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The City of the Future
Ponca City, We Love You writes "One century ago, many Americans still had not seen a movie or ridden in an automobile. The New York World greeted its readers on January 1, 1908 with a stirring rumination about the past and future of America: 'We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves,' the newspaper said. 'We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need.' Today the NY Times asked ten knowledgeable New Yorkers to imagine New York City a century from today. Their visions include archaeological excavations at the Fresh Kills landfill, the waterfront at Third Avenue and Seventh Avenue, a dome over Central Park, and a virtual reality grid superimposed over the city."
This has nothing to do with TFA per se, but if you're into this stuff you should check out the excellent blog Paleo-Future, which is dedicated to "the future that never was" -- how people in various times over the last 140 years or so have thought the future would look.
Read my blog.
Most probably the population of Earth will be greatly reduced due to the shortage of energy. That means hundreds of millions people will die unless something miraculous happens. Do not forget that our civilization depends on cheap energy and energy will be much more expensive in the future.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Ken Perlin will probably be close to the mark. 100 years from now you'll be able to get regular injections that contain millions of nano tech devices. These devices will travel through the blood to parts of the body they need to work on (e.g. the brain) and then construct interfaces that link wireless information networks directly into your consciousness.
I don't think there will be implanted displays as such. Rather, you'll just received the information you request and the display will be superimposed on your eye sight via nano circuitry where the optic nerves connect to the brain. That way you can still 'see' the information you want without distractions by just closing your eyes. This scenario may sound far fetched, but it has a much greater chance of gaining traction in society if all it involves is a simple injection. No painful surgery, no mess, no fuss.
Actually, if you want to extrapolate trends, I have a few for you to consider. Unlike your sensationalistic and inflamatory extrapolations, mine are based on actual, statitisically verifiable trends: - Children raised by one parent will be the norm. Two parent households will be rare.
- America will be a mainly Spanish speaking country
- Marriage will be almost non-existent
- Government will be "responsible" for all the care-and-feeding of the large majority of the population,
and will meet these responsibilities through ever-increasing taxation of the ever-shrinking productive members of society
- The military will be a small shadow of its former self
All of these trends are very evident today, have been gaining momentum in the past 20 years, and show no sign of abating. No serious person can say with any validity that the America of today (2008) is more religious than the America of 1908, and to imply that religion is ascendent in American society today is pure BS. In fact, the opposite is demonstrably true. The military is undeniably in decline, as is the "nuclear family". And demographics clearly point towards a majority Spanish speaking population mid-next century. None of these points is really arguable.
Welcome to the future of America.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.