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A Day in Your Life, Fifteen Years From Now
After your shower, you grab a bowl of cereal and head to the living room. Your desktop has already torrented last night's episode of your favorite comedy show, saturating the municipal gigabit fiber connection for almost a full minute to grab the 20-minute program. (You have it set to download in basic 8K, eschewing the 3D and live mashup feeds.) At a spoken command, your TV turns on and begins playback. When a confirmation box pops up on the screen, you state your name to authorize payment for the episode. Unfortunately, because you spent extra time sleeping, you're in too much of a rush to finish the episode. You tell the TV to send the rest to local storage, pull your CID from the desktop, and put it into your phone. While you get dressed, your phone plays back your social streams from last night, filtered to only the closest tier of relationships. After listening to your mother's voice detailing plans for the upcoming holiday, and your best friend summarizing the game he went to, you tell the phone to retrieve streams from one tier further. Ten seconds into yet another political rant from your cousin, you tell it to cancel and you set off for work.
As the door closes behind you, you absently wave your phone by the doorbell panel. The embedded RFID chip triggers the locks and security system, and sends a command to start your car. You climb in and place your phone in its dock. Quickly checking the car's charge and its wireless connection, you say, "Go to work," and lean back into your seat as it rolls out of the driveway. Telling your phone to resume playback, you watch the rest of your show as you wait for your commute to finish. (You're vaguely aware that the car isn't going to the freeway today — there must have been a hack-cident — and you feel irritation yet again at the arbitrarily low speed limits, wishing there was a way to ignore them.) After the show is over, you call up your work email and calendar, and prepare for the rest of the day. It's not until the car comes to a halt and beeps at you that you realize you've arrived in the parking structure. As the induction coils top off your car's charge, you exit the structure and walk over to your building's entrance. After waving your phone past the entry sensor, you stand as still as you can and slowly think your full name. The fMRI sensors process the input quickly and decide you are who you think you are.
Walking into to your office, you drop your phone into its dock and flip on the display, thus interacting with the only two objects on your desk. The display, nearly five feet across (1.5 meters, you mean) scans your CID and instantly restores the projects you were working on yesterday. You notice a handful of button icons are different than they were before. There must have been an OS update overnight. Your mild curiosity over finding a changelog fades when you realize you can't remember the name of the OS to look for it. It's unlikely anyone else at your agency does, either, except perhaps the CTO. Frowning at one of the dead pixels on your display, you remember when you used to have co-workers who dealt with that sort of thing. As your attention returns to your projects, you begin to manipulate the contents of your screen, sometimes moving your hands along the top of your desk, sometimes gesturing in midair. For particularly precise work, you detach a stylus from the side of the display. Occasionally you pause to read or listen to an email and vocalize your response. Pushing your work to the side, you take a moment to check in on your subordinates' screens, watching in real-time as they manipulate data and imagery. When needed, you open the intercom channel and provide direction.
After a couple hours, the advertising campaign your team is working on is nearing completion. You package it up and open a connection to your company's AI provider, working quickly to minimize the fees. Setting the AI to "Human Approximation" (and using "Moderate" fidelity to make it finish in a reasonable amount of time), you run it through the ad campaign and monitor the psychological reactions over a matrix of common phenotypes and personalities. The response from the Super-Rationals isn't good (but then, it never is), and you spot weaknesses in your campaign's ability to reach females in one subculture, and males in two others. You make a quick list of potential improvements to background music and the facial expressions of the computer-generated actors, and send the list off to your team. This project has been particularly stressful; in addition to the legislation currently being debated over how AIs can be used (or whether they can be turned on at all), several patent suits involving advertising methods are hanging over your company's head, and you have to carefully review your team's work to ensure it doesn't cause another. You know far more about patents now than you ever wanted to, but you don't want your company to be one of the early victims. You hope the advertising industry doesn't go through a reckoning as happened with the computer and entertainment industries. There's still money to be made in those sectors, but nobody's getting rich, and you want to retire into one of the planned orbital communities.
Mid-afternoon rolls around before you realize it. Hunger gnaws at your stomach and, perhaps because of that, you're mildly uncomfortable all over. Grabbing your phone and leaving work, you walk down the street to a restaurant. You seat yourself at a booth and call up the menu on the table's display. Finding a likely-sounding sandwich, you browse quickly through pictures, a few reviews, and the nutritional information before confirming your order. Switching the table to browse-mode, you catch up on the news while waiting for your food. It seems another Middle-Eastern country has severed its last wired connection to the outside world as a desperate defense against continual cyberwar. The local police force has been tasked with controlling wireless transmissions, and they're being run ragged trying to construct monitoring stations and conduct wardriving patrols with limited manpower. Nobody is willing to take chances after last year's nuclear incident. Browsing more, you see nothing is new with the coastal flooding situation in Europe, though China has once again increased its level of economic aid. You note with dismay that the U.S. election campaigns, underway for over a year already, are both distancing themselves from the current plans to return to the Moon. The organization that took over for NASA is likely to face budget cuts regardless of who wins.
The server robot finally rolls up to your table and deposits your sandwich, along with a glass of water (soda is a rare treat these days, because of the tax). After eating half your meal and picking at the rest, you realize it's not hunger that's making you feel poorly. You briefly remove the CID from your phone and wave it across the table to pay for your food. You leave a small tip for the robot maintenance engineer, then walk to your car, calling work on your way to notify them you're feeling ill. Once you've instructed the car to go home, you recline the seat and take a short nap. The car gently chimes to wake you when you're safely home. Heading inside, you walk to the bathroom and root around in a drawer for your phone's medical attachment. Once connected, you instruct it to contact the CDC's servers for a virus definition update. You quickly swab your nose and throat, and place the samples on the attachment's sensor, then step into the kitchen to make some tea while you wait. In 20 minutes, the results come back, showing a very strong likelihood that you have the seasonal flu. Your results are automatically sent to the CDC, where their algorithms verify your CID and confirm you had contact with several other people now exhibiting symptoms. An antiviral drug is prescribed for you immediately. You dispatch your car to pick it up.
Laying back down in bed, you pull your CID from your phone and place it into your tablet. Checking your social feeds, you see several get-well-soon messages already from friends and family. You distractedly browse through some of the media your friends have been reading, watching, and playing, but nothing strikes your interest. After your car returns, you take the meds and settle back down with a cup of tea. Undoing the small latches at the corners of the tablet, you pull at the sides, stretching the screen until it's 30 centimeters across. You lay it down and fire up a game of chess. After quickly losing two games, you suspect it won't be good for your rating to play while sick. You briefly consider pulling the CID and playing anonymously, but decide against it. Returning the screen to its default shape, you detach it from the tablet and grab an e-ink screen from the drawer. Once you've firmly seated it on the tablet, the ebook you've been reading appears on the screen right where you'd left off. After reading a while, you begin to nod off. At the increase in theta waves, your pillow's sensor web shuts off the tablet, dims lights throughout the house, and silently monitors your vital signs to see if your symptoms are getting any worse. As you drift off to sleep, you wonder what the next fifteen years will bring.
But before I get in teh shower I'll jump on Slashdot to try and get first post. Some things never change!
I'd rather put bullets in the oppressors' skulls and fall on my own sword than live a life like that.
-- Ethanol-fueled
No way this is ever going to happen. The US convert to metric? Come on.
You wake up suddenly because looters are again banging at your reinforced door, looking for food and something to kill (or both). You shoot your through the door slits to make them go away, then prepare to take off and scavenge neighboring ruins for food.
And so on, and so forth.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Now nor when I am retired in 15 years
No card. The damn things will simply know what you look like.
Cool, I get to sleep in! I'm all into the future painted by Soulkill's canvas!
I will not work in advertising.
I'll be using GNU/Linux and thankful that they finally got a working wireless driver for my 15-year-old wifi card.
And /. still won't support unicode...
Right! When I was a kid, we had these picture-books about "15 years into the future". That was 25 years ago unfortunately, and zero of the predictions came true. Will be the same with this nonsense here.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If that's me in 15 years, I must have intentionally run over a nun carrying a basket of kittens. Ugh.
What a shitty story. *golf clap*
How about, in 15 years, you'll have the same dead end job where your managers are getting paid more than you are and you have nothing to show in your life except for some bytes on some company's hard drive and you still get up and perform the same routine you always have?
We're really at the top of the curve for technological advancement without some kind of major energy breakthrough. If you want to practice your writing skills, do it somewhere else.
This whole article is tl;dr. Read an Asimov book.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
So Soviet Russia is the future a decade an a half hence? I ignored the CID, but the water quota is ridiculous. Unless we have drastically less water due to using as nuclear fusion fuel, we'll still have all the water we have now.
In 15 years, who can afford to drive a car? This guy must be filthy rich.
Americans will never switch to metric...
Whoever wrote this is having a very imaginative time, but I don't see any of this stuff ever being a reality. Sorry.
