1) I was just in my living room, thinking about when to turn on the radiator so that the room would be a reasonable temperature when we arrive back from nursery pickup, taking into account the current room temperature and how cold it is outside. And I thought "Hang on, surely this is exactly the kind of thing a computer should be good at?" I don't want it to predict my every move and decide what to do when, but if I said "Make sure it's 19.5° at 5:45" it should be able to take into account all of those factors, use its experience of how long it's taken the living room to warm up in the last couple of weeks, and set the room warming up at precisely the right time to be at my preferred temperature when I get home?
2) If I have to cook 5 things, all of which take different times, why do I have to do the maths, and work out how long each of the timers needs to be in order to tell me when to put things in the oven/on the hob? Why can't I say "Chicken takes 80 minutes, potatoes take 40 minutes, carrots take 15 minutes, green beans take 7 minutes" and have my phone set alarms so that all of those happen at the right times? My phone is definitely better at that kind of thing than me, so why can't I find an app that lets me set timers that way?
3) The 24 bus timetable allows 2 minutes from the bus stop on Frederick Street to the bus stop on Lothian Road. I have *never* seen it take that long. Getting onto Princes Street takes it longer than that, because of the lights/traffic, and so does turning onto Lothian Road. It's always at least 5 minutes. Why isn't this information automatically fed back to the "expected times" on the bus signs? How hard could it be to average out the times taken between the stop the bus is currently passing and the one I'm at over the last hour/5 trips/whatever and use *that* to predict when the bus will arrive?
I'm not asking for AI - none of these tasks are intensely complex. If I had a bunch of spare time I'd probably give #2 a go myself. But these three examples are ones where it doesn't seem like it would take that much effort to make life a little easier for people, and I'd be really interested to know why nobody has ever gotten around to them.
