I imagine ...
The approaching future …
I imagine a world where all the cars drive themselves, robotically. The cars are computerized, intelligent, and part of a network that recognizes other members of the fleet as well as their own service and fuel needs. They can maneuver to a docking port in your garage just like my mother’s Roomba does today. I imagine a database that stores all the routes cars take as people go to and from work, and a program would exist to optimize car pooling. You’d be paid for each passenger you elect to pick up along your way, setting your rates like a taxi. We would turn our many isolated and disparate private vehicles into the most massive public transportation system imaginable.
TED Talk, Amory Lovins, talking about the use of monitoring units in cars to track where they are, their condition, and interconnect them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHOyfyGwpes&feature=plcp
Google gets licensed to operate self-driving cars in Nevada for a test program, expects to roll out general use in 2-5 years.
http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/182811/googles-self-driving-car-gets-licensed-to-drive-in-nevada/
The last company I worked for was making motors to steer tractors around fields, and was bidding on projects to mass produce similar motors for the control of cars. It’s happening.
The returning past …
I imagine a world where we don’t type anymore. We speak to the computer and it records our words. We’re nearly there now. But the next leap will be a world where we don’t read anymore, either - at least not actual stories. We put in an earphone and hear the tale told to us just like our forebears - bards, skalds, lorespinners all. It boggles my mind. Won’t the screen always be useful and needed? But then I look at my library of ‘dead tree books’ that have become obsolete in my lifetime. The encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauruses, and almanacs are useless anachronisms - “quaint”. The books about mammals and animals and horses - I can see better and more varied pictures online. The same for cookbooks and biographies and stories. All of my own writing is electronic. It has been more than thirteen years since a single page of my fiction was rendered on paper, and I have written well over two million words in that time.
I don’t even need to provide links, because you already know how prevalent voice recognition software is. It’s being sold as standard on many of the new devices. You know wikipedia, dictionary.com, thesaurus.com, and Google. You know YouTube and Amazon and eBooks. Hell, I don’t even know why I’m writing this one, because it’s here, now, imbedded in the way I live my life everyday, and probably in the way you live yours. My fantasies of the future are becoming reality.