So soulskill has found something he's even worse at then editing submissions. Good job, man!
inb4 the dinosaur and bell-air
Based on experience, a day in my life 15 years from now will look a lot like a day in my life now. Except, hopefully, I won't still be working on my second master's degree, and I'll have kids.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
tl;dr
Reminds me of the original star trek, always carrying little cards around.
Come on! " pull your Computing ID (CID) card from the alarm unit, and stumble out of the bedroom. Pausing briefly to drop your CID into your desktop computer,"
Right, because computers won't be able to track who you are, your own home. Stopped reading there.
" The organization that took over for NASA is likely to face budget cuts regardless of who wins."
The rest is garbage.
Everything was plausible up until I found out I was in advertising, at which point I would obviously hack the order of precedence in my robot's "Three Laws" chip and command my robot to kill me.
With all that 'advancement' in technology I would hope that we wouldn't all be relying on a card that could be lost or stolen.
What about voice pattern analysis or retinal scans?
... stuff will be pretty much the same as it is today. Just like stuff today is pretty much like it was 15 years ago.
It's a bit easier to pick up my email on my phone, and my home internet connection is about 100 times faster. That's about it, really.
I almost expected it to tell me Nixon's head was working on his reelection campaign already.
He shouldn't consider himself an editor but he does anyway.
I read all the way to the end hoping to get to the nymphomaniac fembot or the cloned and imprinted sex-kitten
Your alarm triggered the shower's heating unit, so the water comes out at a pleasant 108 degrees, exactly your preference.
Or it would have, except that as a prank your roommate grabbed your CID and changed the preferences so that the water now comes out at 35 F (2 C).
As the door closes behind you, you absently wave your phone by the doorbell panel. The embedded RFID chip triggers the locks and security system, and sends a command to start your car.
Meanwhile, a bad guy read your RFID chip yesterday when you passed him going to the restaurant and made a copy. He uses it to unlock your house, sits down at the PC to install a tool that will send your CID and any other identifying information about you to him, figures out where your car is likely to be, closes the door, re-locking the security system and starting your car. A confederate hops in the now-started car, drives a while, replaces the ID transponder currently in the car with one he can control, and leaves.
You quickly swab your nose and throat, and place the samples on the attachment's sensor, then step into the kitchen to make some tea while you wait. In 20 minutes, the results come back, showing a very strong likelihood that you have the seasonal flu. Your results are automatically sent to the CDC, where their algorithms verify your CID and confirm you had contact with several other people now exhibiting symptoms. An antiviral drug is prescribed for you immediately.
In addition, your insurance company knows that you are now sick, and raises your rates accordingly. Also, you notice that when you visit ad-supported web sites, they're all pushing products to help you combat your illness.
I am officially gone from
Don't quit your day job.
Remember when the future was more than just the present with a coat of varnish? Even dystopia would be better than this.
Then it'll take an act of God to convince me that I need to be physically present at the office, instead of working remotely.
and i thought EL-RON stoppped writing this crap when he died.
Why would anybody bother with a CID or even fMRI when a DNA scan-and-hash will identify you to 128 bits of certainty?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
If that's the future, count me out.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
These kinds of readings irritate me. They present a wonderful picture, but only when everything goes right. When all the automated thingies in the environment can correctly anticipate your next action. When you don't do the unexpected, or the unexpected doesn't pop up somewhere in the surroundings.
Who's life is that? Not mine. In the above scenario: 1) the alarm clock would wake me up on my day off because I forgot to notify it; 2) the Internet is down and I can't connect outside my house; 3) my arm is in a cast so making decent gestures at my desktop 'computer' is real chore, if not impossible; and 4) my wife is extremely pissed at me for not being able to fix a damn thing in our house. Then a major storm tears through the neighborhood, my roof is half torn off, rainwater gets everywhere and all the electronics go absolutely apeshit.
Tell me what happens when things go wrong, not right. At least a little bit, to provide some much-needed reality.
Minority Report-style UI, as I've generally heard it called the past few years, is a joke. Would be great for games, and perhaps for giving presentations, but who would want it for actually doing work? Stupid people might for a few days, because they imagine it would look cool, until they actually -tried- it and realized what the rest of us already know, that it would suck for actually getting things done quickly. I have nothing against experimental UIs being, well, experimented with, but the mouse and keyboard UI has lasted this long because it -works-.
That was an interesting vision of the future. A couple thoughts:
(1) It's a vision of hell. I prefer solitude and real experience to the social networking world. What about someone who wants off the grid because the grid is a plastic substitute for real experience?
(2) Bonus points to the writer for not claiming that social problems were non-existent. The freeways get hacked, there's been a nuclear war, the middle east is still trouble, and China still wants to control Europe.
It shies away from Utopian thinking enough that I can believe it, but it also shows an automated world that I don't think I want. In that, it's an excellent brain-stimulating piece of writing.
I'll probably still be driving the same car I have today. My computer will be a little faster, and it'll be running Windows 11. Other than that I really can't see my day being so different than it is now. Well, hopefully I'll get a new dishwasher sometime but I doubt it'll be networked.
(42 degrees, you remind yourself — the transition to metric still isn't second nature, after almost two full years.)
I stopped right there.
If everything is so computerized and automated in the future, why would there be a transition to metric? All the internal calculations could be Celsius, Meters, and Grams, but I could set my devices to display Fahrenheit, Yards, and Ounces.
If the editors are just reposting the same old bullshit, I also will.
15 years ago:
- Was in college, playing around with Intel Pentium computers with black and white CRT monitors.
- Was watching p0rn on CDs.
Now:
- Working, playing around with smart phones, with ARM core processors.
- Watch p0rn on my smartphone.
15 years from now:
- Still working, playing around with something like a cross between a Google project glass and a Sony Personal 3D Viewer
- Still watch p0rn, but through the above said device.
- Getting ready to retire in the next 10 years.
- Heavily regretting that my whole life has been one wank party!
If I'm not pushing up the daisies, I'll be totally 'off grid' on an island well away from 'stuff'
No mobile Phone. No Computer
Yeah!
{been writing code for 40 years}
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
15 years from now, things will basically be about the same. There will only be a few differences in tech and social fads, none of which were predicted by this article.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
108 degrees for the shower? Do you want your skin to melt off?
This reminds me of the James R. Berry article from Modern Mechanix, November 1968, describing life in 2008. Interesting to see what they got right and wrong. Still missing my jetpack...
ceci n'est pas un sig
Now I know this is crazy! Next well be all told we are 175 centimeters tall and it's a 15 km trip into work! SI units, in Canada maybe! Viva British Imperial Measure!
Same one I heard in 2000, 1990, and 1980....I'm still waiting on the hover board, personally.
Haselton ate Soulskill and absorbed his passwords!
Yup looks like you libs won
I think this was from the "Aqua" reader.
Gently reply
I work from home. Many of the events, in the article, don't happen for me. I don't wake up until I want to. The only tech I care about relate to health care and food production. The luxury tech I would like to see make it are google glasses and low-cost high-speed global wi-fi. The tech that might make a huge difference to me is the d-wave quantum computer applied to AI. I suspect we need another 1K to 100K increase in cpu performance to create AI that will replace me in the workforce. I am not sure we can get there in 15 years.
Fifteen years from now, your alarm goes off at 7:30 AM
I stopped reading right there.
Wasn't that an episode of Futurama?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I have absolutely NO desire for my alarm clock to talk to my shower OR anything else.
Mr. Alarm Clock best keep his mouth shut or he will "Sleeping With Da Fishes."
Fifteen years from now, your alarm goes off at 7:30 AM, pulling you out of a dead sleep
It had better not! I retire in 2014 (if not earlier).
the loose sensory netting inside your pillow will keep the noise going until it detects alpha waves in drastically higher numbers than theta waves
In a ten dollar clock?
Sighing, you roll out of bed, pull your Computing ID (CID) card from the alarm unit, and stumble out of the bedroom. Pausing briefly to drop your CID into your desktop computer
Networking will be obsolete? That CID sounds like one of the removable drives in STOS that kind of looked like cassettes. I don't have to log into my Linux computer now, why should I have to in fifteen years?
the transition to metric still isn't second nature
The transition has started with liquids, but I'd be willing to bet large sums of money that we'll still be using farenheight in fifteen years.
You have it set to download in basic 8K, eschewing the 3D
"3D" (which isn't really 3D) is a fad that has come and gone for over six decades. Every generation thinks their generation is the 3D generation; it comes and goes every 20-30 years.
At a spoken command, your TV turns on and begins playback.
Doubtful, becaude I'll be blasting the stereo like I do now.
you state your name to authorize payment for the episode
Bullshit, I don't pay for TV now, why would I agree to in fifteen years? OTA or Pirate Bay.
pull your CID from the desktop, and put it into your phone
Wifi and bluetooth will be gone?
