Where did all the eccentric inventors go? The men (and women) in sheds, the gadgets with flashing lights, the sense that the future was arriving one bizarre prototype at a time. In this episode of the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, the panel ask whether invention has become boring — or whether our idea of invention is simply out of date.

Starting with Tomorrow’s World, the Innovations catalogue and the golden age of gadgetry, the conversation moves into patents, capital intensity, incremental progress and the shift from lone inventors to teams, firms and platforms. Along the way, the hosts explore whether innovation has moved from atoms to bits, whether low-hanging fruit has already been picked, and why we might be surrounded by astonishing technology while feeling less excited than ever.

The episode closes with personal “inventions”, disappointing gadgets, and a reminder that creativity may be more democratised now than at any point in history — even if it no longer looks like a bearded professor wheeling something dangerous into a TV studio.

Topics covered

• Tomorrow’s World, gadgets and the romance of invention
• The myth of the lone inventor
• Atoms vs bits: physical invention and software
• What patent data actually shows about innovation
• Capital intensity and “low-hanging fruit”
• Incremental vs breakthrough innovation
• Why batteries and concrete are more exciting than they sound
• Democratisation of invention: GitHub, maker spaces and 3D printing
• Falling costs and the invisibility of progress
• Why technology might feel boring despite being extraordinary

Key ideas & moments

• The heyday of individual inventors may have been the 19th century, not the 1980s
• Most inventions today are still physical — just less visible
• Incremental progress can be transformative without being dramatic
• Cheap, abundant technology dulls our sense of wonder
• Why invention may be everywhere, but invention stories are disappearing
• Fraser’s dual-glasses “optical breakthrough” (and its controversial reception)

Contributors

• Fraser McGruer
• Nick Hare
• Peter Coghill

About the podcast

The Cognitive Engineering Podcast explores decision-making, technology, creativity and complex systems through thoughtful, wide-ranging conversations. New episodes are released every week or two.

Links

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

- The Innovations Catalogue http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2957409.stm

- Decline of the Independent Inventor https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w11654/w11654.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

- The ‘bungling inventor’ trope https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BunglingInventor

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive

Engineering podcast, brought to you by Aleph Insights and

produced by me, Fraser McGruer. I'm here with Nick Hare and

Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights on this podcast, we look at a

wide range of topics, and today we're asking the question, Where

have all the inventors gone? Hey, Nick, where have all the

inventors gone?

Yeah, do you remember Fraser, you're we're all of a

similar age and age. And when I was a kid, one of my favourite

ever programmes was Tomorrow's World. And I think I was first

introduced to it at the age of about four. What's Tomorrow's

World? Well, it was a programme that ran from 1965 to 2003 and

it was, it was a, basically a programme about new and future

technology that was coming online. And the, I mean, one of

the gimmicks, I suppose, of the programme was that it was live.

Was it live? Yeah, it was live until, right up until the late

90s, it was live. And obviously it lost something, and it

stopped being live. And of course, that meant half the time

the things wouldn't work, the robots would kind of go wrong or

fall over or whatever. Yeah. But the point is, it was didn't stop

it being, I thought absolutely like, so exciting to see these

inventions that would be on screen, and maybe in a year or

two's time, you could have them at home. And so some of the,

some of the key things that were demonstrated on there was the

home computer. Do you want to guess when that was first

demonstrated?

So size 65 computer, yeah, the home

computer, 1969

67 not bad. How about the ATM and Chip and PIN

technology?

I would say similar. Yeah. 69

digital watch, 1972 the CD player, 1981 mobile

phone, 1979 all now things we're quite familiar with, and in some

cases, which are now obsolete as a CD player, yeah. So, as I

said, it was always broadcast live. But the thing is, it was

just really exciting. And what they demonstrated, you know, was

a bunch of tech. And what's technology is things with

flashing lights on, with knobs, keys, things that did stuff they

would move or flash or walk about, and it was cancelled,

apparently, according to the BBC, just through eventually,

the viewing figures just tailed off, right? So for some reason,

people just got bored of seeing future technology in the early

2000s and then I thought, well, hang on. Do you remember the

innovations catalogue also cancelled in 2003 what's the

innovations? Oh, the innovations catalogue was it a brilliant

little magazine that was published from 1985 up till 2003

and was included in Sunday papers. And it had all these

brilliant gadgets in right things like light up slippers,

revolving tie racks, a spider arm's length spider catching

device, potato powered clocks. No, they weren't all ridiculous.

