A Day in Your Life, Fifteen Years From Now 687
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.
Live free or DIE (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd rather put bullets in the oppressors' skulls and fall on my own sword than live a life like that.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Rather... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
CID? Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
by his noodly limbs NO (Score:5, Insightful)
I will not work in advertising.
I read this BS somewhere before.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Based on experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just too far out (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, the future is the past (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
15 years from now... (Score:4, Insightful)
... 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.
So much bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Live free or DIE (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Live free or DIE (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
We use cylinder locks and metal keys because they're cheap and good enough.
We use alarm clocks with buttons because they're cheap, easily replaced, and good enough.
We use manually-turned valves to control hot and cold water, again, because they're cheap and good enough.
In short, almost all of our technology is minimalist, because once a technology is developed into a decent working system, there's not a lot of good in changing it for a more expensive system. I like my manual door locks, as there's a certain amount of skill required to pick one that a skr1pt k1dd13 can't download off of the Internet to use.
On top of that, can you imagine the cabling required to control all of these fancy gizmos? A lot of what's described can't operate off of wireless, it needs some physical control. Shower valves, for example.
Plus reliability is always an issue. We have a Clapper to control one of the lights and even it's not perfect, and it's simple.
Re:CID? Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well apparently your shower knows who you are, your clock radio knows if you're awake, a security gate knows what your neural pathways react like at a distance..... But your computer has no idea and needs a card. And worse, your house locks by RFID!
Can't I just have one authentication device?
Tipping the Robot Repair Man? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Just too far out (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank goodness for small favors. Editing posted comments would be a crime against humanity. Let's hope it never, ever happens. God gave us the "Preview" button for a reason.
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Reads like cheap pulp scifi, lost me after second paragraph.
What will happen is that you'll throw your low tech cotton pillow onto your 25 year old plastic, night indestructible alarm clock, grumble, and go to your 30 year old(shover head only 10 years old) shower system, swear while the water takes 2 minutes to reach a proper temperature.
And suddenly you remember this masturbatory futuristic article from slashdot and chuckle heartily.
Hilarious (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Constructive criticism (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd cut the whole thing short. When you go outside to get in your super space car, you get mugged at knifepoint and your cid is stolen.
You can no longer enter your house, because the door locked, and you can't go anywhere because your car only recognizes your cid and biometrics.
You decide to get on your bike and ride to the BCC (bureau of citizen computing) where you can apply for a new cid. You stand in line for 6 hours due to everyone's cid getting stolen because it's a stupid idea in the first place.
Re:Just too far out (Score:2, Insightful)
People still watch live TV?
Every so often I look at the TV listings and I just can't figure out why someone would sit and watch 10 back-to-back episodes of 'ghost hunters' or 'american choppers' every day. Day-time TV is nothing but marathons of reruns, and night time (when they used to do re-run marathons) is now nothing but back-to-back infomercials.
It almost makes me miss the days of the test pattern, when they would at least have the decency to turn off the transmitter when they had nothing of value to transmit, instead of 24 hours of crap that nobody wanted to watch the first time it aired, let alone the 10th time.
Re:But... (Score:2, Insightful)
"... trying to decide to either move to US or commit suicide"
Not great options, but on balance I'd go for the suicide!
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow, I dont' think that this fairy-story will much resemble the drone-infested, FEMA camp that most USians will inhabit, 15 years from now...
There's not enough Brazil in the scenario described.
Re:Just too far out (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, you would. I decided one day I'd use Celsius all the time, even though I live in California. My goal was to try to get an intuitive feel for what different temperatures mean, without mentally converting. It took me a little while, but it didn't really take any effort.
I'm not saying you need to switch, but it's kind of fun, and I'm sure you're capable of it.