At around end of the 19th century, some of the top physicists of the world held the opinion that anything that could be discovered had already been discovered. Newtonian laws could answer nearly everything was the prevailing view in some circles. And then the quantum mechanics came and created an explosion of science in the 20th century.
There are plenty of problem statements even today. Even with the Internet.
- Search is broken. Google was an amazing thing 20 years and a good thing 10 years ago. Now, it is stale as an army of SEO clerks try their best to not give us the most relevant content. Unless you are searching something mundane, Google no longer has the easy answer. There needs to be a revolution in search that avoids easy gaming. Rather than a generic search engine, a future player might start with one domain at a time.
- Privacy is broken. I need to give up a huge deal of my data to get things working.
- Facebook is boring. I have been on FB since the time they were open to only US university ids. It used to be amazing. Now, it is mostly ads and not so relevant information from friends. The early kick we had with FB and Orkut in 2005–06 is no longer there.
- Recommendation systems never became good. 12 years ago my Netflix account was constantly learning about my preferences and used to give pretty good suggestions. Now, the suggestions are pretty poor and I directly ask my friends what to watch. Same with travel or children’s school or a new TV to buy. Tailored recommendations are still non-existent.
And there 1000s of other ideas. And 100s of awesome new companies come up every year fixing various parts of the Internet. Especially with the quality of NLP engines (like GPT-3) going up, I want to see an explosion of new ideas.
Outside Internet, areas like battery technology, electric vehicles, energy storage, cleaning up the oceans, fixing healthcare and making retail shopping exciting are there.
Ideas are never in short. It is the brains that can execute the ideas that are limited.