Actually, there was the Dyson vacuum cleaner was. And the

thing I always wanted, which was the most expensive thing, which

was a laser display device you'd plug into your Hi Fi, and it

would do like, laser patterns on your ceiling and tied to the

music cool. It was all stuff like that, like ranging from,

you know, a fiver through to sort of 1500 quid and and again,

it was, it was sort of everyone used to make fun of it, because

some of them were just utterly ridiculous. A lot of them were

just randomly combining two things, like, you know, this is

a pen that also tells the time, or this is, you know, a

dictionary that also makes you a cup of coffee or whatever. But

there was something fun about this idea of gadgets, like in

there was futuristic gadgety stuff. Anyway, it does feel to

me that these days, technology is basically smartphone apps.

And, you know, I sort of think, well, what would tomorrow's

world be like now it would just be, well, here's another

smartphone app that does something useful, you know,

because kind of boring. So, is it true? How's technology am i

Is it a misperception that innovation has stopped being

interesting gadgets? You know? Is it the case that inventors,

you know, the kind of people would come on with the beard,

Professor, somebody or other, you know, you don't really hear

about them anymore. You do hear about Elon Musk and you know

people like Jeff Bezos, but they're business guys, like the

nutty inventor types. Where have they gone? Basically,

technology. Is it boring? Or am I just, am I just, is it rose

tinted spectacles? Great question.

Didn't wasn't it on Tomorrow's World? They had

that one particular inventor guy who would come along every now

and again. I'm sure he on Blue Peter, so maybe this would help.

So I remember he had this really cool invention for getting rid

of worms, I think, in your garden, and it was to cycle

around. Actually, you kind of want worms in your cycle. But

anyway, he what he did. He had this tricycle or bicycle that he

cycled around his garden that had, he'd, he'd tied something

tinkly to the wheels that imitated, if you were a worm,

would sound exactly like rain, and worms don't like rain, so

they get drowned. Apparently, they'll all come out, and that's

how you get rid of your worms. Do you know who this

guy is? That's precisely the kind of thing I'm

talking about. Yeah. See, nowadays it would just be a

smartphone app that played the sound of a tinker. There'll be

no tricycle with bells on, yeah,

oh, yeah, okay, yeah. There's so many questions

I want to ask, but look, go for it, Peter.

Yeah. I think I'm gonna act as devil's advocate

and challenge a very a number of different things about this

premise. I don't think invention has disappeared, so I, but I and

I can, I think we can challenge this, this, this assertion that

it's moved from atoms to bits, that it's all now smartphones, I

think that there's definitely, it definitely is the case, that

there is lots of apps there, but I think there's also lots of

physical invention going on. I think we can also challenge the

premise that that's any necessarily a bad thing if that

were the case?

Well, it's just boring, if, if that, I think

that's it. But anyway, yeah, fine, yeah, okay.

So, so has the lone inventor disappeared?

There's also something so i So, I think I'm going to change that

to begin with. It's like, Well, did they ever really exist in

the first place? You know, we, we held up a very, sort of

relatively small number of people as being these great

inventors of certain things, but a it's a small number of people.

So I'm thinking like the Tim Berners Lees and the Edisons and

the

Alexander Graham Bell and the right,

influential right. But in many cases they

weren't, weren't working completely on their own. You

know, even, even Bell was not working. You know, Graham Bell,

he had lots of assistants and people working on his Bell's

telephone.

Yeah, perhaps he was more, I mean, they were perhaps

more like Steve

Jobs, yeah, research lead than a lone

inventor.

Maybe we're a bit skewed and projecting as

well by our Britishness, okay, that we like this idea of, you

know, amateurism, and not

sorry, just I, and I know this is the same era that

we've been talking about, which is the sort of 80s. But you

know, as a figure in in fiction, the kind of lone professor,

inventor guy was definitely a big thing when I was a kid, and

in a way that I don't see anymore. So you've got your, you

know, back to the future, of course, Doc Brown, 1985 there's

the dad in Gremlins who's more on the kind of innovations

catalogue line you've got.