As the door closes behind you, you absently wave your phone by the doorbell panel. The embedded RFID chip triggers the locks and security system
Again, why a card? The door should know you're leaving, and by then the stereo and TV will be off. Say the word "lock" and the door locks itself. Why make things harder than they are now?
Sorry, but this is nothing like life will be in 15 years. It never, ever is how fortune tellers say it will be.
Free Martian Whores!
we'll be able to dupe the post.
cause i saw the same thing 15 years ago, and 30 years ago as well. the names change but the story is the same.
...I may off myself sooner than originally anticipated.
Whats all the nonsense with the CID? I would think some sort of single login (government mandated maybe even) for everything. No CID junk. SD card slots are already on their way out.
"A Day in the Life of a Foxconn employee, NOW"
or
"A Day in the Life of Tori Spelling, 1992"
Wearing pants should always be optional.
The population will never accept a tax on food (isn't there something about that in the constitution?), especially if the food in question contains sugar or caffeine.
That CID is plain scary, and there is no way anyone is going to allow that to happen.
AccountKiller
"Sighing, you roll out of bed, pull your Computing ID (CID) card from the alarm unit, and stumble out of the bedroom. Pausing briefly to drop your CID into your desktop computer,"
A card? Are you kidding? You'll beep your wrist chip over a reader, or not even need to do so because the biometric system with 100% national coverage, including in buildings, will ID you to the "Center Station" which will send down the commands to trigger all the devices mentioned
Think back, 15 years ago, to what you were doing the first day you read Slashdot.
Don't give up your day job.
If tipping doesn't go away the same time waiters do, we have a SERIOUSLY messed up society. I hope that was just a really lame joke.
Tipping is institutionalized bribing to convince a person to treat you better. The robots will be programmed to treat everyone the same, and you will NEVER meet the repairman.
Also, it seems super lame to slide that card in and out of everything all the time. Especially when he pulled it out of his phone just to pay the bill. That was by far the weakest point of his little fantasy.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
Local storage of a TV episode? The US running on metric? People working in an actual office? Yeah right! In 15 years time there won't be much real offices more, rather dynamically picked meeting offices for ad-hoc work.
No sex in the future? You don't say .....
First I don't understand why you went to the office. You simply telecommute from home. In fact it's an exceeding rare event for any knowledge worker to go to the office; the few people going to work are the ones involved with physical objects.
Likewise I don't understand why you would go to a restaurant and this robot server. You have your own local meal preparation unit in your house (and there is one in the office for the few times someone shows up there). People only go to restaurants where they are served by real people as a special event. It's a nostalgia type thing.
But the event you remember the most of this day was getting a birthday card from your great grand-mother. You haven't handled physical paper in months--but she is very old-fashioned and sends you this card.
A world where you can't choose to shut an alarm clock off and it shares an automated password from the shower isn't one I would like very much. Computing ID, no thanks. I don't want to have to be keeping up with something like that. Isn't that what the internet is for anyway, syncing state across devices? Metric? Not going to happen. Water quota? If we have the other technology mentioned then we have the technology to provide enough water to meet our needs. Why am I going to torrent something and then pay for it? Why wouldn't the show provider just embed advertisements right into the torrent like they can today? Why am I waving my phone all over the place? Shouldn't it have NFC? Especially if there is a fMRI machine around. Can't I just speak to things like I did with the TV? BTW, I don't want to be speaking to my work computer unless I have a private office. In fact, why did I even have to go into work if I could do everything from home? Looking at my directs screens (assuming without their immediate knowledge) is just creepy. We could do that today and don't so I don't think we will be doing that in 15 years. Planned orbital communities in 15 years? We will be lucky to still have the ISS in 15 years at our current pace (the author even mentions possible budget cuts to NASAs replacement). Server robot... in 15 years people will still be cheaper to employee for such tasks. Cars will still require a person to be present. And one final thought, my phone should be nothing more than an ear bud or some such and the screen could be replaced with a heads up display in my glasses or on surrounding surfaces.
Apparently, in the future we all live a life of complete isolation.. This guy went a whole day without speaking to anyone.
There's not even a link to an article. This looks like Soulskill took a creative writing project and threw it on the front page.
Am I right that at no point do you actually interact face to face with another human in the future? Eff that.
There was also a Revolutionary (decimal) calendar. It had 12 months but with new names, but weeks were 10-days long, days had 10 hours, hours had 100 minutes -- didn't catch on. I think the one holdover is "Lobster Thermidor" -- Thermidor, was one of the Revolutionary months.
One thing he didn't do is read Slashdot.
So at least it's partly realistic.
Isn't that what we will be doing starting this Fall?
Puh-lease
So in 15 years we have no interaction with other people? This guy wakes up alone, works alone, eats lunch alone, goes to sleep alone.
This is terrible future you envision. Your future sounds like something out of "The Leviathan" or "Utopia". Soda tax, water rationing, municipal gigabit internet, CID card tracking everything you do. What about personal liberty, free choice, personal property rights... If I want to take a 20 min shower then I can and I will pay for it with my labor. My labor is translated to currency which is my personal property. I will give up some of my personal property to get what I want.... I NICE HOT LONG SHOWER. and have some soda with my cereal. This is a horrible existence and I pray that we never ever get to your socialist utopia.
Wake up and smell the coffee, guys.
Fifteen years from now food shortages, triggered by the combination of climate change and population explosion, will impact significantly on even advanced western societies. Crops will fail widely, on a regular basis. The cost of food will be relatively a lot more than it is now, and the availability of it a lot less dependable. Cereals in the morning? Don't depend on it. We could, of course, limit climate change if we drastically limited our consumption of energy, but our politicians don't have the bottle to do that, so we probably won't. Which means your shower probably will come on automatically at the comfortable temperature you prefer.
But I'm very sceptical about whether most knowledge workers will get in a car and drive to work. With ubiquitous networks, why drive anywhere? You can work equally effectively wherever you happen to be. You probably work in your own home, or go round the corner to a local cafe/shared workspace. And I doubt anyone will have a screen on their desk. We'll all wear information displays discreetly integrated with glasses or even contact lenses, which will simulate an effectively infinite 3d display when needed, and will simply fade out to give us a clear view of the world when the data display is not needed. Some form of wearable device, probably built into your clothing, will provide local compute power, but will function most of the time as a thin client onto servers elsewhere. You won't own any special purpose information devices - no phone, no MP3 player, no television, no playstation, no ebook reader, no wristwatch, no GPS, certainly no laptop or desktop computer. Your local device will provide you with all the functionality of all those things and more. Younger people won't use a physical keyboard, mouse or pen to input data. Muttering in a shared workspace will probably be considered uncool (although your device will of course respond intelligently to voice input), but if you simulate the motions of writing with a pen or typing on a keyboard, your device will interpret your gestures as though you had written or typed or spoken. Older people may still prefer to use legacy input devices. And it's possible that increasingly we will have direct interface between our brains and our devices, although I think that's probably beyond the fifteen year horizon.
As for having a hardware token as proxy for your identity, I really don't see that surviving in the medium term. Some form of biometric identity will be more convenient and much more secure. If your interface with the network is built into your glasses, then it seems reasonable to use an iris scan.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
So in 15 years we've all become so wealthy that money means nothing to us because instead of doing things the simple, easy, inexpensive way (alarm clock on the other side of the room for example) we have to spend thousands of dollars to create elaborate high tech rube goldberg machines to manage our daily lives...
A lot of this is actually happening now. (except for me the CID is my phone).
The computer I work on goes into "Standby" when I'm done w/ it. Allowing all I was working on to be right where I left off. My Cell phone has an alarm app that makes me do something to shut it off. I can't talk to my t.v. but I can say Navigate to Work, and get the bet route.
Also, using "TASKER", my phone recognizes where I am, and performs necessary tasks. As I leave my house, it sets auto brightness on and enables keyguard, and turns on GPS. (just in case I'm not in my car).
When I get in my car, it turns off wifi, set's Keyguard off, turns up the media volume to 11, locks in my car dock screens, and fires up pandora. As I leave the car it turns wifi on, kills pandora disables GPS, and set's the keyguard. When I arrive at work, it goes into silent mode jacks up the brightness, and disables GPS & bluetooth if it's still enabled if by chance I arrived via vanpool. Even when I travel to different work sites, based on WIFI SSID, which is the same for each site, it performs these functions.
When I leave work, it set's Bluetooth on, and jacks the ringer up.
As I arrive home, it disables key-guard, turns off GPS, sets WIFI on automatically, sets autobright, say's "Welcome Home" Tells me my battery level, and turns all ringers to max. Finally, as I lay to sleep, it automatically drops the brightness down low, and switches to silent mode.
Best part? If I forget to plug in my phone, and the battery reaches 5%, the phone turns off, leaving me enough reserve power to make a few emergency calls if necessary.
This didn't take any programming knowledge except order of operations.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
That would only be about 60 years behind schedule...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
That appending "in bed" to the end of every sentence in that article will no longer be a joke. I would have also thought that the term "desktop computer" would have the same quaint ring to it as "microcomputer" does now.
