The Future
by tophtucker
3D printing, drones everywhere, computers and phones that work better faster longer (batteries), medicine, cure the common cold, cure cancer, GM foods that are actually like crazy healthy and delicious, education, monorails, non-disruptive supersonic transportion, automated infrastructure, cheap pervasive sensors, no more paper forms, a new kind of spreadsheet, efficient labor markets, more robust electrical grid, grid-scale storage, metamaterials or whatever crazy materials science stuff, water purifiers, climate control, street thug surveillance, better automatic data backup, durable data storage, parallel processing architectures, search engines for your life, a replacement for passwords, lifelogging, quantified self, natural language interfaces for everything, automatic translation, data portability and APIs, decent DRM or the eradication thereof, better intellectual property, structured data extraction, open scholarship, sense rehabilitation (sight/sound), prosthetics, gene therapy, selective abortions, domesticated pandas, recycle everything, cheap space cargo transport, space debris fix, a replacement for GPS, next-gen bicycles, smarter gyms, a new kind of math, better economic indicators and finance models, better climate models, efficient solar, safe nuclear, NEO detection/deflection, an arsenal of last-resort geoengineering tools, terraforming, hurricane suppressants, tornado dispersers, better radiation cleanup, the successor to democracy.
Thanks to Aaron Wolf for feedback.
Fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much, regular exercise at the gym (three days a week), getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries, at ease, eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats), a patient better driver, a safer car
yup yup yup yup yup. I was waiting for “A pig, in a cage, on antibiotics” at the end of toph’s rant. (Would have been PERFECT)
Come now, I wouldn’t want to be derivative to the point of hidebound.
Yeah, probably not a coincidence that I had listened to that a few hours before writing this last night.
Or for another vision, we can check in with Leonard Cohen circa 1992 (“I’ve seen the future, brother / it is murder”). Of particular note are the lines:
“Things are going to slide, slide in all directions / Won’t be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore”
and
“There’ll be the breaking of the ancient western code / Your private life will suddenly explode”, which, make what you will of that.
And finally I’ll leave you with the ever-insightful Wikipedia: “The future is the indefinite time period after the present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics.”
Or Cohen’s occasional muse, C.P. Cavafy:
Ordinary people know what’s happening now,
the gods know future things
because they alone are totally enlightened.
Of what’s to come the wise perceive
things about to happen.
Sometimes during moments of intense study
their hearing’s troubled: the hidden sound
of things approaching reaches them,
and they listen reverently, while in the street outside
the people hear nothing whatsoever.
Paraphrasing Philostratos, Life of Apollonios of Tyana, viii, 7:
For the gods perceive future things,
ordinary people things in the present, but
the wise perceive things about to happen.