Ideas

When I was nineteen years old, I wrote up a chart of "inventions" I wanted to see in the future, or at least when I predicted said technology or idea. Now I put inventions in quotes because some of the following were already around in some form or another by the time I started it in November 2016.

Inventions/Ideas

1. Dating App for Nerds and Geeks (2016-2017): This is self-explanatory because I am single and I am a nerd. Nerds on dating apps and sites don't have the best luck, so I was hoping this would be a thing to see. I was somewhat subdued on this point because someone did launch a dating app for professionals and academically-inclined people in 2017. I figured Facebook in its beta state was a college-based site that may have been influenced by the desire for a relationship of some sort, but apparently apps like Tinder are popular enough among college students for some reason.

2. Intelligent Androids Capable of Physical/Sexual Relationships, Spiritual/Intellectual Discussions (2007-2017): In 1997, Austin Powers saved the world by dancing seductively for a group of sexy androids that malfunctioned from his little striptease. That was a good year, believe me. Anyway, the idea of a "sex robot" was at least a material reality when the Animatronics of Disney fame married the plastic blow-up dolls of the time. Japan was/is certainly the hub of android technology where sex bots became a hot-ticket item. I mean we are talking about a country where a culture of repressed sexuality meets the high concentration of automation. Instead of just sex bots, which became subject to extreme derision from feminists in the past few years, we should also use AI to emphasize how human these androids can become without the vibes of 1980's dystopian films. So far, this is still a work in progress, but hopefully it'll be a thing in the next decade.

3. High-Speed Tubular Transportation (2013-2016): Back in 2016, I was reacquainted with an old friend from high school and he told me about his involvement in the Hyper-Loop Competition with Tesla. It reignited my old musings about a futuristic highway of tubular tunnels where high-speed pods race from one point to another. I wanted this when I was facing a long overseas flight, so I looked into the old transport designs used for Walt Disney's city of the future, EPCOT, and I realized that transportation is an important factor in various decisions, such as housing, labor, etc.

4. Automated Waiters/Cooks (2006-2016)

5. Automatic Turrets (2007-2010): Years of playing Splinter Cell and being involved with military technology, even at a non-participatory level, I always wondered if an automatic turret were being developed. I'd imagine that private military corporations developing technology for military ops have considered the application of sci-fi technology to protect high-value targets from hitmen or spies. I read an article in 2016 about the turrets being developed by various corporations and I also read somewhere that some of these turrets were going to be used to secure the borderlands of southern Arizona to erect the border wall promised by US President Trump, so maybe my prediction was a little too close to home.

6. Multi-Medium Television Sets (2007-2015): On a better topic, I noticed how some televisions have DVD players installed into the sets. I looked back further at the television advertisements from the 1940's to the 1970's and some of the television sets included record players, radios, and even bars.

7. Themed, Detailed Environments (2005-2017): Theme parks have been creating new realms for decades and often these environments offer an escape from reality. Disneyland, Disney World, Knott's Berry Farm, the Las Vegas Strip, Six Flags, and Universal Studios are all examples of how theming can be applied to various spaces to enhance the experience. I have written a lot about theming and it's one of my areas of expertise.

8. Motion-Detecting Cameras (2005-2017): This was another security measure inspired by Splinter Cell. The motion signals the camera to record the movement and to monitor the area. Talk about some James Bond level surveillance.

9. Amendable Houses (2011): This sounds obscure, but my obsession with architecture and technology had inspired me to design a pre-fab house that can be customized to the dictates of the occupants. Want another bedroom? Then a new addition to the house would be safely installed without ruining the rest of the dwelling.

10. PDF Archives (2014-2017): Back in the mid-2010's, PDFs were fairly new to me and I always wanted a "free library" of PDFs or some sort of archive to keep those files safe for posterity. So far, a cursory glance at my phone's library, you'll spot at least three hundred PDFs. In fact, I regrettably lost my old PDFs in a network glitch in 2017 and had to retrieve each of them.

11. Self-Driving Vehicles (2014-2015): This felt apparent at the time. So far, there are, in the works, self-driving cars. Hopefully, it'll be on a series of tracks that coordinate with other vehicles to avoid accidents. This is pretty much a conductor-less train.