I’m on a personal crusade against paper. Especially the kind that ends up in dusty, ill-sorted backroom cabinets full of broken slings containing illegible historical notes of undetermined importance.
Today’s invention is therefore simply to incorporate a scanner into every laptop. Their geometries are pleasingly similar: I imagine making a machine with a modified screen which also contains a scanning head and lights. drop your paper document on the keyboard, face-up, close the laptop lid and press ‘scan’.
Now that reasonable quality scanning is available at ridiculously low cost and in suprisingly lightweight packages, I can foresee that everything which now exists in a paper form will soon find itself directly pdf’d by these devices.