People in Hong Kong are already using their Octopus Card to pay for meals and as security passcard.
The author lost me at "driving to work". In fifteen years. with that type of technology, why would this guy, or most IT/professional workers need to drive into work. Very high speed networks (wireless), HD style displays, super computers in a box indicates the ability to work from home (or any where) and still stay connected to co-workers and/or management. Commuting is a waste of energy and time. Face to face need not be lost, just managed.
The rest I found not very realistic (for 15 years). Sure, Mr. Marketing guy can afford all those toys, but many more folk cannot and what will their lives look like...about the same as today. If we are still around in 100 years, then I could see that more connected world
(man I am getting cynical, when did I stop dreaming (sigh))
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
After a couple hours, the advertising campaign your team is working on is nearing completion.
Where do people watch "ads"?
Certainly no point in putting up billboards for self driving cars, the AI isn't going to care.
I already aggressively automatically filter media.
Some sort of product placement thing?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
there is no way I will get up at 7:30.
Foxconn:
"The Air Siren promptly jolts you from your wooden plan bed at 4:30am along with the other 19 Chinese peasants that share the 4mx4m room. The stench of sweat, human waste, and tears stings your nostril as you supress your gag reflex and line up behind the sink to wait your turn to splash some tepid brown water on your waste."
"You are rushed down the five flights of stairs to the canteen where you present your meal pass. Due to low production quota for the last two weeks, your dietery intake has been reduced by 20% in order to motivate you. Today is rice with breadcrumbs and bacon shavings. THat was also last night's supper. You sit at a table with 50 other workers and quickly eat up while avoiding awkward eye contact. Some individuals talk. The manager refers to those who talk and eat as "lunatics" and are demoted to menial tasks like picking up metal pieces and taking them to recycling dump. One of your room-mates was assigned to this task. He left to take on a musical career in Seoul under the acronym of PSY. You momentarily wonder if he is doing well."
You mean in 15 years I still won't have my flying car?
the transition to metric still isn't second nature, after almost two full years
About 25 years ago, when I was in elementary school, we were taught the metric system and told that the US would probably be transitioning Real Soon Now. When I told my parents, they laughed and said that they were told the same thing when they were in school.
Transition to metric in the US? Never gonna happen.
You're vaguely aware that the car isn't going to the freeway today â" there must have been a hack-cident â" and you feel irritation yet again at the arbitrarily low speed limits, wishing there was a way to ignore them.
First off, what kind of dumbass would make a driverless car that can be hacked from the outside? The worst an intruder without physical access to the vehicle should be able to do is jam GPS, and even then a well-designed system should be able to use cached map data.
Secondly, the reason speed limits are set arbitrarily low is so the cops can collect revenue from drivers. In a world of all driverless cars, speeding tickets go away and so does the rationale for these limits. With drivers (voters) complaining and the cops and local governments no longer raking in ticket money, raising the limits becomes a political no-brainer.
Walking into to your office, you drop your phone into its dock and flip on the display, thus interacting with the only two objects on your desk. The display, nearly five feet across (1.5 meters, you mean) scans your CID and instantly restores the projects you were working on yesterday. You notice a handful of button icons are different than they were before. There must have been an OS update overnight.
Good thing you're in advertising because I can't imagine anyone trying to get any real work done this way. The truth is that the desktop/laptop PC isn't going anywhere. It's being supplemented, not replaced. Tablets and phones are consumption devices. And no sensible IT department is going to let a third party vendor change user interfaces overnight with no time for training. That's a recipe for disaster. Whoever wrote this knows nothing about how corporate (or even small business) IT works.
The local police force has been tasked with controlling wireless transmissions, and they're being run ragged trying to construct monitoring stations and conduct wardriving patrols with limited manpower. Nobody is willing to take chances after last year's nuclear incident.
Is the premise here that everyone forgets everything they know about computer security in the next 15 years? Who exposed a nuclear system to the public Internet to the extent that some idiot could hack it via a WIRELESS connection?
soda is a rare treat these days, because of the tax
This kind of crap is very popular among a certain sector of policy wonks, but it will never happen because it's absolute political poison. No one who cares about re-election will propose it.
From this is this:
You mean to tell me in 15 years we'll still have these silly patent squabbles?
F M L
it reads like the beginning of a Stainless Steel Rat story.
In a moment, I will close this computer and go home. I won't use a flying car, but while I'm in the elevator down, I'll grab a small, touch-screened computer from my pocket. This computer is connected to a global information network and I'll just enter my destination and tell it to grab my current location from Global Positioning System, after which it'll connect to an online service that immediately calculates fastest way to reach my destination, tells me what bus stop to go to, when the bus (which broadcasts its location in real time) will be there and so on.
When I get home, I will open one of my several computers, perhaps order (and pay for) some food with a couple of clicks of a button. Then, I'll spend an hour or two relaxing by watching an episode of The Daily Show in high definition from other side of an ocean and the going to Youtube and watch a couple of people who've became famous by recording themselves play computer games and chat to each other (Yogscast channel is quite entertaining). After that, I'll get into studying (nearly finished my engineering degree but a couple of tests left) and if I'll experience any difficulties, I will either "google" (It's amazing that something that complex has became so ordinary) or fire up Khan Academy.
Those couple of hours of ordinary middle-class-ish life aside... We live in an era when unmanned aerial vehicles are constantly on the air in warzones, our cars speak out loud and tell us how to get where we want to go, constant access to massive information network has changed how we spend our time, interact with people, participate in society and access news... The advances in medical research are just mind-boggling... A man-made object just left the solar system! Hell, I'm only 23 but the technological progress during the last 10 years has been amazing. Every couple of days a new set of news provides me with that lovely "Holy shit, I'm living in the future" realization.
So... yeah. I wouldn't change the technological progress we actually had to the one people thought we would have.
The only thing I see happening in there is the audible alarm shut off. The rest is rubbish.
I was thinking maybe the card was some sort of X-gen flash drive/SIM card combo, part of the ubiquitous computing experience of the future. So even if biometric systems are the norm already, you don't expect your contacts/desktop configuration/etc to be wetwired into your brain?
This is the sort of prediction I'd expect for 2012 if made in 1997. Really no thought given to the technologies that have been invented this century, except possibly bittorrent - which is a short term measure that will become substantially more specialised when the media industry works out how to sell us downloads.
unless soulskill is 5 years old. this has got to be a joke.. 15 years is such a short time.. half of the people reading slashdot will still be virgins by then, food will still be shitty, so will medical care, you will have the same piece of shit car you own now, and be working the same shitty IT job for your 4% a year increase...
needed more dragons...
I recall that I learned somewhere that speech is one of the last things to "wake-up" in your brain. Having an alarm clock trigger by voice commands is very impractical.
We are more isolated than ever and technology is a major factor driving it. tweets are not legit interaction; video phone is much better... but that is annoying, leave me a video message... and I'll reply with audio later because I look like a mess... that is if I don't tweet because I'm driving or watching a movie...
The story is purely based upon predicted technological advances. Politics is the biggest factor in life, big or small. It is not likely that will happen because human politics will slow, speed up, or warp it all as the tech progresses. The advances in psychology and the tech to aid in applying it will likely render Democracy out of date as it becomes even easier to have working control over the voting populace and we are experiencing that TODAY already. If we are not properly trained and prepared we will only end up slaves who believe they are free and believe they inherently can think on their own without proper preparation/training.
The end of the American Empire is here and we have about 8 years left of transition as it comes to pass. The impact of this will have a huge global impact; greater than what our banksters have already done to the world - which is still going on as it's ripples shake fragile systems around the planet.
We may have cell phones instead of computers; because we can't afford to buy desktops. Those are for 1st world nations.
fyi: I do not own a cell phone.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Hopefully we will migrate to a thumprint system or something similar. An active directory like structure that was keyed to thumprints/handprints/retina scans or something similar would make all these cards, rfid chips and more redundant. ALso you couldn't lose them, and it would replace the need for most passwords.
I want to live in a futer that is simpler.
This reads a lot like those future predictions written in 1979 about life in the year 2000... which were hilariously wrong too, perhaps except for one coincidental detail, which in reality turned out to be much more powerful/better/slick than the 1979 prediction reckoned.
I suspect my alarm clock in 15 years will still be the late 1970s clock radio with its green vacuum fluorescent display. I also suspect that there's a pretty decent chance my ride to work will be a bicycle, rather than a car, due to the relentless increase in energy costs.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
...and when the financial meltdown has touched many if not most, I will be again in Greece with a fishing line (iRod), trying to check if the Med sea can still feed me. 15 centuries before or later, it's all the same stuff really!
I'll let my buttler handle all that s**t
And I do not need a car, I walk to my office (with a stop at my café where a human is loaning me the newspaper and bring me some breakfast...
