In the future, you can buy open source robotics kits that incorporates a piece of consumer technology that will enable everybody with a keyboard and a good book on code to create robots that can do simultaneous localization and mapping—something roboticists have dreamed of for years. And it won’t cost you $280,000 anymore—just $500. Moore’s Law and all that jazz.
In the future, cyberspace will be overtaken by cyberpunks, who you might think are a group of rebellious, young kids smashing guitars but in actuality will be all of us, hooked up to a consensual hallucination. When we plug in, our sense of self is lost, but it’s okay. It can make calls too.
In the future, you think you’ve met your dream partner online. Her name is Ms. Turing. You chat for a long time, she compliments you in ways you’ve never heard any person do before. You ask if she wants to meet up, she wants to know if you’ve got money in the bank. (And the article about it is written by Ina, who’s changed beats several times and changed gender once.)
In the future, we’re interested in what’s happening right now, all across the world. Earthquakes will even be reported before they are felt. At the same time we’re building clocks that tick for thousands of years inside a mountain, because some people want to think a bit further ahead than the rest of us.
In the future, we will try to build systems that erode the industry of personal banking. But they won’t succeed in their mission completely because they are having worse customer service than regular banks (this might be hard to believe, I know). You can lose all your money because you didn’t log out of your account and lost your phone. At the same time, we will create a new currency that can be grinded, not like a stripper pole, but like a gold ore. That, however, can be lost in a second too—and you can get permanent brain damage because your computer gets too hot from all the grinding and you pass out. Being a miner in the digital age is still a health hazard.
In the future, we still keep ourselves absolutely astonishingly vulnerable with passwords that are typed inside an input field. I know this one sounds really crazy, but it’s true. Some people try to shed some light on possible replacements but we apparently won’t listen.
In the future, an apolitical (yet somehow still leftish) group of underground hackers will emerge from a forum that focus mainly on posts related to how newfags can’t triforce, rick-rolling your friends and testing the boundaries for how long you can keep looking at hilarious renderings of personalities from popular culture before you find out you haven’t eaten in days. Most of the expressions and memes that are spread on the internet will come from this board. Another group of hackers will distance themselves from the /b/tards at the board and start a movement that essentially mimics The Joker’s by positioning themselves as absolutely nihilistic in relation the digital loot from their raids. They will, however, look at how people use the loot. For the lulz, of course.
In the future, we will create weapons by typing letters and characters into a texteditor that can destroy oil pipelines and shut down nuclear plants. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.
Would you rather have the blue pill, or tumble down the rabbit hole and realize this is the reality and we have to try to make the best of this?