Friday, September 08, 2006

In a Road less world

Once upon a time in a road less world, were people used only narrow pathways to move and cross regions and cities, a smart group of people decided to work together to create an innovative transport system that would have boosted the economy. They worked hard for almost three years to create a "Bus".

They made use of the best breed technologies of that time to create this conformable, silent, cutting edge technology BUS. The architecture of the bus was amazing, any piece of the bus could have been replaced while the bus was traveling, the fail safe and redundant subsystems could let the vehicle run even on a single tire. They fitted in a radar system to avoid other buses, the creator of the Bus also created an incredible engine what was, of course theoretical, able to push the Bus at a fantastic speed. There were conformable seats and a scalable system that would allow many buses to be chained together to improve the load capability of the bus.

A socio-economical research was conducted to investigate the impact of the buses in the regions and found out that it'd have increased the economy by 40%. Two simulators were developed to investigate even further how the network of interconnecting buses would have give birth to a scale free network of routes. An intelligence system was conceived to create the best routes automatically.

These smart guys also created a garage on a top of a hill where the bus was parked. The garage was filled with all the required high tech mechanical tools to maintain it. An assembly line ready to build thousand of buses -in a blue-print driven approach- was also built. This idealistic group of inventors strongly believed this invention was due to change the world and for this reason they decided to give the bus and the garage for free to all the citizens of the road less world, without even retaining any intellectual property. Anyone was welcome to enter and use the bus.

Almost at the end of the project the group decided to foster the adoption of the bus because strangely the habitants where not interested in taking care of the bus. The garage was rarely visited and the habitants could not understand the machinery as a whole and how to make good use of it. The group gave training sessions, started the bus and moved it back an forth in the garage to demonstrate that is could actually move and that it was very convenient and conformable.

The inventors opened several tenders in the local region in the attempt of attracting adopters. Some early adopters accepted the deal, and were paid for doing some maintenance: some was taking care of the engine, another of the muffler, the radar system, another the light bulbs; there was finally some activity in the garage! But the citizens, due to the absence of roads, could not understand how the entire community could ever take advantage of this incredible vehicle filled with such cutting edge technologies when a bicycle or a barrow was sufficient. Some of
them realized that they could make use of the engine for building and ommercializing a grass mower, to harvest the field, some other decided to use the electrical system and light bulbs to sell a high tech Christmas tree decoration, the technology for the building the conformable seats were used for the nearby cinemas.

In such a yipe the inventors started a discussion about who was supposed to drive the bus. One group asserted they them self had to drive it, another said that this decision had to be taken by the community that was maintaining the bus. But the community was not interested in driving the bus essentially because they did not
understand how could that machine spin off the economy of the planet, they could only perceive the immediate possibility of adopting its inner technologies in their local business and hence they were interested only in the technologies used to built it.

Many years after, when the project funding was largely terminated, the garage laid abandoned in the road-less hill and the concept of the Bus disappeared in the mind of the inhabitants, but a set of new smaller garages appeared in the region: one was selling radar systems, another engines, another the seates for the cinemas, another....

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home