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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."
trolling is stupid and dying
please voice your opinion if you feel the same
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Hey look! Prior art!
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Pie in the sky, I know...
Luckily I've not had to enforce my patent yet, since every invention since 1998 (including patented ones but excluding mine) are ideas blatantly stolen from prehistoric (pre-1996) times.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
how about GNU/HURD ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
A book that lists future inventions. I call it "Billy and the future inventionasaurus".
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
If Wired is involved, I'm pretty sure one of them won't be a time machine.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
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.
So basically these are people that came up with cool ideas but were too lazy or too poor a writer to write a Sci-Fi story about them.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
Against the monthly flow!
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So basically, you give another person an idea.. they create it.. possibly become filthy rich, and you get to have your name on it? uh-huh. Bridge in Brooklyn for sale. Anyone buying?
Want it to bear your name even if it goes undone until someone else does it after you die?
Even if it's impossible?
My submission: Zero-Point Energy source /w built-in UPS, Line Conditioner and Drink Mixer.
You are not the customer.
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?
The Lord loves trolls!
Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard -- awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.
For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.
Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.
We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails).
Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed.
I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.
Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences." CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed C.I.A. and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad.
Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body pa
warp drive technology!
now every time they use it in star trek my name will apear ahead of it.
SigEp_Ohio Warp Drive!
has a nice ring to it.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
I only have 19 day's to invent the next programming language?!? I'd better get to work!
Developers: We can use your help.
These fellas could use a breath of fresh air like you
This would allow people to plug their mobile phones into a cradle device, then use any phone in their house instead of having to have a landline phone. The idea consists of a cradle device (or multiple cradles, a base station (that utilizes the wiring of the house, and converts the analog signal to digital so mutiple mobile phones can be used at the same time), and digital-to-analog converters for each analog phone in the house.
Hammer of Truth
"Controlling the Weather - Since the beginning of time, man has been fighting the forces of nature. Clothing protects us from the weather in a small way. Buildings protect us in a much larger way. But wouldn't it be nice to spot a hurricane when it first starts to develop, shoot a special wave into it, and just put it out."
Better invention: How about clothing and buildings that are strong enough to withstand any weather? Why disrupt the natural world when we can adapt to it?
"Instant Sleep - People who need to finish an important project, but are beginning to get exhausted can just walk into the instant sleep chamber. In just a few seconds they can walk back out totally rejuvenated, ready to tackle their rest of their work."
Better invention: lets come up with an economy and lifestyle where we get a nice eight-hour sleep at night. I like sleeping. No more sleep, so that my employer can enjoy my improved productivity? This is progress?
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
Stupid shit and Wired have had this long running love affair that caused me to stop reading it in the '90s. But they keep sending the magazine.
Every once in awhile I'll have a peek before it goes in the trash and the last one had a special newsvertising section with "articles" about wireless stuff. Stupid shit.
Most most magaines suck. All flim-flam newsvertising and for hire propoganda slots, like buying hardcopy informercials.
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
I predict... flying cars will be commonplace! Oh wait, that was the predictions for 2000..
Trolling is a art,
This is not for yucks; just a list of way-cool things I've seen in science fiction over the years.
10. The Dream Recorder
9. Impervious material (like Adamantium, General Products Hulls, Mithril)
8. Teleportation booth/transporter
7. Time machine
6. Intelligent, walking robot (I'm thinking more Asimov than Star Wars). Something that can balance, walk and think. Hondo "ASIMO" is a mere toddler.
5. FTL space drive
4. Stasis Field (see Larry Niven....who needa a fridge when you have one of these?)
3. Antigravity
2. Fully creative genetic engineering. Yes, we need Moties and dragons in our world.
1. Brain wave reader machine that makes telepathy a reality.
and over here is our article of 1000 things that could happen. if we get anything right we will forever be known as "visionaris".
WMAV9 on a beowulf cluster !!
