As I turned the wheel to steer the car through the roundabout, there was a shriek and the flash of warning lights. Beside me, Wayne Gilbert smiled.

I had, apparently, steered too aggressively into the curve. The lights and the noise came from Masternaut, a new electronic device attached to the dashboard that is claimed to nudge you towards more careful, considerate driving – and to cut fuel bills by up to a fifth. When businesses have to justify every expense, and with fuel costs up 46% in real terms in the past five years, that is a saving not to be sniffed at.

Masternaut’s custom-fitted “black box” has a GPS for location, a gyroscopic and inertial system to detect turns and acceleration, and a data feed from the the microprocessor that controls the engine to detect revs and use.

Gilbert, chief technology officer at Masternaut, says the device could usher in the age of “ecodriving”: driven by near-real-time feedback not just to the driver, but also to managers back at base.

That does have its worrying side. Neal Parkinson, the company’s head of consultancy, notes that in any sizeable business fleet – and especially of professional van drivers – there will be good and bad drivers, for whom the data will confirm what was already suspected. “How you then have that conversation about improvement is quite a difficult thing,” says Parkinson.

An autopilot it is not, yet. Today, it’s more like a driving instructor that tells you when you’re doing things wrong – braking too harshly, accelerating too aggressively, or turning so tightly that things might be thrown around in the back. Fit it to a van delivering porcelain and you can see it might be useful.

Other settings mean it can note when a vehicle has been idling for longer than a set time, a common cause both of pollution and excess fuel use. It’s like a super-tachometer, able to locate you on a map and point out where you did things wrong, or right.

In the long term, says Gilbert, we’ll see far more sophisticated feedback between drivers and vehicles. He’s a guinea pig. “My own car is a jabbering cave of this kind of technology,” he says. “In the next five to 10 years we’ll see complex event-driven processing feeding back in real time to the driver.”

He points to the crash involving 34 vehicles on the M5 in November, when seven people died in a pile-up suspected of being caused by smoke from a bonfire. With the technology he envisages, the vehicles could have sensed the changing road conditions and given the drivers more rapid feedback – and perhaps controlled their speed as they detected stationary vehicles ahead using radar.

Automatic stopping systems are already fitted to new Mercedes to prevent the classic “roundabout shunt”, where drivers start forward because they see a gap in traffic – but don’t realise the motorist in front hasn’t moved.

It’s not a big step from that to the “driverless car”, an idea for which Google has filed a patent. That would create vehicles able, for example, to guide people around tourist spots or find their way to repair shops. It, too, would rely on a GPS locatorthat would connect to the internet and figure out its location. Google admitted in late 2010 that it had been working on driverless cars when it said test vehicles had navigated more than 1,000 miles in the US without drivers, though two humans were always in the car in case the software failed.

Google’s engineers say robotic cars will have faster reactions than humans, which could reduce accidents and allow more vehicles into the same road space at any given speed, cutting delays.

The purely driverless car is likely to be some way off, which means systems such as Masternaut’s, which is being fitted in fleets in the UK and Europe, will become more common. Gilbert points to an experiment by Norwich Union in which drivers’ insurance premiums were linked to how many miles they drove. The company abandoned it – but there is some suspicion that was due to actuaries who feared computers would take over their jobs of carefully working out how much to charge each age group, so that young drivers up to the age of 25 pay enormous amounts while those who might be just as risky but are older pay far less.

Gilbert knows his company’s systems can ensure careful behaviour: he has two sons. “I told each one, when I let them take my car out, that I’d know precisely how they’d driven it because of the feedback. I told one that if he managed five years without a crash or any points on his licence then I’d buy him a car of his own. ”

Gilbert had to stump up.

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Occupy London is facing imminent eviction from the foot of St Paul’s after three senior judges refused protesters permission to appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

Activists from the camp say they will take their case to the European court of human rights but judges denied them a stay of eviction and it is understood that the City of London Corporation, which brought the case against the protest camp, will act in days to remove up to 100 tents from the grounds of the cathedral.