The alarm clock will still be on my wife's side of the bed and will probably be a cheap Timex battery powered unit with buttons that are hard to press and a crappy display and annoying beep for an alarm. She will still the voice that pulls me from my sleep,
We will have the same shower with maybe an upgrade to the shower head. I don't see a need to upgrade our Thermosol shower control as it seems to do a fine job at at temperature control. We will still live on the east coast where water is not so much a valued commodity. We tend to take short showers, so this shouldn't be an issue.
I will still have a phone and a computer. My computer might look more like a tablet and syncing will be faster and easier, but I won't be plopping my phone into a docking station at my office. Dropbox or Google sync seems to give me that functionality today.
I expect to be swiping and typing. I don't think I will be gesturing into the air which seems to require to much energy. I still expect no more than a 30 inch display on my desk, although the screen and tablet computer might be flexible and thin. I doubt the metric system will take hole in the U.S. I will still be driving at 75MPH on roads with a 65MPH speed limit. My car might have more voice controls and a heads up display, but I suspect it will be a hybrid that runs on electricity and natural gas rather than gasoline.
I will still expect a paper or card menu at the restaurant and a live waiter. The card menu could possibly be a flexible computer, but it will have to look and feel like a menu card to be acceptable.
.
My kitchen appliances will be very high tech with touch displays, but their function will likely be the same. We might have some unforeseen replacements for microwave ovens, but I doubt it.
In essence, I don't expect things to change dramatically. I expect I will have multiple devices that are all synced together (I have that now, so why would it be different 15 years from now). Siri might actually work and be useful by then, but I will still only use it in the car. I won't want to be shouting out my preferences or requests in public for all to hear.
Right now personal computing is bordering giga/tera speed and memory devices. In 15 years persona devices will be knocking at the peta-door.
I went to early school in the kilo era, grad school and early work in the mega era, then recent work in the giga and tera eras.
Hardware trends are easier to predict than software. The WW web came faster than many of us at the time thought. Social computing after a half dozen major failures is gaining traction. I've always wondered why vocal inferences stilll havent dominated by now. I have difficulty imaging the "killer apps" of 2030.
I've got to jump onto the list of people pointing out the CID card flaw to this story. Right now, I have a Google Account. This account gives me access to files (Google Drive), e-mails (GMail), articles (Google Reader), and more. I can view items on my work laptop, home laptop, work desktop, phone, etc. There's no need to put a card into my computer/phone to access this account. Why would we need CID cards for this?
Here's a slightly modified - slightly more realistic version. You buy a new alarm clock and authorize it to have read/write access to your CID account. This lets it access your network, get the current time, get your alarm time preference, reset your alarm time preference, etc. From then on, you use it as an interface to aspects of your CID account. If you want to get rid of it, you deauthorize it first and then sell/junk it. The same way I authorized my phone to use my Google Account.
The technology to authorize/deauthorize is here now. See: Apps on phones or Twitter applications that use OAuth. It's not a big leap to envision an appliance (e.g. alarm clock) operating on the same principle. No cards required.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I can accept almost all of this, but there is one glaring flaw.
The US converting to metric? Lunacy. Sheer fantasy.
Technoli
The usual combination of overoptimistic linear extrapolation of current tech trends with an utter lack of appreciation for their impacts on society. Not that anyone else has ever managed to do much better, maybe Hugo Gurnsback, maybe.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I feel this entry was well written. It gives an intelligent speculation of some things good and bad that will probably or maybe happen. As expected many commentors are inordinately offended by the optimistic proclamations (or seemingly even anything but dystopic). Why can't these people accept a balanced speculation? Is it not healthy (for tech/human progess) to imagine possible futures? Do we need the resolute negative nancies to temper the Kurzweils of the world? Or can we mold ourselves to have a well thought-out balance like Soulskill here?
Its easy to piss on a future projection, but I'm going to try to be as positive as I can.
1. fMRI scanners at entrances. Even if this can be done accurately enough - these scanners require magnetic fields on the order of a Tesla or so. Standing in front of it would rip your keys out of your pocket, at best.
2. Europe in economic/environmental collapse whilst the US is business at usual. Your politics are showing. The idea that Europe is going to be begging China for aid 15 years from now is absurd as it is insulting.
3. Zero human contact. Your hero never speaks to another human face to face throughout his entire day. People don't want to live like this.
4. Commuting to the office. What is the point if you don't see anybody face to face?
5. The CID. Why bother with this? Dongles fell out of fashion years ago. Existing authentication is better than this.
6. Apparently completely unfree computing. Each system the person interacts with is a walled garden. Its possible, but I would hope that the tech savvy wouldn't voluntarily submit to this.
7. Water quota. Fine, this could easily happen - but only whilst there was a shortage of energy for desalination. If there were such a shortage, your guy certainly wouldn't wasted electricity driving to work.
There are a few more flaws, but don't want to do a TLDR post.
"You leave a small tip for the robot maintenance engineer."
Please. By then, gratuities will have merged with lobbying to become a complex system of bribery. It will be functionally the same as the U.N.'s value-added-tax (which will replace various nations' income tax systems in 2020) except that bribery will apply to the black-market half of the global economy.
Change to
"You are completely unconscious of the app in your phone which correctly deduces the proper syndicate to receive the VAT/bribe. It automatically transfers the credits from your account, thereby saving you another broken kneecap."
Ever since the Carrington event of 2023 and its cruel repeat in 2025 most food production and life in the western world has been confined to a few miles of home. 98% of the US electric power transformers were fried along with the computers of almost every truck, car, and train. The US only had about ten percent transformer replacements in stock. And most of those got fried in the repeat event two years later.
In the first months most of the old and sick people died. Then plenty of the rest in the gang wars. The most difficult thing to deal with was the utter electronic silence. No phone, internet, radio or TV. More than one teenage girl jumped off a roof when the smartphones stopped working.
But its the cellphone service that is coming back first. One can runner the towers of solar cells during the day. Every little neighborhood has its solar charging station. No ventral power stations or wires necessary. I recall that was the situation in deepest Africa in the early 2000s: minimum infrastructure, but every family prized its cellphone.
ITT: people normalising the progress of the last 15 years
Death before I step into an automated shower - there's a disaster waiting to happen - and double death before the goddamned shower gets the password to Turn Off The Alarm Clock! And a sensored pillow? No frakking chance one will ever go near my bed.
Who comes up with this unadulterated idiocy?
I can imagine the headlines - Fiery Deaths of 15 Trigger Pillow Recalls - and the advertisements - Is your shower running cold? Our technicians can reset your shower using your neighbour's wifi! Call us today! And if you irritate the neighbour's teenaged kid, he or she might hack into your shower and reset the temperature.
Yeah, not in my home.
Why is it futurists are hellbent on making the future more tech-complicated? Why can't there be a trend towards simple?
Best shower experience for a tech is to turn the lights off. We get too much bright light shone into our eyes, and a nice gloomy shower is a nice antidote to all that.
My life in 15 years will be an ocean of words? I thought we were moving to abstract symbols.
What about the zombie apocalypse?
In 15 years, you will wake up, because the same old lousy noisy bastard of alarm clock, which terrorized you for decades, will go off. If you are lucky it is not one of those mechanical devices and you got a "radio alarm" which provides the best songs of the 80,90,2000,2010,and of today. You will get up after the same pillow fight with the device you have every morning and go to the shower, there will by a faucet mixing thing in it (just like today, which is already 10 or 20 years old) after some fiddling around the water is just perfect and you wash yourself.
Afterwards you will use a towel and try to get dressed. Still not that easy without a coffee. Then you get your regular breakfast (if there is time, or as you overslept again, you get an apple or something). You walk out, lock the door (when you are in the US, apply all locking) and walk to the busstop. You bik was stolen yesterday and it will be a rainy day, so you commute by public transport. If your boss would not be such a nutt sucker you could work from home, but well...
The bus is filled with noisy advertisements for all sorts of crap you cannot pay for, or you do not want, and strangely, they advertising for the winter holidays again, it was just August, how should you know what you do for winter. If you have a job and if you get a day of or two. Still work is better, than living from social support money and have nothing to do (beside doing some coding if you like, only a nerd option).
Arriving at work, after switching once, you greet Sam who guards the entrance of you work place, eating a donut or bagel crossover stuff. You still cannot believe how somebody can put marmalade on a cheeseburger. In the good old days a cheeseburger was just a cheeseburger and you had not to answer twenty questions just about the topping. Still you feel hunger, because the apple was not that good and far from filling.
You consider to use the stairs, but on the other hand you are too sleepy and too hungry so you take the elevator. ...
...or flying car, at least..
Yeah, 15 years from now everything is going to be basicaly the way it is now, only more expensive, more error prone, and more crowded. What in the last 2 decades makes you think anything is going to substantially improve or change the current living conditions? Software and hardware will continue to be rushed out the door ensuring an increase in the number of errors and bugs as the devices get more complex. Natural resources will continue to deminish as more and more people over crowd the world. Coroporations will continue to get more and more powerful until they've essenitally replaced governments. I predict there will be the same number and types of wars going on all over the world for the same tired old reasons assuming China doesn't go apeshit crazy and try to take over by force.