They're not, they're not hit. They're not

heroes though, well, I mean, they're comical, but

I know, but based on an archetype that we all

understand, yeah, but so, so, but that archetype has

disappeared, like, what's an inventor now, really, the

closest thing, I think you'd have to say, is someone like a

kind of a kind of coder sitting in a cafe, black hat with, yeah,

that kind of, it's like, so let's go back. Peter gone, yeah,

so was it everything?

Yes, it wasn't everything. And I don't think

it's necessary. I think, you know, do we egg up the lone

inventor as a more prevalent thing, or as a more important

thing than it actually was? And I so I think we can challenge

that and so there is actually, there's a bit, there's a mythos

around inventors. Men in sheds and women in sheds have never

actually been all that influential. They just make a

good story, if you can say that,

what's a good example of something that was

invented,

then Bell invented the telephone and Marco

invented the radio. But he didn't. They did. They did. They

they made the first kind of successful one. But there were

lots of other versions beforehand that they kind of

work, built on top of, and there were lots of other people around

them, in their respective labs or companies or whatever that

were helping them get there. So they weren't lone people in

sheds.

But we just like, I suppose we like there is

something nice about the thought, yeah, someone, yes.

There's a romantic, it's a remote there's

a romanticism about having this lone per this lone hero can set

this inventive hero who comes along and makes something quite

amazing. So sorry, yeah, go on, Peter. So what I'm saying is

they're not as influential as they could. It could be the case

they were not as influential as they perhaps say it being as

cultural, sort of Misty eyes looking back, they were, what

about then?

And maybe this is what you about to go on to,

because I know there's a couple of things you're gonna say, but

one of them was, okay, perhaps the load inventor thing is not a

thing. But also, what about this thing of inventing things,

physical stuff, atoms versus bits. What's so do you have any

thoughts on that? Are we ready to move on to that? Yet? I've

got some data,

yeah, we've got data, data, number of events or

something, yeah.

Well, I've got so I looked at the pat the World

Intellectual Property organisation, yeah, which is a

UN agency, who kind of coordinate IP. So in other

words, they kind of, they kind of get patent registration data.

They don't themselves do that, but they gather the data and

they put it in one place, and they make it as incomprehensible

and impossible to query as you can possibly get. So I really

what I wanted to do was work out, well, how many patents are

issued to individuals versus and I. The only way to do that would

be to really I would have to take days of working out how

their API worked and downloading stuff, and so I didn't have time

to do it. But what I did could look at is the categories of

technology. So 35 top level technology categories, and

between 1980 and 2023 the biggest absolute growth in terms

of numbers of patents issued was in computer technology, digital

communication, electrical machinery. So it is obvious

that's the thing that has really seen the most growth in

patterns. So that perception is not entirely

there's a bit of bias in computers are where it's

at. Peter, yeah, there's a bit of bias, potentially, because

there's a lot of money in that, right? I think we can, we can

speculate also, number of patents is not the, not

necessarily a great proxy for how culturally prevalent the

technology,

no, but what's the patents that are not that

kind of stuff. So the lowest

absolute growth is nano tech, although that's

actually the highest potential percentage growth, because it

was hardly any in 1980 it was but things like, well, analysis

of biological materials, organic fine chemistry, machine tools

and materials. But the key thing is that even like computer

technology, the top category, still only 11% of all filings in

2023 right? So nine out of 10 patents aren't computer

technology. There's some other thing and and so I think what

I'm saying is, I think Peter's right, is that actually nine out

of 10 new inventions are a thing that does something. Now it

might be a boring thing, like a new battery or a new kind of

sensor or, I suppose, a new kind of drone wing. I mean, God, I

don't know what they are, but the point is, it's not true to

say that the majority of inventions these days just some

sort of computer technology, at least in terms of patents.

Yeah, I challenge that. A new type of battery

would be boring. You might find it exciting. Well, I mean, I

think you would if, if it was explained to you thus, you know,

imagine, like, well before lithium batteries, you didn't

have, my God, he didn't have electric vehicles, because you

just didn't have the power density. Whereas you would

unlock a new type of battery, you can do all these new things.

So if we unlocked another type of battery, which is 10 times,

100 times the power density, we could do even more loads of cool

things.

