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World's First Encyclopedia of Future Inventions
Deb Hellman writes "WIRED Magazine Writers, Cory Doctorow and Wil McCarthy, have joined VC Rick Patch and 2 futurists to judge the Immortalizer Technologies Project - a project designed to uncover a comprehensive list of future inventions. The project is being spearheaded by a futurist think-tank, the DaVinci Institute. The goal of the project is to create a compendium of future inventions, a roadmap of sorts for innovators. They probably won't get it right in the first edition, but I like how Tom Frey is thinking on this one. People can submit their ideas and have a future invention named after themselves. Deadline for submissions is April 30th."
No, you have to submit a working example of the invention, I believe.
It's one thing to say "gosh, I wish there was a device that did such-and-such, I could really use something like that." It's another to say "In 10 years, we will have this and that invention." and it being dead wrong 95 percent (or more) of the time.
It would seem to me that anyone attempting to create an invention that appears on a "to invent" list of this sort would not be an innovator.
Haven't you learned yet that the people who think of the idea get very little. The people who get off their ass and build/market/produce are the ones raking in the cash.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
Yippie! Venture capital and futurists. Two great tastes that get nothing done together! Don't we ever learn. It is the year 2003 and yet no hover car in every garage, jet packs the realm of a few weirdos, and my computer's cooling system sounds like a malfunctioning jet engine. Why don't we finish the work of the futurists from 50 years ago first?
People can submit their ideas and have a future invention named after themselves.
If someone thinks something up and puts in in a book, and then 100 years later I actually make the stupid thing, then I'm pretty sure I get to call it whatever I, or the marketing department, want to call it.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
How is that renewable? I guess that would be the invention part of it....
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The last two could be built today.
Don't put these into that DaVinci site; their list is proprietary.
a safe, handy tool for disposing of whatever sadistic bastard came up with the molded-plastic clamshell packaging that too many smallish products come in?
Bonus points if it also opens the stupid %$#@ packages themselves, without leaving finger-cutting edges, and double bonus if it leaves the package in a state where the thing can be returned to the store if unsatisfactory.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Or, you can increase the amount of your daily free time by 5 or 6 hours.
People had the idea of flying machines long before the Wright brothers came along and invented one - and you know what? it didn't involve feathers or an archimedes screw. And people had the idea of mechanical musical instruments long before any were invented, but they were often imagined to be similar to mechanical musicians playing existing or modified instruments rather than, say, an electronic synthesizer.
The point is, having the general idea doesn't in any way diminish the innovation of the actual workable implementation; the ancients who imagined themselves flying like birds using some aparatus doesn't at all take away from the Wright brothers.
must... stay... awake...
The problem is, that knowledge is quite seperate from experience. And experience not only influences what we know, but what we do with our knowledge, and how we grow. If we copied actual memories, then we're left with a bunch of clones with less personal development.
Think about when Einstein's theories led to the creation of atomic energy sources. Think about what others did with it (nukes). Einstein lacked the comprehension of the sheer evil this knowledge could impart, while others lacked the caution of experience and upbringing.
How about giving a 12-year-old knowledge which would let him build a death-ray? How about giving a 6-year-old knowledge of sex? Even with useful things, like math/english/physics, knowledge would be more useful to some than others.
Seriously. How many of us could read a book, understand the concepts, but completely screw up on the implentation? Knowledge is one thing: skill, ability, and experience are completely different.
I totally agree. People have trouble enough maneuvering in 2 dimensions, then they want to add a 3rd dimension of movement? I shudder to think of the accidents caused people flying to work, while they drink their coffee, read their papers, and use their cell phones...
There's at least three fundamental types of inventions:
1. Those people already want, but the tech isn't there.
2. Those things people don't realize they want, until somebody offers it.
3. The things people just aren't that keen on, but that just grows on you.
Typically, #1 is what you'll find here. #2 are those low-tech inventions that just "show up" because one man had a smart idea.
#3 is maybe the biggest, even though they don't appear that way. I remember before mobile phones took off, when people felt they were flashy and annoying. Well, they still are, but now everybody has one. Age group 18-35 have a 99% coverage here, 85% in general population. Another example is the microwave. In the beginning it was basicly a fancy heater used from time to time, now we use it all the time. With a grill element, even pizza is great, and much faster than a regular oven. This might sound a bit like a luddite, but it's not. You're not against technology, you just don't realize how it will evolve into a central part of your life. Same with internet, even though I admit I saw some of what was coming, many things I didn't. For example P2P and Napster, it was a direction I never expected the Internet to take.
Ah, this is getting a long rant. The point is at least, much of what is happening is not fundamentally "new" technology, but it starts taking other forms and evolves to something else. For an example try to imagine everything a multi-gadget carryable computer could do for you. One that is integrated with your cell phone so it could connect with Internet, or other similar gadgets (alternatively over Wi-Fi?), and your laptop or tablet pc. Nothing truly new or groundbreaking so far, but I'm sure there's a lot of ideas we just haven't thought of.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The itch scratcher is the most common. It's something that's easy enough to do with the technology of the time it was invented, but it was a novel idea that hadn't been though of before, or at least nobody had the patience or resources to follow through on it.
You also have improvement on existing technology. The Pentium 4 processor is significantly different than the 4004, but it's more of a derivative product rather than an entirely new technology. Nobody who's familiar with the 4004 will look at the P4 and slap themselves on the head wondering "Why didn't *I* think of that!" Certainly there are steps of innovation along the way. The components got smaller, pipelines and cache were implemented to get more bang out of each clock cycle, the bus was widened. But in the end, it's just a technology that evolved from a simpler version.
Then you have the pipedreams. These are the inventions that should have been invented but never were, simply because innovation didn't follow the path that everyone expected. We don't have flying cars today. AI is little more than a novelty except for a few nitch applications. No colonies on the moon, no men on Mars. Yet for all the fantastic technological advances that didn't happen, nobody predicted the rise of the internet. The concept of a computer on every desk and every lap was difficult to envison when the average computer occupied an entire room.
Progress provides innovation opportunities. We can always interpolate what we have today to determine what we'll have tomorrow. CPU's will always get faster and cheaper over time and a CPU a year from now will most likely closely resemble a CPU today. But at some point, technology gives us an opporunity to do things that wouldn't have been possible before, and as a result, people will start finding unique solutions. But it's hard to determine what those solutions will be if we aren't aware of the factors that would lead someone to come up with that idea in the first place. And if people COULD predict the future in such a way, the patent office wouldn't be getting overwhelmed with patents based on 20 year old technology.
-Restil
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