Some random thoughts:

Texting before calling

A while back a shop took down my phone number so they can text me (their words) when it comes in so I can pick it up. A few days later, they notify me via a phone call instead of a text, the nerve! (At the the time I was outside pleasantly enjoying a hotdog sandwich.)

Society can't seem to get the hang of the fact that many people don't want the inconvenience of being interrupted by a phone call, I'd like an update / upgrade to whatever protocols mobile phone calls and SMS messages use so that people can enable a "text before calling" mode. I imagine that goes a little something like this:

Say you want to cold call someone, a stranger. When you attempt to do so, your phone gets a response that the recipient has "text before calling" mode enabled and shows you a message like "This number requires that you text first before calling, would you like to send a request for a call?" and it opens up a text editing dialog where you can explain who you are and why you are calling. When you click send, the recipient receives a specially-formatted text message that includes not only the message you sent, but also a set of possible responses, something like: "Allow this number to call me any time", "Allow this number to call me one time", "Ignore this request", "Ignore all requests from this number". If the recipient allows you to call, you will receive another notification via text message and then you can make the call!

This will even have the nice effect of stopping the proliferation of banks trying to call me up to offer cash loans or whatever. I understand that some people may prefer allowing random strangers to call them (maybe journalists or such?), so I wouldn't even mind if the "text before calling" mode remains strictly opt-in. Sadly, this is something that I doubt will ever get implemented.

Marking AI-written text

This one is a bit of more nebulous idea brought about by recent trends, and also probably a bit harder to enforce given the nature of the open web and thus even less likely to be implemented, but given the emergence of AI-assisted writing, I would like it if websites were required to have a clear indicator of whether the text on a page was written with AI assistance. The indicator would need to be both human- and machine- readable, so that stuff like search engines and filters can help us easily ignore AI-written content farms. Unfortunately I think capitalism means there would be zero incentive for this sort of thing.