Yeah, batteries are actually more, much more. That

is,

I've had a similar conversation with you

about concrete, and then you agreed with me that was quite

exciting.

Yeah, okay. I mean, you're an engineer, like you can

make everything exciting, yeah, so, and I think just more data

that sports Peters claims is a paper by the NBER Well, working

paper from 2005 which looked at, so I didn't, I couldn't get the

data first hand, but this looked at what kinds of entities are

getting patents issued to them. And interestingly, so they quite

a different perception to me. Well, it's not perception in

their case, it's actual data.

Well, they collect the data and then they

perceived, well, they

perceived it, yeah. And the they, according to this

analysis, the heyday of the individual inventor, at least in

the US, was the 19th century. Okay, actually, that begins to

make sense. And if you think about the sort of figure of

someone like Doc Brown, that he's a quite 19th century kind

of figure, and I think, you know, you think back to your

Jules Verne kind of exactly the Time Traveller in HG Wells and

so on and and so. And then, you know, increasingly, the trend

over the 20th Century was for inventors to basically work via

firms. So it looks like inventors being less of a thing

and firms being more of a thing. But then they make the point

that some of that is, is simply because firms. A lot of it is

people becoming employees of, you know, Bell Labs. But some of

it is Alexander Graham Bell setting up Bell Labs. And, you

know, so, so, I guess the idea is that you're seeing a

concentration of activity into firms because, you know,

increasingly you need higher capital requirements to make a

successful invention. You know that. And I think this goes back

to one of your explanations, Peter, is you're sort of saying

low hanging fruit. What you need to invent a telegraph is quite

different to what you need to invent an internet.

So if I've got this right, atoms versus bits is

actually good news. Peter, you're right. We're wrong. Okay,

that's the first one, yeah. Second inventors were a thing,

and hey, now they're not. And Peter going, I'm not so sure

about that. Peter's maybe right, but

actually, instead of the 1980s it was the 1880s So,

yeah,

okay, hey, wait, headway, just on your own.

But I want to pick up something else. Peter said,

because Peter said, because I think actually it, you remember,

we've done, we did a podcast quite a long time ago about

where famous people have gone, like, it seems like you don't

get famous people anymore. And I think we identified that there

was this kind of sweet spot in the 60s when you had enough

media for there to be famous people at all. You know, instead

of just being heard of in one. Town. You're heard of

everywhere, but not enough media, certainly not enough

media that you can use in your bedroom to, you know, to get a

billion famous people, which is kind of what we have now, so

that, like, nobody's famous again, but because everyone's

famous, and I think to some extent, like, it is so much

easier to be an inventor at home. Now you can 3d print

parts. You can, you know, you can get a Arduino or a Raspberry

Pi. I can write computer programmes, you know, which do

things that are at home that I would never have been able to do

in the 80s. And just because it can download software libraries

or download data, and just, do you know, we, in a sense, like

everyone, there must be millions of people, if ever, if we

counted everyone uploading to Thingiverse or uploading to

GitHub as an inventor, then suddenly the world's full of

them. Yeah.

And I think this thing worth pointing out is how

democratised is. So they not only are there no fewer

inventors there, I think there are many, many many more,

because people have got more free time, more more spare cash,

and all of these tools, all this infrastructure that didn't exist

before GitHub, loads of code that you can use and reuse,

loads of maker spaces, places, especially short, it's just

absolutely swimming in them. Places you can go borrow a bench

and some tools and some materials to make, to try out

and make a thing and, and, yeah, you can buy a 3d printer for a

few 100 quid, keep it at home. All these cool things,

technology and infrastructure we've never had before means

that invention is now within way more people's grasp than it used

to be.

I feel the world's moving on without me.

I'm bit worried, because things like Thingiverse make a space,

and I kind of vaguely know about GitHub, but I just don't know

about any of this stuff.

Don't worry. It's not that you're not that kind of

inventor. You're that you're you're a different kind of

creator. Thank you. You're a creator of chaos and art, and

that's different. That's a different kind of thing. Yeah,

I'll take that. I think so a couple of other potential

economic things going on. So we talked about the, you know, the

fact that it's pot, it's plausible that to do invention

now has a higher kind of capital requirement that but, but I

think there's also the fact that the precipitous declining cost

of objects, really, you know, the manufacturing revolution of

the last 50 years. This is not appreciated, really, I think, to

the extent that it should be, but I don't, if you remember a

documentary, it's kind of a documentary stroke experiment,

probably about 15 years ago, where they made a family go

through a year a day, and that it was kind of a social

experiment where they gave that, I think they started in 1965 or

something, and they were given new technology as it came out.