Let's face it, the world is in a pretty depressing slow downward spiral. There's too many people, not enough resources, and too many monied interests, corps, to allow change to really take place. The ST:TNG future is far, far less likely than the Neuromancer future. Frankly I don't think I'll ever be able to retire and, indeed, I'll be lucky if I'm not scavenging for food and water in my old age.
The 1960s version of the future was so much better. Flying cars, trips to Mars, plentiful nuclear energy, super fast monorails everywhere, etc. What happened to all that?
Obviously written by a young know-nothing without children. There is no such thing as "dead sleep".
The last time an alarm woke me up was 20 years ago before my first child. I don't know how, but kids makes it so that you never sleep well again. I am always awake before the alarm
Self awareness - try it!
That's pure nonsense to think that the future will bring mechanical advantages. The point is, nonody knows how science will progress, hence it's impossible to tell what actually mechanical devices will become part of our lives.
Why? Nobody who works in advertising really needs to be in an office today, never mind in 15 years time. It's perfectly possible for any such office worker to work from home, and be more productive, right now, today, with the technology currently available..
You'd really think that 15 years in the future even the dumbest members of society (e.g. ad execs) would have figured out that the really do not need to waste money on expensive office buildings, waste economic resources and pollute the environment with unnecessary commutes, causing frustration and fatigue in the process.
The only thing stopping that happening right now, is bad management and the vacuous waste of carbon atoms that are HR staff. With better technology available in 15 years time the need to physically be in the same place as someone you are working with will be even more preposterous than it is now.
4. Massive attrition through war for resources.
Conquering British Columbia was the easy part. Shipping our teraliters of newly-liberated water home to Doha, that was the real struggle...
0 1 - just my two bits
You roll over, grumbling a command
Not likely. I would eat a thousand pounds of broken glass, shove a million nails in my eye, and use windows 8 on the desktop before I would use an alarm clock that had to be controlled with voice commands. I really don't understand why everyone thinks controlling devices with your voice is "futuristic". Annoying? Frustrating? Infuriating? Yes. Futuristic? No.
Did Cory Doctorow sneak in to write this article?
Anyway, here's the more likely scenario:
(sorry I have to work, so no time to post a full set of paragraphs...)
I wake up to my BetchaCant (TM) alarm clock jabbing me in the small of my foot with three evenly-spaced syringes, and I momentarily wonder if I should think about regretting my Woot! Reborn! Again! (TM) impulse purchase. I try to get out of range of the needles, but it's no use, and I am forced to vacate the bed.
I slide bleary-eyed over to the sink and turn my UpSpurt (TM) faucet to face me and hit the "5 second" button for a delightful splash of tap water to head. Yum! They've obviously been improving the piquant chlorine aftertaste.
I then make my way to the kitchen and grab my latest Twinkie (TM) on the end of my rotating stockpile. This one should be just about cured to perfection after 15 years... It's just too bad I'll have to wait that long for the ones at the other end to get this good.
I try to find where I left my NyloSpandoGoretexdexnex (TM) girdle to compress my gut and create the artificial pecs that I know and love. There it is, left on the footstool of my original Aims (TM) lounge chair that I had ordered from Design for People who Aren't Sure (TM).
My implant buzzes behind my left eye socket to remind me of something--I have no idea what. I grab my glasses but since I forgot to recharge them, the blinking red light won't stop and threatens to trigger my epilepsy again. I coax the screen on for one last display before dying, and I understand that the task I have given myself is my daily reminder to order a replacement Twinkie (TM) for the end of the line. I clear the synthetic GM tobacco ashes from the table and, after waking my table up, look up the address of the convenience store next door. After an hour, I was able to navigate their miserably designed shop page and order a case. Bloody hell, shipping's gone up. Well, it should be here in about 3 or 4 days. I have enough to last until then.
Twinkies (TM).
I forgot what I was going to do next. Maybe head back to bed? Whatever--time to face this exciting day! But later. Or should I bathe? What time is it? Did I pay that bill? Where's my MultiPass? Maybe I should quit.
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
15 years later everyone has brain cancer from continuous fMRI scans and RFID waves.
Why would I care about speed limits if the car is driving itself while I'm watching a tv show? For me speed limits will cease to matter once the car starts driving itself, as I will happily play with my portable electronic devices for however long it takes me to get to my destination.
Posted anonymously since I removed my CID.
I'm thinking i'll be dead really....
Be seeing you...
Why would I torrent something then pay to watch it?
Hell, why would I even torrent something? There are faster ways to get the content and I laugh at your pathetic "torrent".
You know, the world's largest seller of ads.
After getting woken by a 140db rickroll at 4am, You get scalded by 140 degree water.. because the ex you pissed off screwed around with your preferences...
You're still late for work, because you kept getting cut off by those diving for the Priority Lane. You, of course, can't afford the tolls, so have to suffer in the shared public lane.
The robot maintenance engineer is actually the 80 year old guy whose (still) 15 years away from retirement, due to everyone else's increased life expectancy, and the latest government pension grab-back. He can't be arsed to learn metric, and keeps screwing up the robot's sensor parameters. The robot travels 3 meters instead of three feet, and dumps your sammich on your lap.
When you call in sick, the HR Drone does a worth/risk calculation on you, taking into account the amount of time your sick day is going to cost the company based on your projects. Your salary is automatically docked the expected value of your absence. Since you've already used your sick day this year, you must also provide documentation in the next 12 hours or face termination.
The CDC diagnoses you with AIDS. Fortunately, it's one of those mild, 24-hour AIDS. Since your health plan doesn't include a delivery premium, you have to send your car out on your own electrical dime to pick up your meds. Your CID automatically correlates your social calendar with the incubation time of your AIDS, and sends notices to your partners, and posts it on your public feeds anyways. It also packages the whole report and ships it off to HR, not like that's needed, since HR monitors your social and medical feeds in real time. Your worth/risk score is adjusted again, penalizing you for your undesirable social behaviour. The company would rather not be associated with anyone who could damage their brand by engaging in "unseeming" social activities. You're instantly terminated. Your 2-day severance package is reduced by the sick day, plus early-termination penalties. The bill for 1 week's pay arrives in your inbox, the funds already removed from your savings account.
After leaving the pharmacy, your driverless car is spotted by a pack of organized thieves. Your car passes through their wireless interdict field, and they easily break in, steal your medication, and are out without even stopping the car. Your car arrives at your home, sans medicine or any evidence it was broken into. Now, without a job and without health insurance, you cannot afford to replace the pills. You must quickly find employment to afford you meds before your immune system shuts down and you die. Of course, now you'll never pass the mandatory health screens or social network background checks. You figure you've got a good two years left, for some definition of "good".
UTF-8: There and Back Again
and I will laugh my old geezer ass off at the quaint ideas they had 15 years ago.
I'll get a fire started in the cave and do an early morning tresspasser patrol. I'll look up at the blue and pink sky, a holdover from the big one; a massive sun flare that send us all back to the dark ages. We couldn't handle that along with the severe thickening of the ozone layer, flipping of the poles, and the drop of 15 feet in the sea level as the poles froze up harder than the young hooker's ass in the next cave. The good part is, she trades a ride on that ass for a little food. I won't tell her that I'd feed her anyways.
You life is already like that to me. You just dont know it.
I probably wont host a 30 years of /. party since the other one 15 years ago wasn't a big success. Thank god I got the t-shirt nevertheless! Then I go to the /. site and post some snarly replies to dumbasses with 40digit uid's telling them that back in the olden day's things were much better. Mainly because with a CRT you got cheap laser eye surgery. (I think I might end up rather cynical) :-)
Then Ill drink some moonlight still, cause that is the only stuff around (because those pesky crypto-communist-health-and-safety-environmentalists got their way) and curse at my cat for half an hour. No problems, he is old and deaf cause he is born way back in 2012, and there (still) is no wife to yell at. Then I hit another shot at the little altar erected in 2018 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of George Carlin. Erected just to piss him off in case he IS in heaven looking down. Before I go to my damp cold bed and take a look at the martian sunset one more time before I close my eyes.
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
I do. That sounds like a terrible day. What if I like dealing with people face-to-face? Who dreams this garbage up?
...another yahoo pulls some predictions out of his butt that have more to do with his fantasies than anything resembling relevant data.
You forgot:
"Then you go to work assembling Samsung and HTC phones, hoping that this one won't be as big a dud as the rest, since you're not smart enough to work on the Apple production lines, and your flow was never as strong as PSY's."
I'll be obscenely rich and working in a senior position in marketing. Gotcha.
