Personally, I’ll be amazed that video displays are available by the foot (Current price, $12/foot in 4 foot widths. 10/foot in 2 foot widths, and $16/foot in 10 foot widths.)
Oh, and they’re sprayed on.
The Holodeck was overblown claptrap. Who needs holograms, forcefields and head mounted displays when all you need to do is wiggle a neuron or two?
The upcoming manufacturing blight has everyone concerned, After manufacturing went from Korea, to China, to Central Africa, then South Africa…then jumped to Antarctica, there’s nowhere else where manufacturing is cheaper.
Need a new home appliance? Print it out. Need a new liver? Print it out! Need a new pet? Print it out!
Don’t get me started on space tourism. Sure, if you’re Rory John Gates and can afford to drop twelve quadrillion euros for a five-day stay in that decrepit Chinese space station, I guess that counts as “tourism”. But where are the rotating space Hiltons they were envisioning eighty years ago?
[ul]
[li]I can grab the whole musical output of America 1900-2010 in a single file. It isn’t legal, but I can do it.[/li][li]Kids are building their own computer systems out of spare parts, including fabbing their own CPUs from netlists downloaded off the Internet.[/li][li]Anti-spam software has achieved limited sentience due to the intricate pattern-matching and weighting (learning, in other words) required. In the Third World, ‘spammer’ is a respectable job requiring a serious education.[/li][li]Keith Richards is still alive, waiting for the stars to be right.[/li][li]Creating believable virtual people that have relationships with real people is the primary way of selling things.[/li][li]People are talking seriously about the End Of Coal. Nuclear plants are protested wherever they are planned.[/li][li]Robots outnumber people in Japan. Still no mechas, but police use powered armor.[/li][li]Microsoft and IBM still exist, but nobody really cares. Windows died long ago, but VM and MVS chug on in paperback-sized computers emulating entire networks of mainframes.[/li][/ul]
The Identity Card that has replaced the Birth Certificate, Social Security Card, hell, even the Driver’s License and credit cards. It is amazing to me that no one carries thumb drives or DVD’s, just this card that stores all personal information. It has a biometric chip that renders it totally useless to anyone other than the person to whom it was issued, shortly after birth.
The card fits into computers, phones, ATM’s and even gas pumps. People can copy videos onto the card (and the card will automatically search for your choices when you go to a video store, or on the internet. Don’t watch the video, don’t get charged.) Students will use the homework to complete homework assignments. Doctors will have a person’s medical history by scanning the card.
Wallets will be a thing of the past as will identity theft.
I’d be more impressed with the DNA scanner that is slowly making the ID cards obsolete. All you have to do is put your finger and a soft pad and the machine instantly recognizes who you are. Machines can also tell whether the finger is attached to your body or not.
Computers are now the size of USB sticks and can be carried around anywhere. There are terminals everywhere that have a slot where you can stick your computer inside. Some are standard monitor and keyboard set ups. Some are just big screens, and some can provide your computer with a portable monitor.
Money will be a thing of the past, replaced with Burnrate. Based on your IQ, physical skills, and looks, a pre-calculated value will be assigned to you, your Earnrate.
Spend too much time with either out of whack and ‘they’ will come to ‘liquidate’ your ‘assets’.
Not spending enough is just as bad as spending too much. You wouldn’t want to be un_american[sup]®[/sup] would you?
And there are STILL people who don’t know how to use the damn machine. They give classes in it, fa cripes sake. These people go through the classes, and STILL don’t know how to use the machine. And they stand there at my register, futzing around with it, pushing all the wrong buttons, or worse, not pushing any buttons at all. Like they don’t know you gotta push the damn buttons, tell the machine what you wanna do? I ask myself, not for the first time, how do these people survive? We’ve had 75 years of using a machine at a cash register, and somehow the genes for “total incompetence at this task” haven’t been weeded out of the gene pool? Darwin must’ve missed something…
…several of whom are Chinese. The album is smuggled into the North American Freedom and Prosperity Sphere as steganographic files carried within the DNA of unsuspecting ‘mules’, who think they’ve merely caught a cold while transiting the Port of Beijing.
Few of the things we expect will come to pass, and looooooots of things we don’t expect will. Forty years ago was 1968 . . . everybody thought 2008 would be flying cars and space tourism . . . nobody expected the internet.