And like, the first piece of technology was the teas made,

which is an alarm clock combined with making you a cup of tea.

Make a cup of tea, and then it wakes you up. Yeah, something

that not a silly combination, and it was, and it was something

like in today's money, 2000 pounds when it first came out,

something utterly preposterous, you know, and now, and I was

just so I looked at what my purchases have been, forget what

you would regard as gadgets over the last year. And they include

an electric kettle invented in 1891 a beard trimmer invented in

1898 an e cigarette. 2003 a rice cooker, invented in 1956 carbon

monoxide detector, boring, but useful. The modern ones were

came out in the 1990s hole punch, 1886 that one battery

tester, apparently not, not commercialised till 1980s a

Water Flosser for my teeth, wireless microphones, pH

detector strips and some LED bulbs. Now, a lot of these,

these are all things that would have been quite an outlay 40

years ago. These would be things that would cost you a

substantial amount of money, and they're all basically nothing

these days. You know, you can just get them for nothing on the

internet and and I just think we don't, maybe just do not

appreciate how many fabulous gadgets we're surrounded by, to

the extent that we just sort of forget about them and don't

notice how many brilliant things there are in our kitchens and

living rooms doing cool stuff. What's a Water Flosser? It's

basically like a little squirty water jet that that does the job

of flossing, but uses water instead of floss. I wouldn't

recommend it, to be honest. Okay, this hasn't changed my

life.

Okay, okay. So yeah, we're actually surrounded

by loads of cool stuff. Yeah, I reckon, yeah, yeah. What do we

got? Where are we going with this? So we were talking about

the low hanging fruit stuff, which is, hey, there's a reason

why individual inventors is not a thing anymore. Because for one

person just to get the easy stuff is easy, and so they did

it. Yeah, right. Go on. Then. So, yeah, take,

sorry, just the radical, the really big

inventions have been invented. I think that's the argument that,

you know, yes, a. Loan inventors can create new little,

interesting shapes and maybe a new software. Oh, I'm sorry,

but, but, you know, so there's more people inventing software

now than many, more than there were 30 years ago. But there's

fewer people invent it, or at least they're more concentrated.

They're in large firms inventing the equivalent of penicillin.

Yeah, because the big stuff's been done. Yeah.

So, I mean, following this follow, I think

following a case study is helpful, considering the lithium

ion battery, right? So, loves

these things batteries, because it's, oh,

this is so exciting. I can't

wait, because it's because it's kind of

pivotal, right? So it was early 80s, whether where the

breakthroughs in the chemistry were made. I mean, the chemistry

was always, was, was understood up to then, what they, what the

chemists then, who are, who were Nobel Prize laureates of good

enough, Whittingham and Yoshino, they, they get science names,

three, three people, I think two of them were working the same

group, and one Yoshino, was independent in working

independently in Japan, but they, but they was it was

stabilising it so that it could be put into a manufacturable

format. That where they where their breakthrough came. But

before the 1980s you didn't have lithium batteries. And after

that, after the 80s, you did have lithium batteries that, as

we said, kicked off lots of different mobile devices that

were otherwise not sort of feasible. But since then, you've

had continuous, but fairly incremental improvements on that

design. So it feels like there was a lithium and battery

problem. They solved it. But now we haven't that they've picked

that fruit. The next fruit is the next battery. Fruit is much

higher up and it's harder to get. Yeah, so it's three

people's effort made this thing work, versus the billions of

pounds of investment per year and millions and millions of

person hours that go into what's the next thing after the theme

battery, 100, you know, loads of loads of institutions are

pursuing that because it's such a big deal.

