The New York Times Magazine has a lovely list of “innovations that will change your tomorrow.” Many of these innovations will give people fabulous new ways to consume more: New coffee! More screens! Underwear that monitors how lazy you are! But a few will also change our tomorrows to help people use less. Naturally, those are our favorites, and here they are:
- Power-creating clothing: Most of the clothes that can charge your phone rely on solar technology. This fabric harnesses the heat variations among your body parts to create electricity.
- Adaptive cruise control: Keeping human fuck-up-itude out of driving by setting distances between cars keeps congestion down, saving gas.
- Better bikes: We’re pretty sure more people will ride bikes if they don’t have to deal with greasy chains, rust, and the constant fear of bike theft.
- Food packaging you can eat: Instead of throwing away your plastic yogurt container, you could choose whether you wanted strawberry- or honey-flavored packaging.
What are the chances that these innovations will actually be a part of your tomorrow? Well, some of them, like edible packaging, already exist in some form. As for the others, they seem plausible enough, if people can actually develop them. Maybe our new laziness-monitoring underwear will shame us into motivation.
