In predicting the future (which I kinda suck at, but you don’t know that yet), it helps to think of stupid problems. What are problems so stupid that someone, somewhere must think of a solution to them? For example, transport. A Swedish study found that “couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce.” This is a stupid problem. What’s to be done about it?

I read something interesting: “What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value” (Tim Maudlin).

Seriously. Is this the ten, or the teens, or what? The last decade seems to have no name at all (the noughties? the nils?). We seem to be living in some epochal limbo, where things change but kinda stay the same. Like we’re waiting for history to begin again, in the twenties perhaps. Aside from faster Internet, I can’t say that my life is that much different from 1992.

It’s pretty simple. Numbers. Look at the GeoSocial Universe infographic above. In terms of raw users, Skype is bigger than Facebook. Facebook wants to devour as much of the Internet into their Intranet as possible, and folding Skype into their omelette is an obvious win. Why did this happen now? At least partly because Microsoft bought Skype.

Innovation is adaptation. It’s evolution. Business is not that different from life in the jungle. You have to survive, thrive, and that means you have to adapt. That’s all innovation really is. Artificial adaptation. To understand innovation you don’t need to think like an MBA, you need to think like a monkey.

Feedback helps change behavior. It’s immediate knowledge, immediate results, immediate corrections. It’s what we’re built for. Wouldn’t it be cool if life had better feedback? Like a video game? In video games you have a health bar, money, and power (let’s say). I wish I could have something similar superimposed on my vision. Health (amount of exercise, diet), money (money) and power (meditation time or something).

This is an idea I had. When you go on a business trip, you leave a teddy bear with the child. Then, when you’re abroad, you remotely connect to the teddy bear via XBox Kinect or whatever and see what he sees, hear what he hears and control what he does. So he can spend actually rewarding time with your child, through a physical avatar. Alternately, you could just put the bear on the flight.

I spend an inordinate amount of time logging into things. I spend extra time forgetting passwords and then logging into various email accounts to recover passwords. It’s so obviously stupid that it will obviously be evolved out of in a generation. But how? What replaces the login? What I’m thinking is smell. I think the computer should smell me, know who I am and let me do my stuff. That is, rather than fingerprinting or whatever, to use a wireless seemingly invisible odortype. I think that’s what the cat does and he’s not insanely smart. Should be possible.

I have always thought that the best architecture is the closest to seeming natural. The ancient Anuradhapura tanks compared to the Dehiwala flyover, for example. This takes it to another level of awesome, however. Scientists in Taiwan have made trees that glow. It’s a stretch, but they could theoretically light streets at night. “By implanting the nanoparticles into Bacopa caroliniana plants, Su was able to induce the chlorophyll in the leaves to produce a red emission… ‘The bio-LED could be used to make roadside trees luminescent at night. This will save energy and absorb CO2 as the bio-LED luminescence will cause the chloroplast to conduct photosynthesis,’ says Su” (Chemistry World). This would be the coolest ever. Nature has, admittedly, been trying to kill us for millions of years, but the pendulum is slowly swinging towards a comfortable harmony with it. Via inhabitat.com.

I’m under the overpass. There’s a motorbike carrying two people and a huge box. Behind that there’s a van carrying one person and nothing. I wonder. Traffic is bad and the more roads you build, the more traffic you get. At some point, somethings got to give. I wonder if there are other ways of thinking about the problem. I’ve often wondered, what if you made cars that were thinner, four people in a row. But that would be odd. What if you made cars that were modular, take one pod out for one person, four for the whole family. Also odd. At this point, also, the investment in current technology means you’d have to clamber down this evolutionary peak to find another one, something that rarely happens. Then I wondered, what if you kept the same technology and just switched road traffic like internet traffic, in packets.