That quote from Jeff Hammerbacher comes to mind: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."
There's lots of genuine good to be done in the world outside of the US. A year or two ago I did a short presentation to students in an entrepreneur class in Monterrey, Mexico. Now Monterrey is rich even by US standards (in fact it's just across the border), but even then there's still a lot of genuine people problems to be solved by entrepreneurs in that country. Think of the problems one could solve in a poorer country like the ones in Central America or poor areas of wealthier countries in South America like Colombia, Chile, Brazil.
The example I gave the students in Mexico was the need to accept payments online in Central/South American countries. Paypal doesn't work in many of them and online bill pay is almost unheard of. Even in relatively wealthy countries like Mexico and Colombia people can spend an entire afternoon in a massive queue outside their bank to pay their cable bills in person and in cash. Internet startups can't grow because there's no easy way to accept payment online. Building an online payment/mobile infrastructure is a fundamental problem that could make a lot of lives better and pave the road for entrepreneurs in the future. It's not an easy problem and it's not really a tech problem either, but it's not impossible!
This is an excellent example of a concrete problem with a foreseeable solution that will have tangible real-world effects.
I find your comments and the original submission inspiring.
I think that the reason why so many of these recognizable problems remain unsolved has to do with something of a snowball effect. The opportunity to do hard work that can be seen as purely technological innovation is often more appealing than retrofitting some technology to solve an existing problem.
To use the example you gave, _forms_ of online payment exist, and are growing. Products like Paypal have been changing the way many companies think about accepting payment from their customers for years; immediate online payment has slowly been adopted by the U.S's largest banks.
However, for most of their users, these technologies exist as innovations in luxury: they improve upon existing technologies in order to provide further ease-of-use. This is different, I think, than applying an existing technology to a problem: instead of _improving_ upon something, you are instead _applying_ something to a different set of circumstances.
I think many people do not think of that as a hard problem: since the 'hard' technology already exists, applying it should be easy.
I also think that for most ambitious people who have 'innovate' stamped at the top of their to-do list and have the freedom of choosing what they would like to work on, it then appears to be a choice between 'improve' and 'apply', and improve likely wins out for most.
EDIT:
I realize that I essentially re-make the 'iterate vs innovate' point the author makes in my above comment, but I am choosing to keep it there for the sake of coherence.
There's lots of genuine good to be done in the world outside of the US. A year or two ago I did a short presentation to students in an entrepreneur class in Monterrey, Mexico. Now Monterrey is rich even by US standards (in fact it's just across the border), but even then there's still a lot of genuine people problems to be solved by entrepreneurs in that country. Think of the problems one could solve in a poorer country like the ones in Central America or poor areas of wealthier countries in South America like Colombia, Chile, Brazil.
The example I gave the students in Mexico was the need to accept payments online in Central/South American countries. Paypal doesn't work in many of them and online bill pay is almost unheard of. Even in relatively wealthy countries like Mexico and Colombia people can spend an entire afternoon in a massive queue outside their bank to pay their cable bills in person and in cash. Internet startups can't grow because there's no easy way to accept payment online. Building an online payment/mobile infrastructure is a fundamental problem that could make a lot of lives better and pave the road for entrepreneurs in the future. It's not an easy problem and it's not really a tech problem either, but it's not impossible!