Daydreaming with enthusiasm about the "intelligent roads" idea. Haven't search-engined it, so maybe I'm behind and it's already happening. Never mind; it's a happy daydream. We invent ocean-mining ships to go into the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" and bring back holds-full of discarded plastic to be recycled into road surfaces. Meanwhile, geeks in garages invent intelligent cat's eyes, road signs and AI-enabled roadside widgetry to communicate with the self-driving intelligent cars rolling around the roads of, say, Mountain View, California.
While all that starts happening, other geeks in garages give up on intelligent wearable fabrics and start working on intelligent road surfaces. They use 3D printing, let's say, to transform discarded plastic into modular road surfaces: plug'n'drive, or maybe click together'n'drive. Some or all of the component pieces of these road surfaces are infused (okay, so not the right word) with circuitry, gadgetry, whatever, to make the whole road intelligent enough to hold a useful conversation with an equally intelligent car. New road networks start to spread out from, say, Mountain View, California.
Had a conversation the other day about water-powered jet packs. Apparently jet packs can be made to work, if you don't mind having a hose trailing down to suck up the water you need to use for the jets. You can use your jet pack to travel around, so long as you only do your travelling around over water. Yes, we did start thinking about all the cities in the world where, as Robert Benchley put it, the streets are full of water. Was that Amsterdam he visited, or Venice ... ?
While all that starts happening, other geeks in garages give up on intelligent wearable fabrics and start working on intelligent road surfaces. They use 3D printing, let's say, to transform discarded plastic into modular road surfaces: plug'n'drive, or maybe click together'n'drive. Some or all of the component pieces of these road surfaces are infused (okay, so not the right word) with circuitry, gadgetry, whatever, to make the whole road intelligent enough to hold a useful conversation with an equally intelligent car. New road networks start to spread out from, say, Mountain View, California.
Had a conversation the other day about water-powered jet packs. Apparently jet packs can be made to work, if you don't mind having a hose trailing down to suck up the water you need to use for the jets. You can use your jet pack to travel around, so long as you only do your travelling around over water. Yes, we did start thinking about all the cities in the world where, as Robert Benchley put it, the streets are full of water. Was that Amsterdam he visited, or Venice ... ?