So what I was about to say is, what I think

you were saying is that incrementalism is less dramatic

and less interesting. But it sounds to me that you're quite

interested in actually, yeah. But so incrementalism,

yeah, and other things standing like the

microchips, you know, the the going from the transistor to the

microchip was quite a big jump. Even the transistor was quite a

bit. It was, was, was, but getting the transistor was quite

a sort of small effort, a couple of people working on that bell

labs, I think. But then to get the transit, to get the once

you, once you've got that jump, once you've done that jump to a

microchip, you've got incremental improvements again,

kind of year on year, they double in capacity and things,

and

I suppose so the the thing, or incrementally

improving again, each improvement is going to, you

would assume, be harder and harder, yeah, but it but, but

also for the field of kind of new potential, new the new

transistor or the microchip, or the new innovative thing. What's

after themselves? Yeah. Are also getting harder to Yeah. But, I

mean, I think there's that yeah, so that it sort of feels like

there's

even a law for it. There's a law for it. Oh

god. E rooms law, which I've never heard of. It's kind of the

inverse of Moore's law. What's Moore's law? Don't worry about

Moore's law, because we're not talking about that is, let me

look him up. So he was Laura, sort of, the is, is an

observation that the cost of specifically in drug discovery,

doubles every nine years. Wow, in pharma, just because it's

harder to get progress because you've done all the easy things,

yeah, I think, and I think there's some, there's

something else as well, which I think is probably related to

this thing I was saying about the precipitous decline of

gadgets, which is the how, just quite how much invention is

effectively free, right? So, you know, if you invent a new, cool

shape and you upload it to Thingiverse, it's kind of free.

Most GitHub, you put things on GitHub, you've created something

new, and it's free. Ai, you know, models are basically free.

Like so much stuff is free that what previously would have been

pursued, it might have been a massive project that a company

like Microsoft might have done to produce something which I can

just download for free now, and because, you know, because it

would be monetizable, because you could make tonnes of money

off it, now it's much harder to do that off the kinds of things.

So what we're saying is there's a lot more.

Just download, if you try and monetize your shape

exactly, download a symbol, someone

else will make a shape exactly the same and

upload that for free. So it sort of feels like, okay, you've got

the fact that these things are just not as valuable as they

used to be, combined with the fact that you're increasingly

getting to more and more costly things to create, sort of just,

I think, more or less, explains how you can have both much more

creation and invention, and at the same time it be harder and

harder to create the genuinely new breakthrough. Yeah. So,

yeah, makes sense. I think we've actually more or less closed

this off. One thing, I think, which is undeniable, and I think

we've covered all the reasons for it, but which is, I think,

is a bit sad, is that I don't think people are as excited

about technology as they used to be. And I think you know that

that certainly the 80s, to me, was a real high point for being

excited about and as Peter is so rightly reminding us, there's a

lot of exciting things out there being invented, new stuff, a lot

of it, maybe it's not like as consumer focused as it used to

be, if it's a new gadget, but it, you know, it's sad that we

when I was a kid, space was a big thing, you know, Carl Sagan

and and the space shuttle and all that, space is a big thing

now, yeah, like, space is bloody amazing, and we're and we're

massively low themselves. I know it's incredible, and yet, kids

are just, you know, it's not like, it's a big thing, like it

used to be. I mean, we, you know, my dad used to take me to

the Science Museum to go and see the space exhibition. It was

like, this is we're going to be all on the moon in 30 years now,

we might actually end up on the moon in 30 years time. It's much

more plausible now than it was then. And yet we just sort of

go, oh yeah, okay, another, another rocket, whatever. So

it's, you know, I don't know. It's just, it would be nice to

get some of that

excitement back. Maybe it's become too routine,

because there's so much of it,

because there's so much of it, I suspect that's it

has the idea of new technology become so ubiquitous that it's

boring.

So look two questions. I think they're both

great. First one, what's the most disappointing technology

that you've ever used or been gifted? You know, is a good

question. You might have been either excited about a song,

gave you something like, oh, and then usually like, well, this is

crap. That's the first question. Second thing, I'm quite

interested you sound like inventors to me, because you

were talking about this thingy, things, whatever it's called,

and get Yeah, and GitHub, or whatever. It sounds like you do

stuff, yeah. Sounds like you do stuff, and you do codes and

things and load it and stuff, and what have you made? Because

I need to get in on this. I don't I have no idea. So I'd

like to know, what have you done. And obviously I've got no

answer for that second one, but the first one, I do two good

questions.

Well, you mainly invented Cesaro Ecko. That was

very cool, mainly cobbled together from parts of other

things, but there wasn't anything that did that unplug

Cicero's echo. I'm all ears.

