Imagine saying to the average person in 1981 “I have to get my phone out of my purse, I want to take a picture and show my brother in Vancouver.”
Now realize that is only 30 years ago, and to us that is a perfectly normal concept. In 1981 it was science fiction/James Bond stuff. In 1961 it was definitely future stuff with little green men, and in 1911 the telephone and camera were still pretty uncommon things for the average person to have, and the fastest way to communicate with Vancouver would be telegraph.
So… the sky’s the limit. (Why did people say the sky is the limit? Isn’t that a pretty small limit?)
In language, maybe the Imma construction will take over.
Maybe there will be no concept of celebrities since everyone is on Youtube.
Ongoing medication for chronic problems like diabetes and hypertension instead of fixing the problem.
It seems weird to me already that clothes have to washed in one machine and dried in another. I know combo units are out there somewhere and I bet it’s not long before kids of the future are marvelling over how much work it must have been having to use two machines to do the laundry. Hell, maybe they’ll even invent one that folds it and puts it away, too.
Gasoline-powered vehicles will be weird when all the cars are water-powered. I think oil-dependency in general will be seen as an odd phase of planetary development. “You mean dinosaurs died and turned into black goo, and they used that to power spaceships? Weird, dude.”
Fresh, drinkable water was practically free! And we used it to flush bodily waste! And sometimes we forgot and watered the lawn all night! (Grandma, what’s a lawn? Really? You wasted good water on plants that didn’t even feed you?! And everyone who had a house had one of these lawn things??)
Nah, it’ll be more like “Why didn’t they just have their kitchen robots cook then delicious and healthy food every day?” and “Why didn’t they just reprogram their genetic code so they couldn’t get fat?”
Which (with a bow to Connie Willis and Even the Queen) makes me think of another future scenario, with some teenage girls asking their mother if it’s true that “women did what every month?!”.
Yeah, that’ll be seen to be like the Ming dynasty destroying the Treasure Fleets when they were on the verge of worldwide navigation… except this time it’ll be the Chinese looking down from their space stations and shaking their heads.
With advancements to cosmetic treatments of all varieties, we’ll probably look hideously ugly to them. Sort of like how we portray some warty yellow toothed peasant in a grim-and-gritty movie set in the Dark Ages.
this won’t actually be spoken, will be quantumly fast as it will all take place on neural implants behind the ear linked to the home intranet via the router implanted behind the other ear
what? computers were made of silicon chips with millions and million of tiny transistor thingys etched on them? whats a transistor?
oops sorry Full Metal Lotus, missed your bioneral reference the first time…
Shaking hands. With the advancements in knowledge of what/how various communicable diseases are spread, and just how easily; in the future this common gesture of goodwill will be looked at by people in the same light as we would look at random “buttswipes” between two people today. :eek:
Or there won’t be any communicable diseases because we’ll all have nanotech immune systems or be full body cyborgs or be in pods remote controlling drone bodies.
Yeah, remembering growing upin a small town where lots of people rode horses in the road, I don’t think we’re ever going back. Unless someone invents a Segway-like vehicle that picks up all the shit off the the side of the road and uses it for fuel…
I really don’t miss all the shit in the streets at all, at all. In point of fact, that really sucked.
Anything to do with today’s computers is going to be bizarre. Although I think the mouse/keyboard interface is much more adaptable and useful than our fat, greasy analog fingers some genius out there will eventually figure out a way to build some tech into our fingers which makes mice/keys obsolete. Or maybe it will be built into our eyes. In any case, someday we will all be like Scotty in Star Trek IV, talking into the mouse and expecting it to respond.
Along the same lines, there will eventually come a time where there is no such thing as speed on the internet. No matter what you are downloading or uploading or enjoying, it will arrive much faster than an analog human being can process it.
The health care system in the US is going to be seen as utterly barbaric. What do you mean people just had to rot and die if they didn’t have “insurance”? That’s goddamn extortion! Why in the world would you let companies profit from the misery and suffering of regular human beings?
I hope the military-industrial complex will be viewed much the same way. “So, every ten years or so you had to have a war so these guys could keep making money and justify the constant creation of new killing machines? And your politicians were all in on it by virtue of having big military projects in their districts that had to be constantly fed?”
Copyright law. I like author John Varley’s approach to this. Week one, it’s available for full price. Week two, it’s half price. Week three, it’s public domain. Keeps content creators motivated.
Physical money. So you have these funny little pieces of paper and chunks of metal and they represent an arbitrary value? Cash is becoming quaint today. I can walk into a store with a piece of plastic and walk out with anything the store offers provided my plastic has the right digits on it.
Interesting how time does fly: when I read TimeWinder’s quote, my first thought was, “But Joe McCarthy’s dead.” Then my second: “Jenny, idiot.” And I’m not that old; I’m 34!