Bastards! I came up with this idea next week!
This one is definitely in our future, once we realize the power of knowledge. It's simply a device that will bypass the learning process and education system that takes 16+ years and just beams information and knowledge into your memory. If we every figure this one out, we'll reach a golden age of humanity.
Hammer of Truth
What is it with Wired and that STUPIDLY ANNOYING full screen ad they show now when you go to their site??? Are times THAT bad they need that kind of obnoxious advertisement??? I ain't goin' there no more.
the matrix
How about the "Death Clock" or maybe the "Smellescope"?
[Yes - I watched Futurama on TiVo last night.]
How about a device that we will
1. put in your house
2. you will pay to have this device
in your house
3. anyone can use another device to
interuppt you 7 days per week,
24 hours per day
Oh wait, its already been done -...
IT'S a telephone
There are some inventions that no sane person could have ever predicted.
This, for example.
(Warning: Adult content, Do not open if your children are nearby!)
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
a lot of bullshit to me
vaporware nominations to come
A professor at the University of Mississippi is giving a
lecture on the supernatural. To get a feel for his
audience, he asks: "How many people here believe in
ghostses?" About 90 students raise their hands.
"Well, that's a good start. Out of those of you who
believe in ghostses, do any of you think you've ever seen
a ghostse?" About 40 students raise their hands.
"That's really good. Has anyone here ever talked to a
ghostse?" 15 students raise their hands.
"That's great. Has anyone here ever touched a ghostse?" 3
students raise their hands.
"That's fantastic. But let me ask you one question
further... Have any of you ever made love to a ghostse?"
One student way in the back raises his hand.
The professor is astonished and says, "Son, in all the
years I've been giving this lecture, no one has ever
claimed to have slept with a ghostse. You've got to come
up here and tell us about your experience."
The redneck student replies with a nod and a grin, and
begins to make his way up to the podium. The professor
says, "Well, tell us what it's like to have sex with a
ghostse."
The student replies, "Ghostse?!? From ah-way back there ah
thought yuh said "goatse."
--
Mamma look!
My dad invented the automatic lawn mower. The project was concieved on a rainy night in 1978. It had voice recognition, anger avoidance, and would even refill the gas tank! It took a little over 10 years to develop, but once perfected I got paid $10 every two weeks to keep the lawn trimmed.
"Derp de derp."
Hmm, but when the future arrives it is no longer the future, it is the present, and then instantly the past, thus any invention I create in the future will be created instead in the present and the rapidly the past, thus your patent doesn't apply. Nod. Sure. Works here.
Shadus
"Deadline for submissions is April 30th."
When did they start accepting entries?
April 1.
You may have a point about these guys being failed Sci_fi writers, I mean look at the names associated with it.
"VC Rick Patch" - If that isnt a sci-fi name then ive never watched Robotech
"The DaVinci Institute" - Obviously a front for M15
And Cory "Doctor O" - This would have to be the leader at The DaVinci Institute.....
Man with a name like "VC Rick Patch" I could rule the world!
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Well, as luck would have it, most of the truly innovative things being invented today don't come out of the US anyways. Everything except music. Music we like totally rock at.
I know you were joking but would any of us be suprised if the patent office did issue you this patent? I know I wouldn't be suprised in the least.
Visit www.seriouslythough.com
"My dad invented the automatic lawn mower.... I got paid $10 every two weeks to keep the lawn trimmed."
My dad invented the self healing computer. Only I got paid in porn bookmarks.
C'mon now, how many present inventions can be claimed to have been predicted? OK, the geosynchronous satellite. But what about the ones that aren't like TIVO ?
There will always be stuff you can predict assuming progressive evolution of today's hardware and software. But then there will also be the stuff you can't predict no matter how far you take current technology. Flying cars anyone?
