • Sensor barrier technology is more cost-effective than store-wide camera systems
  • Digital twin cart allows for easy item removal and purchase changes during shopping
  • System could work with existing product packaging and doesn't require special shelf infrastructure
  • Cart-based approach maintains familiar shopping experience while adding convenience

Tesla Backseat Driver

Passenger Voice Controls in a Post-Stearing Wheel Autonomous EV Future

Provide a reasonable degree of passenger agency in fully autonomous vehicles through a voice-based interface that listens for natural language commands and directions, transforming the traditional driver-vehicle relationship into a collaborative dialogue between passenger and AI while preserving privacy through transparent audio monitoring.

Date

Oct 30, 2024

Challenge

Passengers will require some form of input to maintain a sense of agency while autonomous vehicles drive them around.

Solution

Provide a passively listening agentic voice interface for passengers to provide high level directions to the vehicle with their voice

Insights

  • The speed of sound is faster than human reflexes by 3.8 orders of magnitude
  • Complements Tesla's existing multimodal AI models and would add audio as an additional modality
  • Voice identity, maybe with sonic localization to the front seat, would likely be a prerequisite
  • Muting the microphone and transparency when the agent is listening is critical for privacy

Palantir Data Market

Empowering Individuals in the Age of Automation with Data Ownership

Combat automation-induced job loss by empowering individuals to track, own, and (if they want to) sell their engagement data through a government technology platform, creating a new economy where personal data becomes a valuable asset.

Date

Apr 20, 2023

Challenge

Automation will reduce the need for humans in the labor market, people will need a way to earn a living relative to their performance, and the data that people generate is valuable but there is no liquidity.

Solution

Provide governments with a full technology solution for implementing a data market in their country, similar to Palantir. Pursue legislation that grants data ownership to the creator and makes it illegal for companies to track engagement data. Establish a new market for data, the Data Market, similar to the stock market. Provide people with apps that track their engagement data for them to package and sell on the Data Market. Provide companies with apps to buy data.

Insights

  • Data is the new oil
  • Technology companies have means of data liquidity
  • Universal Basic Income (UBI) does not solve for the problem of, “earn a living relative to their performance,” which is core to the American identity
  • Governments are not protecting data property rights
  • New legislation would be needed

Tesla Copilot

How Remote Drivers Could Be Solution to Robotaxi Challenges

A dedicated remote driver that oversees level five autonomous vehicles, intervening if necessary, with teleoperation facilitated by real-time software and Premium Connectivity.

Date

Feb 4, 2023

Challenge

Level five autonomous vehicles are not yet legal in any jurisdiction and the path toward building regulatory confidence and eventually approval is not clear.

Solution

Dedicated remote drivers that oversee level five autonomous vehicles, intervening if necessary, with teleoperation facilitated by real-time software and Premium Connectivity.

Insights

  • Remote drivers could work from home
  • No dependency on their vehicles
  • Sixteen states do not require the operator to be in the vehicle while driving
  • In ten states it depends on the vehicle's level of autonomy