I was driving the other day, and was thinking about the following idea. What if you had some way of knowing pertinent safety information about all the cars around you? You would be aware that the person driving the 1987 Honda to your left has had two drunk driving convictions. And you would know that the Chevy Impala to your right is a model that has had numerous problems with brakes.

How would you know this? It’s not that hard, and I suspect it’s the wave of the future anyway. Basically, cars would all be miniature network hubs and would be broadcasting their identification information to other cars around them. Your car would be aware of other cars on the road and thus be aware of information related to those cars.

But what about applying that idea to people? Envision this scenario: you meet a new person. Your phone, which at that point has evolved to be something like an all-knowing miniature personal computer, picks up information from that person’s phone. (Or, perhaps the miniature camera you wear at all times scans their face and figures out their identification through face recognition software.) As a result, you can instantly beware of all public information about this person.

Now, let’s twist that scenario a bit. First, let me give you a bit of Internet history. Around 1998 or so I became aware of an interesting Internet plug-in. Basically, it was a component that would attach to your browser and would let you paste “sticky notes” to any website you are looking at, as well as see sticky notes other people had applied to any website you viewed. This was an understandably controversial piece of technology. I could be a dentist with a fancy website offering my services, and someone could paste a sticky note that says “Dr. Schmidt sucks donkey dicks and likes it a lot!” right on my picture. (I think the application might’ve actually weeded out cursing, but you get the idea.) To my knowledge, the controversy pretty much killed the application.

But imagine this. You meet a new person, your miniature computer digs up information on them instantly. But what if it also dug up any comments others have made about that person? In essence, every person would have a web guestbook attached to them and all sorts of comments could go on that guestbook. So, you might meet a new person and instantly be informed that they have herpes and smell in the morning. What would that do to human relations? For the most part, we meet a new person (romantically or platonically) and find them interesting. But, invariably, the more we get to know them, the more we’re disappointed by them. I’m proposing a technology that would take you right to the disappointment stage. You would instantly learn what a loser every person you meet is.