I already know what happens. I've seen "Back To The Future" parts I, II, andIII.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
You should try reading their magazine. (~~shudder~~)
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I propose an accessory that people will be able to attach to their flying cars that will emit the sound from the Jetzons cartoon. And a patent on highlighting the flying car's vehicle designation with a border of purple neon.
would be a system to use a planet's natural magnetic field as a renewable energy source.
As in the paper mag.? Bad, huh?
Oh well, back to working on my web page that contains links to all pages that don't link to themselves.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Is Duke Nukem Forever on the list ?
This sounds an awful lot like the HalfBakery (which isn't nearly as pretentious-sounding as the "DaVinci Institute").
I'm working on a helmet with "eyeports" that only allow you to see things worth looking at and "earphones" that only allow you to hear things worth hearing.
My prototypes are available at the supermarket under the code name "brown bag please".
Is Frey a common last name? Because the person who submitted this news item about Tom Frey is none other than Darby Frey (a.k.a Deb Hellman)
The damned project's page has a horizontal scrollbar! How can anybody who would make an incredibly dumb mistake like that be credible? I mean, assuming anybody who proposes a technology roadmap be credible in teh first place?
Balls of crystal or balls of iron?
Anyone remember that skit from Mr. Show on HBO?
Usama bin Laden alive and well working
at the CIA 3-1
Saddam Hussein alive and well in
Dick Cheney's bunker 2-5
Jon Katz down and out (and trying
to score coke) in Silicon Valley
for another uninspiring phoney story
that he will post on Slashdot when
Dick Cheney seeks asylum in France 5-1
Cheers,
W00t
Get Your War On
Just out of curiosity, does anyone think /. should have a policy regarding these kind of press releases? Sometimes they may contain useful information to be sure but here you have the Vice President of this very organization really just having the editors post a promo puff piece. Not to impinge on the credibility of an institute represented by the amazing "Father of Invention" as proclaimed by that hard hitting news source the Boulder Daily Camera, but seeing how this issue has come up recently for google it seems relevent to wonder if /. to should be considering it as well.
The last two could be built today.
Don't put these into that DaVinci site; their list is proprietary.
I think that for ideas that are truely novel that it is ok to attach your name to it for eternity and have it remain, but I'm talking truely novel ideas.
For the most part such things only reside on mathematical theories or other such currently useful ideas. Ie. the Shannon Limit or the Turing Test. If I simply come up with a idea for something like a "glass magnet" to make recycling landfills easier, that's just fairly pointless. No one is going to speak of Flamesplash's Glass Magnet, especially since it doesn't exist. Now if say in 3 years someone hears my idea and actually builds one, then I don't see any real reason I should get credit for it, maybe an acknowledgement or mention in the paper for said Glass Magnet, but little else.
You could say the person would have never made the device without my suggestion, but I think the actual creation of the device is the harder of the two parts and actually deserves the credit.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
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
Unless you give it a really stupid name, in which case people will fall back on whatever cooler name someone else came up with.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Exactly.
In fact, I wondered "why the deadline?" Just publish everybody's future invention ideas, ongoingly, and maybe some of the more inappropriate patents can be prevented.
--When you buy proprietary software, you don't get better software. What you get is the right to complain about it.
reverse-SCUBA for fish.
I've read a few references about a fairly new drug that's been given to narcoleptics and been adopted by others that really seems to be a stay-awake drug that has few known side effects. Unlike stimulants that crank you up, this new drug simply keeps you from getting sleepy.
Non-narcoleptic users reported being able to stay awake for 4-5 days straight without any sleep. When they stop taking the drug, they get tired as per normal and sleep a normal 8 hours and wake up rested and "normal."
I think this is pretty revolutionary -- we talk about free time as being important, but what would it be like to get 10 additional hours a day? Feel like watching that 3 hour DVD, but its 11 PM and you know you'll be shot the next day if you do? What if the bigger worry was whether you had enough DVDs to occupy your time between 2 and 6 AM?
