Inventions I Would Like to See

Occasionally I think one up. Sometimes I discover from commenters that it already exists. Nobody, so far as I know, has taken the idea and run with it, but I can always hope.

Filtering Spam

Phone spam, calls made at random as part of a scam or an attempt to sell me something, are a nuisance. The phone companies do not, perhaps cannot, do anything to prevent it. Is there anything we, the individual customers, could do?

The simplest solution is a whitelist, a list of numbers of people I accept calls from. Anyone else gets a recorded message saying that I don’t accept calls from strangers. But for most of us that is overkill, since there are people we know, are happy to accept calls from, but have not put on the list, may not even know the phone number of. And there may be people we don’t know but would like to accept calls from, people with a legitimate reason to call us.

The best solution I can think of is the combination of a whitelist, perhaps also a blacklist of numbers I don’t want calls from, with a test someone calling me rather than a random number can pass. I doubt any single question would do it but the software offer the caller multiple questions such that anyone with a legitimate reason to get in touch with me is likely to be able to answer one.

Where do I work? What is my wife’s name? Where did I go to college? What was my major? My profession?

The hard part is coming up with a list, simple enough to be usable on a phone, that contains at least one question anyone with a legitimate reason to call me will be able to answer. A second problem is thinking up all the answers I want to accept including wrong-but-right ones; someone who identifies my college major as economics is mistaken but he is not guessing at random.

Once someone gets through to me by passing the test and I speak with him I press a button on my answering machine and he is added to the whitelist — or, if I never want to speak with him again, the blacklist.

A better solution would be charging people to call me, refunded if it is someone I want to listen to. I do not see any easy way that I could set that up by myself but the phone companies could. They already bill their customers, could add ten cents to the bill of anyone who calls me, subtract ten cents from my bill.

For a monopoly phone company it would be easy. With multiple companies competing but connected it would be harder. But my company presumably knows or could know what company’s lines a call is coming in on, could refuse to let through to me any call from a company that has not agreed to charge its subscribers my price.

In my Future Imperfect I suggested a way of doing it that did not depend on the phone company:

Give your email program a list of the people you wish to receive mail from. Mail from anyone not on the list is returned with a note explaining that you charge five cents to read mail from strangers – and the URL of the stamp machine. Five cents is a trivial cost to anyone with something to say that you are likely to want to read, but five cents times ten million recipients is quite a substantial cost to someone sending out bulk email on the chance that one recipient in ten thousand may respond.

The stamp machine is located on a web page. The stamps are digital cash. Pay $10 from your credit card and you get in exchange 200 five-cent stamps – each a morsel of encrypted information that you can transfer to someone else who can in turn transfer it.

A virtual stamp, unlike a real stamp, can be reused; it is paying not for the cost of transmitting my mail but for my time and trouble reading it, so the payment goes to me, not the post office. I can use it the next time I want to send a message to a stranger. If lots of strangers choose to send me messages, I can accumulate a surplus of stamps to be eventually changed back into cash.

How much I charge is up to me. If I hate reading messages from strangers, I can make the price $1, or $10, or $100 – and get very few of them. If I enjoy junk email, I can set a low price. Once such a system is established, the same people who presently create and rent out the mailing lists used to send spam will add another service – a database keeping track of what each potential target charges to receive it.

What is in it for the stamp machine – why would someone maintain such a system? Part of the answer is seigniorage – the profit from coining money. After selling a hundred million five-cent stamps, you have five million dollars of money. If your stamps are popular, many of them may stay in circulation for a long time – leaving the money that bought them in your bank account accumulating interest.

In addition to the free use of other people’s money, there is a second advantage. If you own the stamp machine, you also own the wall behind it – the web page people visit to buy stamps. Advertisements on that wall will be seen by a lot of people. (Future Imperfect, Chapter 6)

Conversations With Interesting Strangers

Once or twice a year, on our annual summer trip, we stop in Winnemucca to have dinner at the Martin Hotel. The Basque food is good but the other reason we like it is the family style dining; if your group is not big enough to fill the eight person table you end up dining with strangers. Year before last it was two cowboys who made their living on the rodeo circuit.¹ I like talking with interesting strangers.

Dinner at the Martin Hotel — or the person sitting next to me in an airplane — is an almost random selection of strangers, although a number have been interesting. One should be able to do better. I want a mechanism and a social institution that will let me spot people I would enjoy talking with and start a conversation with them. That might mean someone with an interest in common with me, a fellow economist, libertarian, anachronist, Kipling fan. It might mean someone with an odd and interesting profession or background that would be fun to hear about, like the cowboys we had dinner with in the Martin Hotel.

I am imagining an app on your cell phone. You tell it everything you are willing talk about that you think might make you interesting to a stranger. It accepts requests for access via Bluetooth, routinely checks everyone nearby who has the app to see if I want to talk with them, beeps on both phones if it gets a hit. Having the app on my phone signals my willingness to talk with interesting strangers, that they have it on their phone signals theirs.

The easiest part of what the app does is spotting something in common, since that only requires finding a characteristic on both lists sufficiently uncommon to produce an interesting conversation; one shared with half the population is unlikely to work. A favorite author, C.J. Cherryh but probably not the author of the current NYT best seller, The Lord of the Rings book but not the movie.

Recognizing a characteristic we don’t have in common that makes someone interesting to chat with is a harder problem. The best we can do at present may be for each person to list things about him that might qualify, in my case perhaps medieval cooking and market anarchy, and letting anyone with the app and nothing urgent to do scan that list. Eventually AI might be able to do it for us.

The proposal goes against the current concern with privacy, but privacy has costs as well as benefits and nobody has to participate.

Wanted: A Sleep Switch

Lying in bed trying to fall asleep is boring. I know a lot of poetry and sometimes it works, but eventually I get tired of it. For a while I dealt with the problem by plotting novels in my head until I fell asleep; that that gave me more distance from the story than daydreaming, made it easier to drift off. It worked for a while, produced my first novel, but it doesn’t work any more, perhaps for the same reasons that I have been unable to finish the sequel to that novel or write the planned prequel to my third.

When I was younger, the solution was to fall asleep to music, songs with lyrics I could loosely tie my mind to, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, the Clancy Brothers. Nowadays I use audiobooks, not a new one — paying attention to the plot would keep me awake — but an old favorite that I have read two or three times, such as one of Novik’s Scholomance books.

The problem is how to turn the sound off when I fall asleep.

My solution that needs no new technology, only software. I listen to audiobooks and songs on my smartphone. My phone communicates with my watch. My watch knows whether I an asleep, tells my phone, which tells me, how much sleep I got each night. All I need is software on watch and phone that will turn off what is playing when the watch tells the phone that I am asleep.

A Build-to-Order Dishwasher

We are in the process of buying a new dishwasher. Having decided brand (Miele, because all current Bosch models connect to WiFi which my wife and daughter strongly object to) and series (5000) we still have to chose among models, all mostly the same but with a variety of detailed differences. Some of the options we want, some we don’t mind having but don’t want to pay for, some we would prefer not to have. There are seven that I can think of, six of which we have a preference on.

None of the models have our ideal combination of features. That is not surprising. With seven options, each of which you can have or not have, all possible combinations would require 128 models of the 5000 series alone.

They could, however, assemble the pieces of the dishwasher to fit a customer’s order. I do not know how difficult that would be for building a dishwasher, never having built one, but it would be very convenient for the customer.

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1. An encounter described in an earlier post.