Delivering judgment on an application to have the eviction order quashed, the head of the civil judiciary, the master of the rolls, Lord Neuberger, sitting with two other judges, dismissed an appeal hearing. He concluded that there was “no chance that any of the criticisms raised by each of the defendants, or even all of those criticisms taken together, could persuade an appellate court” that the initial ruling was wrong.

However, the judges said the right to protest could be strengthened by the nature of the arguments raised by activists.

“It can be appropriate to take into account the general character of the views whose expression the convention is being invoked to protect. For instance, political and economic views are at the top end of the scale, and pornography and vapid tittle-tattle is towards the bottom,” the judgment read.

In a day-long hearing to decide whether to grant an appeal last week, John Cooper QC, acting for Occupy camp members, had argued that in granting the eviction order, Justice Lindblom had carried out a “rubber-stamping exercise” rather than a rigorous consideration of the alternatives and that the right to protest had been limited.

The City of London had opposed the claim, saying there was an “overwhelming” case for the court’s intervention because of the impact on St Paul’s Churchyard.

It said the camp was a magnet for disorder and crime in the area, which had an impact on worshippers, affected trade, and caused waste and hygiene problems.

Occupy, which set up outside St Paul’s in October after the London Stock Exchange took out a pre-emptive court order banning any protest from its property on Paternoster Square, said it would begin packing away a number of large marquees in the next 24 hours, tents which it said the camp had borrowed and needed to return undamaged.

Occupy camp spokesperson Naomi Colvin said the judgment was “not unexpected” but added that a full programme of events would continue for the next few days, including a debate with the business secretary, Vince Cable. Camp members would decide at a meeting on Wednesday evening whether to resist eviction, she said.

She said they would appeal to the European court of human rights, because their protest had raised “fundamental questions about freedom of assembly and freedom of speech”.

“What we are doing is at the edge of what you can do as a lawful protest … we will proceed to use the highest court to gauge a definition of where the law stands,” she said.

She also explained that an Occupy camp in Finsbury Square, at the edge of the City of London, set up a week after the St Paul’s camp was “still going strong”. The local authority for that area, Islington council, is understood to have no plans to evict.

Following the ruling, Anonymous UK which also has a number of tents on church property said it would “withdraw gracefully in a thoroughly British manner”, within the next 72 hours.

The City of London said its timetable for eviction was an operational matter, but the corporation’s policy chairman, Stuart Fraser, welcomed the ruling. “Everyone has had their day in court and the courts have backed our application to remove tents and equipment from St Paul’s,” he said. “Peaceful protest is a democratic right but the camp is clearly in breach of highway and planning law. I would call on protesters to comply with the decision of the courts and remove their tents and equipment voluntarily right away.”

Following the decision, Michael Paget, acting for one of the Occupy camp members named in the court case, said: “Throughout this process the seriousness of Occupy’s message has never been questioned. It was recognised by the trial judge and the court of appeal.

“The Occupy message has been heard and will continue to be heard. It has made a difference and it will continue to make a difference.”

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As we plan our TEDxThames event on ‘Breakthrough Capitalism’ in May, my brain is taking me on unexpected detours. Here’s one. Join me on a short tour through the world of ants, their nests and the role of pheromones in ant colonies, en route to the intensely topical issue of the future of capitalism.

The first thing to say is that I really don’t like to be intimate with ants: in 1970, I awoke in a tent in France where we had pitched our tent smack on top of a nest of aggressive ants and my eyes, ears, nose and much else were crawling. But I find ant societies and architecture fascinating, which led me around that time to the work of Eugene Marais, particularly The Soul of the White Ant. A naturalist who, among other things, had lived with a troop of baboons and was addicted to morphine, Marais was obsessed with termites, the “white ants” of his title.