They don't know what the long term psychological impact of sleep deprivation like this would be, but there's no apparent physical problems reported by people who have been up 3-5 days. None of the paranoia and other psychotic behavior typically associated with long-term stimulant use and other sleep deprivation.
The amount of extra free time would be truly amazing, even if you only stayed "up" 2-3 nights a week, you could be gaining the equivilent of 50 days free time a year.
We already have a good compendium of future technology. Steve Jackson games, makers of the Generic Universal Role Playing System (GURPS) published several supplements detailing future technology. Yeah, it's just a game, but they are very well thought out and plausible (at least for the next few tech levels above 7, which is where we're at now.)
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
My personal opinion is that we will see a world much more like Star Trek TNG. Seriously. Think about any one technology in that show that isnt entirely unfathomable. Transporters employ an area of quantum mechanics that we're currently looking at. Computers are almost already at the point where we can interact with them on the same level as the enterprises' main computer. Look at the tablet PCs' people are carrying around, now and on that show.
The future is all about quantum technology. Thats going to be the next major area of breakthroughs.
.
This may *limit* the scope of future patents but there are likely *elements* of these inventions that would be patentable.
Yes, I would think that the prior art would be a reasonable defence, but if there are parts of the invention which are covered by the patent but not the prior art, that would likely still be enforceable. But hey, IANAL.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Yep.
....AND THAT'S JUST THIS MONTH!
The page design is loud and annoying and that makes difficult to tell which pages are ads and which are articles. It's like Maxim or Cosmo for computers - looooong on (really bad) style and short on brainpower. The border is freakin' ORANGE AND GREEN for crying out loud.
They also spend an inordinate amount of pagespace discussing dumb-ass but important sounding issues like "Breaking in to the Hollywood network (an expose of how movie deals are made)", "Instant messaging in the workplace", "Games are teaching kids the things schools are not" and "What metro areas are the biggest for wireless networking".
If computers got you laid, this would be your monthly instruction manual. Imagine a computer magazine who's target audience is Jim Rome. It's like a bunch of cool people set out to write a magazine about how geeky they thing they are and failed miserably because they aren't eggheaded enough to pull it off.
Really!
There's not a single damn unnecessary Lego(tm) robot project anywhere near that rag! How are they supposed to have any credibility? Hell, they just caught up with the "classic gaming" fanbase with an article about that guy that re-builds Atari 2600's into hand-held units. Next month they'll probably have a cover story on case mods. "Oooh, Buffy, look. People are installing colored lights in their PC's and cutting windows in the side so..." Arrrrrrgh! I can't even finish the gag it's so stupid.
If they wanted to make themselves useful, they'd publish articles like "How to still MS software and keep from getting screwed by Licensing 6.0", "Why you should ignore web services just a little while longer" and "Why is Larry Ellison such a psycho?"
THAT'S info I would pay for.
On another note, don't these people realize that the niche/canned business software market is STILL DIGESTING AND IMPLEMENTING STANDARDS THAT WERE WRITTEN 5 YEARS AGO? Example: My company is probably going to upgrade one of our two major apps this summer. The major innovation? It's a web based product, so there's a zero client install, it pulls info from credit bureaus automatically and it sends email status updates to applicants. (The old app it is replacing was Win16/ODBC and integrated with MS Office 6.0 standards. Ick!) It's a very powerful and flexible package, but it's brand spanking new with a tiny little installed base, so you KNOW it's going to be problematic. But, enough ranting.
I've read one issue of Wired, and it's mostly catbox liner as far as I'm concerned. Maybe if I were 25, lived in San Francisco and had schitzophrenic ADD it would be amusing, but it really makes me miss "Creative Computing" and "Compute!". You see, back in the good old days, computer magazines published the source for useful BASIC programs every month!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
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...
I'm thinking of a booth on the steet, kinda of like a phone booth,where you go into it, deposit 25c, then select either a quick and painless death, or a bloody and gruesome one.