Yeah. So we so Nick had an idea to have a

active, dynamic and context aware picture for a picture that

responds to your board game session. So you'd have an open

you have an open mic that's listening to the conversation,

and it would this pick the screen would render your an

image that's in some way representative or appropriate

for for your

game all using off the shelf pre training, yeah.

So we So, so I built this thing that captured

audio, transcribed the audio, sent it to an image generator

with a bunch of prompts and and gave you an image back. Yeah.

And it was quite fun. It worked really well.

What have you invented? Well, I was, I've

been, over the summer, I worked on a, worked on a software

framework called Falcon, which is for training, specifically

for training board game playing AIs. And so it's, it's

basically, instead of being in the past, I've trained AIS to

play specific board games, right? So, you know, to just

simple ones, your kind of Noughts and Crosses and ultimate

Noughts and Crosses, various other things that I've trained

and it, I always, always do it, and I go, Oh, it's so annoying.

I'm doing the same things that I did last time. I'm going to

build a software framework to do it. So I've got loads of

components right in this kind of framework, and they kind of

handle all the all the tedious stuff. So basically, you code

your code for the just for the board game, and a few other

things, and you put them in there, and it then does all the

training itself. It generates the data, and it trains the new

models and all that. Like with nearly all my projects, it's not

finished yet, but it's a lot more advanced than I would have

predicted. Are you saying you created a trainer for your

creative thing that is going to that that can be that you can

use to very easily create board game. AI's right? So it's based

on, it's based on kind of neural network, which I

just realised that my answer was the invent,

my invention that Nick was most proud of.

Ah, okay, good.

Another, recent one. It's hardly an invention,

really, but I was, I was pleased with how quick it was to make.

So I made a thing that simply downloads a calendar from the

UCI website that's in a weird format and publishes it as a

calendar. So really basic bit of data manipulation it took me

and. About 10 minutes to get

that working. Well, so you invented a

calendar. I didn't quite understand.

I meant it's hardly an invention. It was just

all I've done is republish information from one website

onto another, well,

in a useless form into a useful

Yeah, from a useless form into a useful form.

And it took all of the thing I'm proud of is the fact that it

took me 10 minutes to make

it, Okay, nice. I've realised in in much the

same way, that your might not be an invention. I've got an

invention that you might say that's not invention, but I

think it is, which is, as we get older, all of us wear glasses,

okay? And sometimes, as we get older, we need, sort of, you

know, our near vision. We get sort of long sighted, right? And

I don't want to look like some old grand some old granny with

sort of bifocals or very focused, anything like that,

even very focused, I think I'm not keen on those. And also that

costs stuff, right? So if you've already got two pairs of

glasses, and

Yeah, where's this going?

And so you're both sure you're both short

sighted and long sighted. You just put them both on, okay, at

the same time, right? So there you are watching TV, and you

need, oh no, I'm short sighted. I need my short sighted glasses

to watch TV.

Okay, I've got, I've got an improvement for you.

Well, this is

the thing, is what we're talking about. So I

have the big discovery, yeah. And then you sort of

incrementally, yeah, refine it, yeah. But then just a one day,

and I just started putting on my these glasses for when I need to

read stuff, but then I want to sort of look down here and look

up the TV down, pushing them down onto your nose like that.

No, no, no. But you wear both glasses at the same time, okay,

but the RE Why would you do that? Right? Well, the reason

why is because you don't want to look stupid. Because you don't

look stupid. You don't look like some old person with very vocals

and things like that, or have the cost of getting an extra

pair of glasses when you've already got two. And if you want

to go further, you could even sort of time together with like

an elastic band or something. And I have actually spent more

hours sitting down, as I have just described, than you would

imagine, two pairs of glasses online. George, you want an

improvement? Well, I'm open to suggestion,

or, yeah, I think you'll be annoyed if you try and

improve it. Go on, put in with it,

pop out a lens from each one, and have a long

sighted lens and a short sighted lens in one frame, and then just

close one eye,

one long

side, eye, one short side. I

think you should keep to see things and keep on

uploading stuff that to that. And I'll stick to keep with this

stuff,

optics, advanced optics, it's Fraser's area.

Yeah, that's

all we've got time for today. You've been

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