But on a serious note, sending a car, which is built for transporting passengers, on a trip to pick up a small packet of medicine? In a world where even your shower water (not drinking water) apparently has a quota, that's an insane waste of fuel. An advanced society would have more efficient delivery systems, either underground channels or aerial drones. Besides, there's probably going to be flu medication where you live (if you're as rich as the article makes out, you'll have a well-stocked personal medicine cabinet, and if you're not your apartment megacomplex will be large enough to make an in-house pharmacy viable).
On the other hand, the prediction that your medical diagnosis will be published on your social feeds in real-time is probably spot-on.
Your alarm triggered the shower's heating unit, so the water comes out at a pleasant 108 degrees
Sounds like the flash heating that showers have had in Europe for decades.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I suspect that technological advance will eventually allow the mimicry of any biometric identification method, without sensors being able to keep up. In fifteen years, biometric authentication is likely going to be on the way out - possibly replaced by implants that are equally easy to carry but easier to replace when compromised.
(Then again, people will probably use their phones for everything.)
Seriously, this article is poor sci-fi at best.
Sounds like a nasty Distopia.
FUCK, IF THAT'S THE FUTURE, KILL ME NOW
I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am
in disbelief. Did I come to Kuro5hin?
Well, 15 years ago I lived in the same house I live in now, with the same alarm clock and same shower - but shower head is relatively new, so at least that may be accurate!
I'm surprised that there is little question on the veracity of a fully automated auotombile/transit system in place in a paltry 15 years. Science and progress will always be decades behind politics, graft and the entrenched industries dependent on our current system.
I almost got caught last night, oh boy that was close .. but I got done what I set out to do. This fool
walked city streets and without bodyguards, so self-assured, so arrogant. One of those Agenda 21
people, you know the folks who want to take away beef and meat products, force us to take their
toxic vaccines and medications and make us live in 100sqft appartments. I got him good. The first
shot went right into his back and he fell on his knees and then on his face. I was all over him in a flash.
I struck him on the back of the head with a heavy metal bar, then turned his face to the side and literally crushed his
jaw. Heavy motherfucker but he ain't getting up now more. Dragging him into the van, omg my pants are
full with blood I so better not get stopped, shit like this needs much better planning but I don't have a lot of
time either and I need to get a few things done now. Anyhow now I got him in back, I'm taking a screwdriver and jabbing his thigh
to locate the tracker implant. It's hamburger by now and I'm thinking of just slicing off slabs of meat and
then searching those for it but then I'm also worried there are major arteries here and I don't want this
swine to die too easy. I bind off the leg it - I don't really consider it a person like me - it looks at me and mewls
and I jab the screw driver into its right eye. Damm right, bitch, I'm serious about hurting you and your life is over.
It's got some fight in it so I take to just stomping it in the chest I'm trying to crack it's ribs and chest bone with my
heels then I can use the lose bones to exert pressure on its heart and lungs. It's having a little semi heart attack
laboring to breathe while I push against its chest. I quiet explain why I'm punishing it the way I am. I'm going to spare
you the gruesome details of what happened after I got him into my little death house as I call that abandoned shack off
of Hwy 33. That was that Agenda 21 guy. He got off easy too, no comparison to what I did to the CPS worker who
took my daughter.
Let's take it apart:
>Fifteen years from now, your alarm goes off at 7:30 AM,
When I was in my twenties, we had a manager who insisted that IT folks under her make it in by 10am. The first time three of us got paged at 2am and were still in the NOC at 10am, she rolled back on this.
>pulling you out of a dead sleep. You roll over, grumbling a command, and the alarm obediently shuts up. You drift off again, but ten minutes later the alarm returns, more insistent.
My current sleep monitor, unlke this proposed future one, is actually intelligent and doesn't try to wake me from dead sleep (which has negative consequences). It waits until I'm between sleep cycles, then GENTLY chirps...
>It won't be so easily pacified this time; the loose sensory netting inside your pillow will keep the noise going until it detects alpha waves in drastically higher numbers than theta waves.
Again, silly. Why would an advanced device keep trying to disrupt your sleep patterns, instead of gently nudging?
> Or until it gets the automated password from the shower. Sighing, you roll out of bed, pull your Computing ID (CID) card from the alarm unit,
Sigh. Someone already mentioned, an ID card is SO 1980s.
>and stumble out of the bedroom. Pausing briefly to drop your CID into your desktop computer, you make your way to the shower and begin washing. Your alarm triggered the shower's heating unit, so the water comes out at a pleasant 108 degrees, exactly your preference. (42 degrees, you remind yourself — the transition to metric
Someone already mentioned: the US? Metric? Is some other country on Imperial Units, and going to convert?
>still isn't second nature, after almost two full years.) You wash quickly to avoid exceeding your water quota,
Water quota?!? Are you friggin' kidding? Any civilized nation that faces freshwater shortage, will simply separate potable (drinking) water from other uses. There's not going to be a shortage of water to shower with etc., and if there was, there'd likely be a revolt in most of the US.
>and step out refreshed, ready to meet the day.
After a short shower? The writer clearly is in his/her 20s and hasn't aged 15 years yet. When the writer is 15 years older, they'll likely find that a long, hot shower is the only way they can get their muscles halfway untensed for the day-- followed by stretches (I assume a tech lifestyle, ie, staring at six monitors all day).
I leave taking apart the silliness of the rest of the paragraphs, as an exerice for the reader.
Also what Luddite Amish cave dweller thinks this stuff doesn't already exist today? I've had an automated torrent and archiving system for years. I can also wave my hands in front of the faucet of my bathroom and water comes out of it automagically.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
but that scenario reads like one of the circles of Hell from Dante's Inferno. I'm for technology making life easier, but not at the expense of freedom. Of course it's up to us to decide whether or not we want totalitarianism. Seems that all government sees in new technology is new ways to control the population.
Simpler? How about a unique identification alias tied to a collection of cryptographically secure language elements? Just "type" your "password" and you are automatically "logged in" to the "computer!"
RMS's eternal AI-bot denounces the non-free software controlling the robotic waiter and proclaims Hurd to enter stable release within the next 15 years.
Indeed. I'd say if this is what he likes doing, perhaps he should get a blog and spare the rest of us.
There will not be any electricity because of a solar storm - so I disagree with the prediction.
Metric is for people who are too bad at math to mentally convert from different base systems.
So what you are implying is that Imperial users are good enough at maths to mentally convert to metric but too stubborn and stuck in the past to do so?
Describes the immediate aftermath of an utter loss of electricity. It estimates a 90% population decline in the first year. We return to a pre-civil war "steampunk" type agrarian lifestyle until we recover. Humanity did fine before the mid 19th century. The trauma is transitioning to that.
Some electrical devices will be shielded in sub-basements and caves. Its unclear if would be a critical nucleus for recovery.
The TV show Revolution is 15 years after such an event. They hint at a 3rd cause other than a nuclear blast or massive solar storm.
Besides, 15 years from now I'll be existing in a computer matrix after the singularity. It's great fun in there - everything is possible, and its bigger on the inside!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Please archive this article!
We will be laughing our asses off at it 15yrs from now. . .
In 15 years, I will not grumble anything to my alarm clock. I got my alarm clock in 1987, I still have it today. It's made of sturdy plastic and not very complicated electronics. It is likely that if it survived my childhood and college dorm room, it will survive another 25 years.
In 15 years, my alarm clock will go off at 7:30AM, and I will still be slapping my snooze bar every 9 minutes for an hour until I drag my ass out of bed.
Sometimes, the secret to discovering what the future is going to be like is determining what has little chance of actually changing between now and then.
you'll be woken up by the sunlight pouring under the bridge you decided to pass out under the night before or a nearly naked guy wearing a hockey mask will kick you and say "I am the Humongus. Just walk away. Just walk away!".
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Hopefully there will also be suicide booths, like in Futurama, or that ST:TOS episode. Because after a long day of all of that which was described in that post, I'd like to relax, and retire to a nice suicide booth...
I practically never get up anywhere near that early⦠Why would I do it in 15 years??
(joking)
All I can ever see when reading articles like these is the tours that I took though Disney's Epcot Center in the 80's. With GE's, GM's, and other industry giants letting there marketing teams loose.
The reality is far from what the marketing hacks are projecting. However that never has stopped a good fantasy...or in this day and age a click bait.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
15 years from now ...
(don't say banging your wife ... don't say banging your wife)
banging .... your son?
(family guy)
the real oppression is natural: not enough water. the government's quota is a clumsy reaction, but bullets aren't going to get you more water, they just get you into gunfights with other hotheads wanting more water, further strengthening the average citizen's call for the government to have water quotas to save them from hotheads trying to get control of the water supply
in fact, the ultimate source of the oppression is runaway population growth. but if you institute quotas on how many children you can have, even more hotheads will grab guns so they can have more kids, leading to more chaos and more oppression in the form of hotheads with guns and twelve children
oppression is usually from natural reasons, or oppression is from individuals, such as hotheads with guns, rather than government
not that government can't oppress you, they frequently do
but the idea that in the scenario outlined: that an attempt to ration a limited water supply is oppression, and the right reaction is to start shooting, suggests people who think like you are more oppressive than the government's clumsy attempt to keep the peace
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As someone who's spent years, every day, researching an upcoming Science Fiction novel (not even a tenth done!) I'd like to make a few corrections:
There will be no computer ID. Biometric will be replacing all ID. Secure, hard to spoof, and most importantly already available to everyone. The number one thing to consider when trying to accurately predict the future is "how cheap can this possibly be done?"
