118 - Brainstorming VII
Hey there, !
Previous posts:
- here (initial idea post),
- here (businesses I want to see that don’t exist yet),
- here (absurd products bought in pairs)
- here (businesses that take advantage of things you don’t use at home) and
- here (stupid businesses that can help you get rich)
- here (businesses for Asian-Australian kids)
Today’s theme is new sci-fi technology - because apparently I’ve never done a brainstorm about this?:
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Smell-Over-Internet - transmitting smells across the internet; would require everyone to have a basic set of ‘perfumes’ - like you have RGB pixels for light on your laptop - that is then mixed to the exact smell that’s coming from the other side. Could be good (try out a perfume online!) but might be real bad too (BO? Farts? ew.)
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Shrink Ray - maybe it’s already been done, but I’m imagining a small little robot that can traverse a miniaturised city, which you control by VR headset. It would be a mixture of the real and the virtual - very metaverse-y, eh?
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Cheap plant DNA splicers - not for the weird designer baby stuff, but for like…seeing what would happen if you bred two plants together. Or had an apple/orange hybrid; how cool would that be?! More creation, tinkering with the recipes of life. Many ethical considerations which is why I want it for plants only.
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Flying Houses - we have flying cars, why not flying houses? Land is no longer a premium - the sky’s the limit (literally!). Probably requires a lot of fuel and logistics regarding water / electricity / sewage / gas, but let’s handwave that away for our brainstorming session, shall we?
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Dreaming but Awake - run your brain activity through a GPT-3 AI and see what kinds of dreams it makes of your thoughts. Can it tap into our subconscious the same way we can? What if it could work the other way and seed specific dreams into your head? Inception-level shit…
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Drink your Textbook - knowledge that dissolves into your body orally - learn science, math, or art through smoothies, juices and muesli bars. Easy access to whatever you need to know about - just bring those snack packets with you!
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The Optimising Room - furniture that continuously optimises itself based on your preferences and how you like to use the space. Sleep a lot in the space? Maybe the blinds become more blackout that normal. Enjoy the TV at a different angle while you’re lying on the couch? The table reduces in front of you, or the tv cabinet scoots across. Data data data and then we’ll make your world easier.
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Live in Anime - Westworld but make it anime. Imagine living in the world of Avatar, and being able to bend! Or maybe you live in the One Piece world, eat a Devil Fruit before you set off, and have a wonderful adventure. NEXT LEVEL WEEB!
Chat soon :)
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✔️ Real Life Recommendations
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Dune - I’m so freakin’ obsessed with this movie. Please please PLEASE go watch it. Maybe I’ll write about it next week - just things that were missed / might come up in the next movie. I don’t know - it’s SO EXCITING. The young 13 year old boy in me who read this book knowing it was fantastic but too nerdy for mainstream audiences now gets to watch it in IMAX in 8k or whatever it is and it’s BRILLIANT. Denis Villeneuve, master of Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, turned down directing the new Bond for this movie. Hans Zimmer rejected Tenet to come score this film. It’s so bloody beautiful. Just standalone, as a non book-reader, they introduce concepts and worlds and characters really fluidly, and just watching it is beautiful as well. The prophetic nature of the movie, a central theme in the book, is really well done. For book readers, they have made some wonderful choices in how to show things like shields and The Voice and the pain box and the Bene Gesserit it’s SO GOOD. GO WATCH IT.
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Did I STUTTER GO WATCH DUNE.
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Every thought about giving and taking advice I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible - Alexey Guzey - sad that I only found this after last week’s piece - it’s a really good berakdown of how to give advice and what to think about. Especially about ‘simple advice’ that hey, sometimes you do need to just think about to slow down and work through.
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Miramax, Tarantino and a Fight Over Bright Shiny Objects - Copyright Lately - a very interesting piece on what rights have been reserved by filmmakers and whether they can sell, for example, a scanned NFT of the original Pulp Fiction script. Intellectual property law has always been fascinating to me - what does it mean to ‘own’ something!
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All placebos are not created equal - placebos actually work - there’s a marked decrease in how people experience pain when they use certain placebos. But which ones? I remember a Rory Sutherland idea which was essentially ‘why don’t we just sell placebos for pain treatment?’ It’s proven effective and kind of works…