Way before biomimicry became fashionable, he saw termite nests as compound organisms, super organisms, and was fascinated by how they had evolved such home comforts as natural air conditioning systems and subterranean fungal gardens. My own interest flowed from the fact that I was about to start a postgraduate degree in city planning – and was wondering whether humankind might be on a trajectory towards an urban future where growing numbers of people would live and work in man-made termitaries?

Then I stumbled across the work of architect Paolo Soleri, who wasn’t simply asking the same question but also seemed determined to build human termitaries. I spent many hours poring over his 1960 book Arcology: the City in the Image of Man. Later I flew to Arizona to visit both Soleri’s Cosanti Foundation in Scottsdale and then Arcosanti, his prototype city that was rising (very slowly) in the desert north of Phoenix.

At a time when potential limits to growth were increasingly discussed, I was interested about the implications for urban form and metabolism. The same year I visited Arcosanti, I also spent a week at Robin Clarke’s Biotechnic Research & Development (BRAD) alternative technology test-bed. Alongside other pioneers, including John Todd of the New Alchemists, BRAD was exploring the leading edge of alternative technology and communal living.

All this came back to me when I saw an update on Arcosanti in the New York Times last week. .

In retrospect, Arcosanti and BRAD were very different – even extreme – expressions of the design response to the limits to growth agenda. On the one hand Soleri was rebelling against his apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright, who envisioned every American family on its one-acre lot, all connected by thrumming highways. On the other, Clarke was rebelling against cities themselves, seeing the future in terms of linked intentional communities run by what someone at the time dubbed ‘techno-peasants’.

I emerged from the Arcosanti and BRAD experiences thinking that the future lay elsewhere. In an article I wrote in 1974 for Architectural Association Quarterly, I predicted that Arcosanti would make magnificent ruins – probably sooner than anyone imagined. The New York Times piece is friendly, but portrays a collapsed vision, with less than 60 people living on-site, either as employees or volunteers. And the BRAD experiment, which also struck me as vulnerable, collapsed not long afterwards.

These experiences – coupled with early visits to companies working to improve their environmental performance – persuaded me that we needed to advance towards what would become known as the sustainability agenda through capitalism, markets and business. In the process, we must get much better at understanding how to help decision-makers to think and invest for the longer term.

This reminds me of what a colleague — once a senior Shell executive – said to me last year: think of most senior business executives, he suggested, as ants following pheromone trails. If you want serious change, get better at laying the trails in the direction of where you want them to go.

This theme of incentives is addressed in our report The Future Quotient – and is also one which Al Gore and David Blood of Generation Investment Management spotlight in their new manifesto, Sustainable Capitalism. One of five areas they underscore as critical is the need to ensure that business leaders are financially incentivised to think and invest longer term.

The news last week from BP is therefore even more interesting. The company has decided to award its top directors share bonuses under a long-term incentive plan. Great idea, pheromonally speaking, but there has been criticism that executives have received bonuses at a time when the company has failed on many measures of success.

Clearly, we must experiment energetically with such things as incentives, integrated reporting and accounting for the likelihood of stranded assets, all recommendations of the Blood and Gore paper. But we also need to redesign our physical infrastructures to make sustainability the default setting. Which brings me back to Soleri and his planned arcologies. His idea was that we can radically reduce our impact as a species by transforming urban infrastructures. These days, I am less persuaded by the notion that so-called starchitects will build a sustainable future top-down.

Instead, we must create the conditions in which innovators can explore, experiment and scale. A context in which a multiplicity of Arcosanti and BRAD-like experiments can flourish. One pioneer mapping out tomorrow’s necessary infrastructures is Jeremy Rifkin, with his Third Industrial Revolution. His insistence that we exploit the principles of the internet to guide the design and operation of a more sustainable economy strikes me as intriguingly aligned with the self-assembly principles of the termite mound. Perhaps we can exploit the principles of the ant-heap without becoming ants ourselves.

John Elkington is executive chairman of Volans, co-founder of SustainAbility, blogs at johnelkington.com, tweets at @volansjohn and is a member of the Guardian’s sustainable business advisory panel. He is a past chairman and current trustee of the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development

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