A review of the future, as it is available today:
Science is changing every aspect of our lives, from what we eat to how we cook it, parenting to child development to our own personal development. If facebook has changed how we relate to our friends, what about the emerging technologies that are changing how we relate to ourselves? The structures of our society are shifting over to new paradigms as the ease of communication increases and the cost of biological technologies steadily decreases. Last century's technology and the worldview that its use brought about are being replaced.
I saw the first episode of Mad Men a few weeks ago. Our lives must be damn near incomprehensible to that generation, but it didn't really hit me how much context difference they had been working with until one of the characters had a throwaway line about how there weren't magical machines that could make exact copies of a report. Now Xerox machines are so common we don't even consider them technology. Copiers are largely obsolete now that so much data processing is paperless. What must our world be like for them, to have had the world slowly rewritten as they were trying to navigate it? I understand my grandmother's disorientation and paranoia a lot better now.
The informational shape of our world is vastly different from theirs, and if there is no intervening cataclysm then by the time I am old, we will have more robots than we have cars, our cars will be able to drive themselves, we can have mobile phones that boost our memory retention implanted in our heads, wireless power and phone service worldwide; we will be able to breathe underwater, and our grandchildren will probably all be technologically enhanced.
And I, for one, welcome our cyborg grandchildren.
When we get implanted chipware, we won't need external physical representations of the past to spark our memories. We'll just set our neurochip playlist function on random and have our lives flash before our eyes all the time. Or whenever we're bored, which I hear for some people is not that often.
We'll be able to go back over our memories and own ourselves in a way that is alien to everyone who doesn't have an eidetic memory. We'll be able to relive experiences more fully, never forget the name of who we're talking to, and always have a dozen cheat sheets available on the wireless internet connection in our brains. It'll be like playing in god mode (with interesting possibilities for 1UP mushrooms).
I saw the first episode of Mad Men a few weeks ago. Our lives must be damn near incomprehensible to that generation, but it didn't really hit me how much context difference they had been working with until one of the characters had a throwaway line about how there weren't magical machines that could make exact copies of a report. Now Xerox machines are so common we don't even consider them technology. Copiers are largely obsolete now that so much data processing is paperless. What must our world be like for them, to have had the world slowly rewritten as they were trying to navigate it? I understand my grandmother's disorientation and paranoia a lot better now.
The informational shape of our world is vastly different from theirs, and if there is no intervening cataclysm then by the time I am old, we will have more robots than we have cars, our cars will be able to drive themselves, we can have mobile phones that boost our memory retention implanted in our heads, wireless power and phone service worldwide; we will be able to breathe underwater, and our grandchildren will probably all be technologically enhanced.
And I, for one, welcome our cyborg grandchildren.
When we get implanted chipware, we won't need external physical representations of the past to spark our memories. We'll just set our neurochip playlist function on random and have our lives flash before our eyes all the time. Or whenever we're bored, which I hear for some people is not that often.
We'll be able to go back over our memories and own ourselves in a way that is alien to everyone who doesn't have an eidetic memory. We'll be able to relive experiences more fully, never forget the name of who we're talking to, and always have a dozen cheat sheets available on the wireless internet connection in our brains. It'll be like playing in god mode (with interesting possibilities for 1UP mushrooms).