Invention

Norway is famous for its incredible fjords. These formations of unspeakable beauty make the Norwegian coast one of the most photographed in the world.
They also make it one of the most difficult coasts to traverse. The present road and ferry system in place presently makes it possible to drive the 683-mile route from the southern Norwegian city of Kristiansand to the northern point of Trondheim in a rather lengthy 21 hours. This course involves no fewer than seven ferry crossings along the way.

Tech companies from Google to Apple may be ploughing resources into driverless cars, but on our oceans, automated ships could be making bigger waves by the end of the decade: Norwegian company Yara is launching the world's first electric cargo ship next year, and that's just the beginning.

The common thought among young people is that our rocketing population growth is going to overpopulate the earth. But given the number of people in poverty, it looks like population growth is actually good for poverty – more people means more brains, which means more ideas, inventions, and innovations.
This week on Words and Numbers, Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan talk about how and why the world is improving despite widespread negativity towards the idea of a growing world population, and why that negativity persists regardless of the prosperity we see every day.

As someone who works for an Internet of Things (IoT) software company, this is a question that I’m asked frequently. Whether it’s a friend, family member, or stranger, when the conversation turns to what I do, I inevitably find that I need to first explain what IoT is. I’ve also found that if you just Google “what is IoT,” many of the answers are unnecessarily technical. So I’ll provide you with a simple explanation of the Internet of Things and what it means for you.

When it comes to the question "what’s going to change in the next 10 years?" you generate the most powerful answers by keeping at least one eye on what definitely won’t change. Why?

Everyone knows we’re surrounded by “tech.” It’s reshaping every aspect of society in every corner of the globe, making countless twenty-something millionaires in the process, and keeping kids from playing outside like they used to. Those things might be true. And yet, we’re not great at identifying what “tech” really is: ask someone to point it out, and they’ll look for the closest object with a glowing screen.

Talented people logically want to express those talents in the marketplace. The good news is that they're getting that chance. Thanks to a surge of investor interest in Silicon Valley, companies like Google are, according to Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times, "funding the biggest, most world-changing things. They are spending on ideas that, years from now, we may come to see as having altered life for much of the planet."

From Blockbuster employees to the men who removed horse carcasses from the streets of New York, we’ve seen creative destruction end jobs as unnecessary or unwanted products are replaced with new, better ones. But as surely as creative destruction will replace Uber with self-driving cars, we’ll see strict government regulation to try to keep the old ways from going away.

Economist Mariana Mazzucato recently tweeted a complaint about the inefficiency of the Home Office. We've all come to expect government inefficiency, but the funny part is that she thinks government is responsible for innovation. Yes, that's right, the same government that took four months to notice a typo on her visa application, she argues, is the one which made the iPhone possible. Let's take a look at government's contribution to innovation.

Today, washing machines are still doing the work they were doing 80 years ago – which isn’t just cleaning clothes. These juddering boxes are life-transforming technologies that allow women to put their time and labor to more constructive use.