One of my favorite and most frustrating recent discoveries is Libby.
If you’re not familiar with it, Libby is an app that allows you to borrow e-books from your local public library for free. And it's incredible. I use it to listen to audiobooks, download novels to my Kindle (that I wish I read more), and graphic novels to my iPad.
What's frustrating, though, is that e-books are subject to the same borrowing limits as physical media. There are limited versions available from the library, you have to place a hold and wait your turn, and then return it to the library within a set period of time.
This is frustrating because none of these limits are actually limitations of the technology. There is no concept of "returning" digital media. You download a copy to your devices, and then when your time with them is finished, they are deleted.
The technology makes it possible for you to have instant access to any book, at home, for free. But there are artificial limitations imposed by business constraints.
These business constraints, to be sure, are there for a reason. Publishers must make money in order to operate, and they likely worry that allowing indefinite holds on library materials would cut into their revenue. Whether or not this is actually true is debatable. But the important point is that what's keeping us from a happy home-library utopia is not a technological problem.
With this perspective, whenever I hear of other new and exciting technologies on the horizon, I always approach them with a question: are they actually solving the real problem?
For example, Elon Musk and the (terrifically named) Boring Company's work on the high-speed transit tunnels is ingenious in its technical complexity. The idea of whooshing people in tubes underground from home to work is straight out of the Jetsons. But how to effiecntly move people around a city is a problem that's been understood for decades: mass public transit. And in the cities where Hyperloop is being considered, there is a lack of public transportation not because of any technological or geological reasons, but because years of governmental and corporate collaboration have disenfranchised mass public transit. The solution to people-moving issues is not a technology problem, it's a people problem. And a really difficult one.
I find it helpful to remember that our ability to design great solutions depends on our ability to understand the true nature of problems. Sometimes, technical solutions are just a distraction from difficult societal problems.