Desktop? Not likely, not at least as we recognize the word now. Some sort of computing unit, sure of course. But not something we'd recognize as a "desktop" today. They're slowly going out of style, only useful for heavy work spaces anymore (what their form factor was originally designed for).
RFID for locking your house? Again, not likely. How about a webcam near your door? Again, facial identification, cheap, easy, no way to "lose" it. Cheap, cheap cheap cheap. It's the sound birds make and how humans think. The less complicated the more likely it is to work every time, the more people are likely to go for it.
Your phone as a your work device? IT workers will come to your house and murder you in your sleep. You're centrally approved hardware and software in a centrally approved software environment and they don't give a damn whether you like it.
Gesturing for control? Again, the mouse works. They keyboard WORKS. We have adapted them so perfectly that they haven't evolved as an interface in decades. They're not going anywhere. The only weakness of tablets that all can agree on is that they don't HAVE a mouse and keyboard. If there was a way to pop them out of midair when typing or more precision than touch is needed everyone would do that.
The AI proposed isn't going to be here in 15 years, not commercially available anyway. Otherwise we'd just use it to replace your hypothetical workers to begin with. But there will be AI optimization algorithms. One will be built for various types of ad campaigns, and you will get back an effectiveness rating. So a lot of it seems correct.
Table menu display? Again, another expense, another thing to go wrong. "You can't sit at that table, it's screen is broken." Some automated way of ordering should certainly be available. Probably your menu will look quite similar to todays, but actually be an interactive touchscreen connected via wifi.
China with economic aid? China is about to have a huge recession within the next ten years. Coastal flooding however is quite the possibility : (
Server robot? Not in fifteen years, not common anyway. Factory robots replacing all factories sure. But people like human interaction, and since all the factory worker jobs are gone what else is there but to be a waiter?
Virus checking via the internet? Again, a lab on a chip will be available, but expensive. People don't have time or money for that. "If I get sick I can damn well tell when I'm sneezing!" Not that viruses will be a problem at all. We've, theoretically, got a perfect broad spectrum cure. At least until they adapt.
Still, all in all a good job and a fun read. There is a huge, world changing point that's been missed. And that's simply that humans will be facing the prospect of immortality. Probably the largest single change humans will have ever encountered up to that point.
post to undo errant mod
This is pathetic.
15 years from now, there will be no TV, no alarm, no display, phone and no tablet. It is utterly ridiculous to think that today's gadgets will still be around in 15 years.
I think what will happen is many people will wear augmented reality glasses that will replace all these things.The early adopters will have a quantum computer embedded into their skull and wired to their brain. Instead of ridiculous CIDs and voice commands, one would simply think about what they want and it will be done. Video will be transmitted directly into your brain and everything will be live and online -- no need for torrents. Everywhere you look you will get augmented reality information fed into your brain Terminator style. There will be no commute because everyone you work with will be connected wirelessly brain-to-brain.
I have absolutely NO desire for my alarm clock to talk to my shower OR anything else.
I like how the article keeps wandering back and forth from centralist (everything on one device) to decentralist (a device for each thing). There are only two things on his desk at work, one of them being an extremely inefficient to use monitor interface; yet for some reason, there needs to be a dedicated alarm clock instead of using some other device like a smartphone.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Piracy (in terms of IP violations) has existed since copyright existed. Before copyright it wasn't illegal of course. So, for Americans piracy started in 1790, in the UK it was 80 years earlier
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sudan, Columbia, Burma, Cambodia, or perhaps Uruguay?
Nate
No human interaction for a whole day? Clearly this is a slashweenie fantasy!
tl;dr.
In 1955 our 5th grade class (in the US) was told that there is a 'master plan' to convert to the metric system. As a result we spent two days in a mandatory exploration and comparison of metric measurements.
Personally I won't be satisfied until we have a metric system for measuring time.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I'll sleep as long as I want. Then I'll sleep some more. Meanwhile, my strong AI-based avatar will work in my stead. In fact, it needn't come home, but will work nonstop. Ask it for my bank account number so you can deposit its pay in my account. Now leave me alone. I have some serious sleeping to do.
The car drops you off in front of work and drives itself to the parking, rather than making you walk from the parking to the work entrance
The guy sends his entire car (probably one of those stupid massive 4-wheel-drive-monster-truck-tinycockmobile behemoths that you see in the states) to pick up a bottle of medication that weighs a few hundred grams.
A couple of more energy-efficient efficient alternatives spring to mind:
1 - once self-driving technology has matured to the point indicated in the story, there will be fleets of automated postmen running around, delivering stuff as and when it's needed.
2 - As well as a self-driving car for driving you/ your family around, you will also have a "courier" robot that is basically a very small autonomous car, too small to carry people, but big enough for small packages.
"Frowning at one of the dead pixels on your display, you remember when you used to have co-workers who dealt with that sort of thing."
That's by far the saddest thing I've read today. Mostly because it's going to be true.
The leftist/progressive/liberal slant in your sociology is appalling, and quite unrealistic.
The real problem with predicting the future, is predicting how long it will take you to ditch everything you own and everything you owned incrementally between now and the future you're predicting. 15 years from now I will probably still own all of the same stuff and as I'm lazy and cheap I'll probably still own it long after that. I would need to either a) win the lottery or b) move into some brand nw high rise apartment in a yet non-existant city in China furnished by the company, before I had any of this stuff.
15 years from now I'll own someones mid range luxury car from today, still won't have a TV, probably will still be rolling my own computers and thus be stuck with a ridiculous list of bugs and features I was too lazy to ever get working and getting my internet from a local starbucks.
Failed utterly as human beings.
I like technology, I work in technology (programming), and I hobby in technology (game making, 3d models, music synth, programming, digital art), but this is not the direction to go. It is devoid of the very elements that make us human.
Technology should liberate us, liberate our minds and souls, not entrap them. If I need all those gismos to get out off bed in the morning then I'm not meant to get up that morning, 9/10 of the time I wake up before my alarm (wish the built in alarm on the iphone had a "I'm awake just skip the next alarm" button, instead I have to toggle it off and then back on again 5 minutes later after the time has passed).
I have more reasons than most NOT to get up in the morning, but I get up every morning. Last month I lost my spouse of 10 years to illness (not a joke). I held her hand as she died in the hospital. The only thing I wanted to do was be with her which meant joining her. There is no one who would be upset if I didn't bother getting out of bed in the morning, not even work. But every morning I get up and keep going, because there are things out there, great things. Some day I may have to (figuratively) sit down and tell her all about those wonderful things. (ps I am an atheist, I don't believe in god, the universe is bigger than mans concept of god, and there may yet be something unexplained along the lines of what we think of as a soul)
If someone had tried guessing how our day would be 30 years ago, how close would they be to where we are now? No doubt flying cars would be predicted.
Is this 1958?
you lost me at desktop
I got to the part about torrenting a TV show and stopped. I really can't imagine that we would still need to do this by then. At least I hope. I really see no reason why we aren't already streaming everything on-demand. get away from the channel/24hour time slot lock. Stop canceling good shit for dancing with bears, simply becuase it *might* turn more profit. ...
I'll be divorcing myself of most electronic technology and moving off the grid for about 50% of my living time. I'll be retiring, poorer because of the money spent on technology that 'improves' my job chances, which I will not need as I retire. My house will be small and cheap to run, and I'll be dependant on a pension and my wife/best-friend. We already own the land and a 'building' It is just a matter of renovation and careful planning.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
"You drift off again, but ten minutes later the alarm returns, more insistent. It won't be so easily pacified this time; the loose sensory netting inside your pillow will keep the noise going until it detects alpha waves in drastically higher numbers than theta waves."
I'm not an EEG technician, but I've worked with the machines enough to know that you can't read brainwaves using a "loose sensory netting inside a pillow". And even if you could, the suggested algorithm will not reliably distinguish between REM sleep and wakefulness.
Right out of the gate, the author predicts something which is implausible and flat-out dumb. I didn't quite stop reading at this point (I think I made it up to the part where I "insert my computer ID into my phone"), but I sure as hell didn't make it to the end.
Hey I like technology as much as the next guy, but a scenario like this gives me chills down my spine
Honestly, I've read S/F written in the 90's trying to predict what the world would be like now - exactly the same level of predictions but based on current tech instead of 90's tech. Blegh.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
s/advertising/newspeakanalysis/
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Oh yeah -- I was employed....
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.