Black Mirror: 6 Best & 6 Worst Inventions

In the episode Fifteen Million Merits, people spend work shifts cycling, using dynamos to create power for the city and being paid merits for their work. Seemingly an idea out of the dystopian futures handbook, this actually makes a lot of sense and solves several problems that are fast making themselves known in the supposedly non-dystopian world we live in.

Now, this is obviously as climate-friendly as you can get, so that's a major problem solved with power generation. People are going to stay fit in this job too, so perhaps requiring everyone to take a day a week performing it may be a good idea. It's also a way to guarantee jobs in an increasingly automated future, as the power required to automate this process would cost more than the power produced. So, nobody is going to be out of a job under this system, no matter how under-qualified they are, even if the work itself is so mind-numbing that they need to spend some of their earned credits on ways to brighten it up.

I say bring this into primary schools and work up, beginning to add it to workplaces as those kids graduate, until the whole country is covered.