I'll call it a Suicide Booth!!
What?? Not my original idea? Damn...
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
The drug is Modafinil, and is sold under the name Provigil.
This report is from Dec. 3 (doesn't say what year, I'd imagine 2002), and it discusses the military uses. It warns that we might be messing with something we don't fully understand (like the effects on the endocrine system), but I for one would love to try this out.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
One of the problems with the drug, is it's like taking a painkiller and burning yourself with a match. I can't feel the pain, therefore I'm alright, right? Sleep deprivation has been shown to be dangerous for your long term health, offsetting circadian rhythms among other things. The body is repairing itself, as well as other maintenance related tasks when you're asleep. You will need to 'catch up' at some point. Bare in mind that this drug is being used by narcileptics, and for military usage in which they had irregular sleeping patterns to begin with.
(Score:+1000000, totally ON TOPIC)
From what I recall, one thing that was kind of disturbing about the drug was that it worked so well that it appeared to have no side effects. Traditional sleep deprivation (ie, just staying awake and not sleeping) and heavy stimulant usage all have psychosis-like side effects (paranoia, hallucinations, etc) as well as big "crashes" of long sleeps to catch up (further worsened by the use of barbituates or tranquilizers). These are all well-known to be really harsh on your phsyical and mental well-being. Anyone who's ever met a hard-core tweaker can tell you about that (and anyone who has who isn't one can tell you how far away you want to stay from them).
I don't doubt that it might have longer-term psychological effects, but it doesn't appear to have any of the negative physical consequences associated with more familiar forms of sleep avoidance.
What I wonder about, though, is what's the mind of a 40 year old like if they've "added" an extra 2 years of living by using a drug like this? Does your mind age too fast? Do you feel 42? Wiser? More bored, tired, angry, ?
There are probably hidden side-effects from this, but they don't sound like they'd be evident without many years of repeated long-term waking "sessions" to find out.
I was prescribed Provigil (modafonil) as a stimulant to combat sleep disorder induced narcolepsy - didn't do much for myself, unfortunately.
Any spoon would be too big.
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
Interesting...there just was a documentary about a woman who took colloidal silver and it "embedded" in her skin and gave her an ashen grey skin color over her entire body.
z er-technologies-big-thinkers-page.php
http://www.immortalizertechnologies.com/immortali
Al Shugart
Al Shugart cofounded Seagate Technology, the world's largest independent hard-drive manufacturer. He has more than 45 years of experience in the technology industry and is now chairman, president, and CEO of Al Shugart International, a venture capital and public relations firm.
"I see the development of new cures or preventive measures for diseases. One such idea is colloidal silver, which works but isn't patentable for human consumption because it isn't FDA-approved. Colloidal silver is a solution of submicroscopic particles of pure silver suspended in water by an electric charge on each particle. It can be taken orally or applied to the skin. When it comes in contact with single-celled pathogens, such as viruses or parasites or bacteria, it disables the pathogens' metabolic enzymes, causing the pathogen to suffocate and die. Perhaps someday colloidal silver will be widely accepted along with other nontraditional methods of treatment once considered quackery, such as acupuncture."
John Kerry is a Joke!
Perhaps they can steal a few good ideas from shouldexist.org
...because it's selling power is what will drive any future "invention'. "Will the public buy it?" If not, it will never see the outside of Professor Frank's garage.
Pet rocks and Hula Hoops aside...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
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
Play with my webcams and lights here
Instant Sleep - People who need to finish an important project, but are beginning to get exhausted can just walk into the instant sleep chamber. In just a few seconds they can walk back out totally rejuvenated, ready to tackle their rest of their work.
Someone's been playing too much Chrono Trigger.
Sweet. Indentured servitude. Yeesh.
