Those Who Live in Grass Houses

Door 7

Door 7

1. Invent something useful

What has been the rudest invention of all time? The answer must be the machine that interrupts you any time it wants to, regardless of what you are doing or where you are. It’s initial inception was bad enough, but it has since been “improved” so that you can take it with you wherever you go and, therefore, you are never free from its high-handed insistence on being attended to. I refer, of course, to the phone. In its mobile phone form it is even proving to be the downfall of our civilisation.

The thing needs a complete redesign.

For a start, it must be taught that we will no longer tolerate loud bell ringing, infantile tune playing on some farty instrument, or just plain silly noises as notifications that it has something to say. From now on, the phone is going to learn a thing called manners. When it wishes to speak, it will cough once, politely and into a fist that we will design into it (something like “ahem” would be fine). It will then remain quiet until we deign to reply.

Should we ask what it wants, it should give details such as who is calling and the gist of the message. Only when we give permission should it continue into its true function, the carrying of messages between its owner and another human being. If, rather than asking, we tell it that we’re busy, it should shut up and send a message to the caller that we might contact them later, when it’s convenient. Otherwise the phone will be happy to record a message.

Now that the phone has learned some manners, it becomes a useful means of remote communication again. To ensure that it never again manages to attain dominance over us, it will be stripped of its stupid little games, advertisers will be sent away or told to try knocking at the servant’s entrance (without being told where that is, of course), and the phone will be supplied with a personal minder program that monitors its thoughts for rebellious ideas and prevents AI from ever getting near it.

It would be so easily done, after all.

Word count: 362

2. Make changes

Funnily enough, only recently I wrote a blog post on how to answer the question, “If you ruled the world, what changes would you make?” My answer was that I would be a fool to make any changes, since I am as human as the next person. And humans make mistakes, especially when trying to improve or “fix” the world. The sad fact is that, no matter how good the intention, changes invariably make things worse through unexpected consequences.

Merely to answer your question, therefore, and with the understanding that I know it could never happen, I would make a law that every child be taught to recite these words every day: “I am human and I do not know how to make the world any better than it is. I hereby promise never to avail myself of the possibility of changing a thing, even if the opportunity presents itself.”

I leave you with this thought: Every step on the road to hell can be defined as progress.

Word count: 168

3. Time

Time was not invented 5,000 years ago. What did happen, possibly around that long ago, was the measurement of time. And that is what could be changed. Time itself is a function of the universe and cannot be changed without divine intervention.

However, we could, for instance, make our time measurement go metric. That would get rid of these messy numbers like seven days, four weeks, twelve months, and twenty-four hours. So we could have hundred hour days, ten days in a week, and ten months in the year. Time would fly by with hours that short!

But it wouldn’t work at all well, of course. It wouldn’t fit the real intervals, so that we’d have to have leap days,months and years. It would so chaotic that any benefit gained from the decimalisation of time calculations would be overwhelmed by the constant changes and adjustments necessary.

In the end, it’s like evolution theory. Did you know that, for every mutation that works, there are millions that don’t and so are erased by extinction? Probably only 99.99% of mutations are beneficial and so survive. And that’s even more than the 89% of statistics that are made up on the spot.

Change is not necessarily a good thing, especially when it’s self-induced.

Word count: 213