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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!
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)
No card. The damn things will simply know what you look like.
I will not work in advertising.
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.
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 soulskill has found something he's even worse at then editing submissions. Good job, man!
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.
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.
... 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 read all the way to the end hoping to get to the nymphomaniac fembot or the cloned and imprinted sex-kitten
I'd rather put bullets in the oppressors' skulls and fall on my own sword than live a life like that.
I know... 7:30 alarm? And you call that life?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
Why not? Many areas are already under heavy water stress. There are but three ways I can see the future deal with this:
1. Revolutionary new technology. Perhaps a big increase in the use of nuclear energy for desalination.
2. Free-market control of demand: You can use all the water you want, but you pay by the litre. Your usage is limited by what you can afford. May work, may just result in the low-income going unwashed because they can't afford more than drinking water. Depends how the market sets the price.
3. Regulatory control of demand. The water quota.
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.
2. Free-market control of demand: You can use all the water you want, but you pay by the litre. Your usage is limited by what you can afford.
Except that where I live we've had water meters since before the 1960s.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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--
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.
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.
I have relatives in the Midwest of the US that apparently don't pay per litre, but in every other country I've ever been, water usage is metered just like electricity or any other utility.
Yea, we call that "having a well."
FYI, having a well is far from free.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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
The UK has historically been mostly on unmetered water,
And also historically lurches between flooding and hosepipe bans. Not that metering will fix the legendarily leaky pipes. Or fix the fact that after selling off the water authorities, the companies went on and sold off all the resevoir land for development.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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.
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