Okay I think this is a cool idea and I applaud their effort and all...
but their "examples" don't seem like they're all that revolutionary... it says that they do -not- want something that's just an incremental improvement (the example of something like that they give is better brakes on cars). But then 1 of their 3 examples is "Build the first space hotel". WTF, how is that not an incremental improvement? It's a hotel, in space.
I just think it's dissapointing that a think tank, whose job it is to THINK, gives a weak example like that when presented with the opportunity to toss pretty much anything out there... hope the submissions are better than the examples. If hotels in space is valid, how about cars in space. Geeks in space. Space motels. Space RVs (been done)... just because you tack "in space" onto an idea doesn't make it good.
besides, all the futurists and philosophers do is get drunk/high and actually remember the bullshit that spews out of their mouths the next day and put it on paper as an ingenious idea.
In 1876, two Frenchmen, Alphonse Penaud and Paul Gauchot came out with a plan for an airplane quite similar to modern ones and very different from the Wright biplane. Penaud's plane was a monoplane, it had retractable landing gear, windshield and a single control for pitch and directional control - way ahead of time... This ahead-of-time idea is not the thing he's remembered for, though - Penaud's most famous invention was a rubber-band propelled airplane model, which inspired many a men attempt building a flying machine, including the Wright brothers...
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Once bitboys invent the fastest GPU ever to grace the earth and Daikatana blows the whole concept of an immersive reality out of the water, future consequent advances will be so drastic as to be unpredictable as of this date.
Pardon me.
My spaceshiop needs me.
"I call it the Hawkings Vortex!"
The Institute began the project last summer but wasn't able to get any real traction until recently - http://denver.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2002/ 05/27/newscolumn2.html
Obviously if this was something easy to achieve, it would already have been done. The first space hotel will require thousands of inventions to make it adaptable to space. Oh ye of little bandwidth.
I didn't say it would be easy to achieve, I'm just saying that they said "better brakes on cars" would be one example of an "incremental" improvement. Now better brakes on cars isn't exactly a piece of cake either, but the fact remains that such an invention would be incremental, an obvious eventual improvement upon an existing and known technology.
Who in your mind is the most famous inventor from the past 10 years?
We need to give the lowly inventors all the encouragement they can get. They get their ideas stolen from their employers, they have to fight for their ideas in courts, and very few walk away with any money.
An you have the gall to criticize how this made it into print.
Only people with tiny monitors have this problem. You must be totally tech impaired youself if you don't own a "real" monitor
Yes this was a staff submission Sherlock. Just like 90% of all the news that makes it into the press. Duh?
the ancients who imagined themselves flying like birds using some aparatus
I read that as "flying like birds using some *asparagus*".
Maybe Icarus didn't make it because he got *hungry* (not because the wax holding his feathered wings melted)....
And I agree, this certainly doesn't take away from the Wright brothers. Whoever first had the concept of the atom bomb isn't the one who's famous, either.
And people who have ideas that are almost purely conceptual (like the post-it note) won't add them to this list, obviously.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Well, it's the present right now... Where the hell is my flying car already?
In Soviet Russia, the car flying YOU!
Here I was, wondering why an account that's been dead for at least 3 years started getting mail from this 'davinciinstitute.com', and now I know. They're obviously using some seriously dirty lists.
Rise, Sir Timothy.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
lets come up with an economy and lifestyle where we get a nice eight-hour sleep at night. I like sleeping. No more sleep, so that my employer can enjoy my improved productivity? This is progress?
The Beggars series, by Nancy Kress, deals with a future when some humans are engineered to not require sleep. They use the extra time to study, accumluate power and riches. They are actually over ordinary humans. Then the question comes, do the sleepless owe something to the sleepy. What happens when supersleepless people are engineered?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
P.S. -- Anyone want to buy a used copy of A.I.?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
There's a similar thing in some of Michael Moorcock's books. No scientific basis for it AFAIK, but time has a kind of immune system, that barfs you out if you change anything too much. It's called the Morphail Effect, IIRC.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."