Fraser McGruer: 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?
Nick Hare: 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?
Fraser McGruer: So size 65 computer, yeah, the home
computer, 1969
Nick Hare: 67 not bad. How about the ATM and Chip and PIN
technology?
Fraser McGruer: I would say similar. Yeah. 69
Nick Hare: 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.
Fraser McGruer: 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
Nick Hare: 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,
Fraser McGruer: oh, yeah, okay, yeah. There's so many questions
I want to ask, but look, go for it, Peter.
Peter Coghill: 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?
Fraser McGruer: Well, it's just boring, if, if that, I think
that's it. But anyway, yeah, fine, yeah, okay.
Peter Coghill: 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
Unknown: Alexander Graham Bell and the right,
Peter Coghill: 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.
Nick Hare: Yeah, perhaps he was more, I mean, they were perhaps
more like Steve
Peter Coghill: Jobs, yeah, research lead than a lone
inventor.
Fraser McGruer: 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
Nick Hare: 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.
Peter Coghill: They're not, they're not hit. They're not
heroes though, well, I mean, they're comical, but
Nick Hare: 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,
Fraser McGruer: so was it everything?
Peter Coghill: 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,
Fraser McGruer: what's a good example of something that was
invented,
Peter Coghill: 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.
Nick Hare: But we just like, I suppose we like there is
something nice about the thought, yeah, someone, yes.
Peter Coghill: 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?
Fraser McGruer: 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,
Peter Coghill: yeah, we've got data, data, number of events or
something, yeah.
Nick Hare: 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
Peter Coghill: 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,
Fraser McGruer: no, but what's the patents that are not that
kind of stuff. So the lowest
Nick Hare: 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.
Peter Coghill: 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.
Nick Hare: Yeah, batteries are actually more, much more. That
is,
Peter Coghill: I've had a similar conversation with you
about concrete, and then you agreed with me that was quite
exciting.
Nick Hare: 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.
Peter Coghill: Well, they collect the data and then they
perceived, well, they
Nick Hare: 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.
Fraser McGruer: 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
Nick Hare: actually, instead of the 1980s it was the 1880s So,
yeah,
Peter Coghill: okay, hey, wait, headway, just on your own.
Nick Hare: 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.
Peter Coghill: 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.
Fraser McGruer: 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.
Nick Hare: 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.
Fraser McGruer: 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
Peter Coghill: it. Yeah, right. Go on. Then. So, yeah, take,
Nick Hare: 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.
Peter Coghill: So, I mean, following this follow, I think
following a case study is helpful, considering the lithium
ion battery, right? So, loves
Fraser McGruer: these things batteries, because it's, oh,
this is so exciting. I can't
Peter Coghill: 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.
Fraser McGruer: 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,
Peter Coghill: 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
Nick Hare: 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
Peter Coghill: 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,
Nick Hare: 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.
Peter Coghill: Just download, if you try and monetize your shape
exactly, download a symbol, someone
Nick Hare: 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
Peter Coghill: excitement back. Maybe it's become too routine,
because there's so much of it,
Nick Hare: 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.
Fraser McGruer: 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.
Nick Hare: 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.
Peter Coghill: 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
Nick Hare: game all using off the shelf pre training, yeah.
Peter Coghill: 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.
Nick Hare: 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
Peter Coghill: just realised that my answer was the invent,
my invention that Nick was most proud of.
Fraser McGruer: Ah, okay, good.
Peter Coghill: 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
Fraser McGruer: that working. Well, so you invented a
calendar. I didn't quite understand.
Peter Coghill: I meant it's hardly an invention. It was just
all I've done is republish information from one website
onto another, well,
Nick Hare: in a useless form into a useful
Peter Coghill: 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
Fraser McGruer: 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
Unknown: Yeah, where's this going?
Fraser McGruer: 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.
Peter Coghill: Okay, I've got, I've got an improvement for you.
Well, this is
Fraser McGruer: 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,
Nick Hare: or, yeah, I think you'll be annoyed if you try and
improve it. Go on, put in with it,
Peter Coghill: 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,
Unknown: one long
Peter Coghill: side, eye, one short side. I
Fraser McGruer: think you should keep to see things and keep on
uploading stuff that to that. And I'll stick to keep with this
stuff,
Unknown: optics, advanced optics, it's Fraser's area.
Yeah, that's
Fraser McGruer: all we've got time for today. You've been
listening to the cognitive engineering podcast brought to
you by Aleph Insights and produced by me, Fraser McGruer,
if you haven't already, please like and subscribe. We try and
release an episode every week or two. If there are topics you'd
like us to cover, please do get in touch. You can find out more
about Aleph Insights at Alephinsights.com many thanks
for listening until next time. Goodbye.