You make 1000 a month from this site? I'm very impressed. I feel like I should be doing something with the gigs of photos I have sitting on my computer now...
Become an architect! Sorta serious, go google digital fabrication. Your'e good at programming but young in the realm of architecture. Be the next zah hadid!
Hackerspaces. Geek meetups. Get roommates, even if you can afford not to have them, join a co-op. It takes work, it sucks, but its worth it. Join a sport even if you hate them?....guy at my job has been inviting me to dragon-boating. For women...no clue, I'm gay.
I work for IBM's new design group and honestly I'm pretty optimistic about the future of the company (and I'm a generally a pretty big pessimist/realist). Aspects of the company have issues but many of those are being fixed/changed.
Sorry for jumping a reply on this reply, its not connected but all the other reply buttons are missing?..
Go check out the architecture/industrial design realm. Paper mockups, foldable concepts, foam, clay, legos....there are a myriad of techniques to create the physical form.
Then if its electornic you have arduino/sparkcore/etc. etc. Sooo many ways that you can move through, whether its purely visual, 3d printing, etc.
Really I'd say don't jump into the 3D modeling environment. Jump into clay/foam/blocks/glue/crafting. Spend a little time there first, then get into the more precise realm. You'll thank yourself later. Iterate and develop, its the sort of thing the creators of NEST did.
Designer/Developer ish guy here. Can you give me some examples of what this would fall under? Like...inkscape? Thats open source right? Do they want/need designers? Or how could I get involved in this? (My current closest thing to this is I randomly add icons to the noun-project. Conceptually I could make money off that but not really, so I view it more as public help...now you can get an easy to use tesseract icon if anyone ever wants it!)
Oh yeah this would never be purely AI...think of Watson like the Tardis and the Doctor like ...The Doctor. They go hand in hand, Watson simply makes it so the Doctor doesn't have to waste time.
I'd wanted to buy a bunch two years ago but was still a poor grad student and thought the price then was too high...i could have paid off my student loans...
I was at a startup weekend that had 'hipmunk' and it seems to be doing well right now...:) wish I'd jumped on their group rather than the one I was on.