Ah "Virtual Friend" reminds me of FriendProxy from Maniac:

> Another equally depressing tech-inspired service in Maniac is called FriendProxy, a fictional company that lets you hire random strangers to pretend to be your close friends. As one customer notes, “I have real friends, this is just more convenient.”

Let's go ahead and add AdBuddy to your list:

> Targeted advertising takes its logical next step in Maniac with AdBuddy, a company that lets you pay for other products and services by listening to some schlub read advertisements to you. Can’t afford a train ticket? Ride with an AdBuddy. Hungry? AdBuddy will pay for your lunch — if you listen to advertisements while you eat.

1. https://www.inverse.com/article/49305-maniac-netflix-adbuddy...

Is advertising to people without money a good business?

it is if people are given UBI.

Maniac is a great watch. Really hit some good dystopian/alternative future vibes.

Next you'll tell we have to suffer ads and promotional marketing for rewards or donations just to check out at the pharmacy!

> Virtual Friend: become a friend to a random person online. Chat with them, play games, etc. will be more and more common as the loneliness epidemic grows exponentially over the next few decades.

How about "Virtual Non-Romantic Matchmaker". Pair up lonely people with similar interests who just want to be friends and play games, etc.

Wonder how much of this could be solved by removing the automation around matchmaking in online games. I used to find a server with a good ping and mods / rules that I liked and then I'd usually see the same people day after day, eventually people would start saying "hi" to me or laughing at my gameplay even though I made minimal effort to connect with them.

Huh, actually it would be interesting if online matchmaking in games took into account more of what you’re looking for in a friend. Like if it prioritized matching you with people in similar age brackets and maybe could take into account other interests… so it’d be like the people you’re playing with would make someday likely friends. They could show your match score so you would immediately know if another player had similar interests… I kinda wish that existed!!

The skill-based matchmaking that's popular today is optimized for setting up a fair game, ie. theres a roughly 50/50 chance of either side winning. It makes logical sense, but it turns out nobody actually wants a fair match!

The old style of games had privately hosted servers, each able to host about 30 people. These games allowed people to drop in and out at will. Newer games are more match focused, with shorter matches and a focus on players completing matches. It would still be nice to join a small pool of 30 players and create smaller matches from that pool, but this would require people in the pool to sometimes wait for the next match to form. Balancing would not be hard, just make sure skill is as evenly distributed as possible. All this would allow match focused gameplay while keeping the pool of players small enough to build a community.

Someone recently commented on HN that online cheating is a social problem, and can be solved by playing with a curated group of players. I agree, and think this could also help with cheating.

> Virtual Friend

Virtual AI Friends that are better than humans on how they deal with you are more likely to exist.

Which will continue to be more of a commentary on the continuing decline and collapse of society, and the ability of people to seamlessly enter delusional states when given only the most superficially convincing data, than it is on the advancements of "AI" :)

People never behave how we are supposed to behave. AI will be way better at behaving properly. The minute AI lovers exist a huge percentage of the population is going to give up on human lovers entirely. No cheating, no fighting, emotionally stable. Proper conflict resolution. Although AI does get weird sometimes.

Fore sure. Replika is already doing pretty well for many people.

> Virtual Friend: become a friend to a random person online. Chat with them, play games, etc. will be more and more common as the loneliness epidemic grows exponentially over the next few decades.

Reminds me of those services in Japan where you can hire people to act as relatives or simply be there to talk to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rental_family_service

I suspect online versions either exist already, or will exist soon enough.

Experience designer. (for the last one with multimedia experiences)

Nice one

Love the unstuck er. There was a street in San Fran where way mo cars kept getting stuck.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726534/waymo-autonomou...

> Autopilot Unstucker

I think this could be a job for the same people who work when a tree fall in the middle of the road and they remove it.

"as the loneliness epidemic grows exponentially over the next few decades"

hasn't that happened already?