Stealth poo robots (What invention do you think the world needs?)

Member Name: skittle

Product:	What invention do you think the world needs?
Date:	12/11/07 (111 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Could change the world...

Disadvantages: possibly for the worse

In my oh so humble opinion the World is in need of more than one invention to sort out some of its problems right now. A diet that actually works would be a nice place to start. Yes, I know that if you eat less calories than you burn off you’ll lose weight, but in the golden age of labour saving devices, McDonalds and 4x4’s more and more of us are finding it hard to keep those extra pounds at bay.

It’s shocking really that we in the West have mounting problems with obesity. The strain that’s likely to cause on the NHS in this Country alone is phenomenal. Latest statistics show that we are also throwing away around one third of the groceries we buy, too, whilst in the third world people are starving. So my first invention would be a redistributer, to redistribute the world’s wealth (and food) more fairly and evenly so that everybody can eat, and less is wasted. Yup, I’m fully aware I have communist leanings, but I’m not talking about paying everybody the same rate no matter what job they do, I’m just talking about an invention to magically find some way of getting food that’s being wasted in one Country into the mouths of starving children in another. Nope, I don’t know how they’d do it either – that’s why it needs inventing.

Whilst I’m solving the problems of the World, I’d love a chance to get rid of one of the major ones, one George W Bush. I’d like to invent something I’ll call an ‘Idiotometer’, which would test people in important roles around the world and calculate a score to ascertain if they’re really qualified to do their job. If not, it will allocate them a role they’re more suited for, and suggest a list of people with the skills, knowledge and intelligence to take their place. I can see what the result from George W’s test would be already… ‘Want fries with that?’

Well, from George Bush to another type of public nuisance, dog poo. Now, I love dogs, I have three of them myself, but I never, ever take the dogs out on a walk without pockets bulging with carrier bags incase of the inevitable accident. It drives me insane to see people walking away from a poo that their dog has just done, leaving it for somebody else to stand in, or worse. I’m always tempted to confront these people and demand to know why they can’t be responsible for their dog’s mess – and it got me thinking that there must be some way for encouraging them to clean up after their dog.

Now, this is a bit unlikely, I’ll admit, but I’d love somebody to invent a stealth robot that patrols parks, woods, open ground and anywhere else that dog walkers generally congregate. These robots would be specifically designed to target owners who don’t clean up after their dogs, wait until the owner and dog have both moved away from the poo, so are clearly not going to clean it up, then clean it up for them. Now, and here’s the clever part, this stealth robot would then follow the dog walker home. The little gift that the dog so graciously left in the park would then be posted through the letterbox for the dog owner to clean up off their own carpet. That’d stop them…

But by real pet hate of all time, however, is to see people walking along busy roads with their dog trotting along next to them, but not on a lead. What makes me even more insane is people who just let their dogs run about completely unattended on the streets at any time of the day or night. There’s a girl who lives near me whose dog can jump straight over the back gate and does so several times a day. She also lives one block from a busy road, and I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen that dog nearly get hit by a car out on her own. So to solve this problem I’d employ my little stealth dog poo robots again. This time, they’d capture loose dogs, whether out walking with their owner or not, and reunite them with their owner in a more permanent way. I’d have the robots handcuff the owner to their dog with an electronic handcuff that will not come off for a set period of time, say a week. The plan is that if anybody had to spend a whole seven days chained to their dog, they’d be more careful about letting them off the lead in future.

If this system didn’t work, I’d put the next stage of the two step programme into effect with an invention that took a picture of the dog in question then incorporated it into a film showing images of the dog getting run over by a lorry, or attacked by another stray dog, or captured and taken away by vivisectionists, or tangled in barbed wire where it slowly starved to death, or being hit by a firework or any other hideous situation you can think of that could happen to a dog out on their own. Horrible, I know, but so is letting your dog wander without you.

Another thing I really hate to see is people dropping litter when they’re feet away from a bin. One of the most annoying things for me is when people drop empty cans and bottles near my local shop, when there’s a recycling point literally 4 or 5 metres from them. Still, I haven’t really worked out a way of encouraging these people to clean up after themselves yet, especially as most of them would probably be too drunk to actually see the recycling point anyway. Still, the thought of these bottles and cans that could otherwise have been recycled made me think about other things that we throw away, and how we could stop polluting the environment. So I’d like somebody to invent a foolproof method of recycling for plastics – or even some kind of a alchemical solution that you could add to plastic that would make it evaporate harmlessly into the atmosphere, now that really would be cool.

My next invention would be to do away with hospitals, doctors surgeries, dentists, opticians damn it, even chiropodists – I’d make the lot of them redundant by introducing a cure-all machine. This machine would look just like a photo booth, though very likely it would look a lot funkier. They’d be in all of the places you’d expect to see a photo booth and more – the local supermarket, library, railway station, shopping centre, etc. You’d step in, press a button to lock the door and start the diagnoses, and the machine would automatically do a full system check and fix all of your ailments in one fell swoop, lasting only a few seconds. You’d then get a printout telling you what you’d been suffering from and advising you of any precautions you needed to take. Would be nice though, wouldn’t it.

An invention to give you more hours in the day when you’re particularly busy would be marvellous too, or perhaps just an invention that allowed you to work twice as fast so you could get more done.

And my final invention (because I’ve been pretty busy so far) would be Teenager Island. Not really so much an invention as a fantasy, to be honest, but Teenager Island would be a beautiful desert island somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where every child would be sent on their thirteenth birthday, to be released only when they hit the age of 20. Bliss.

Summary: Would make the world a better place... probably