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.
Re:Live free or DIE (Score:2, Interesting)
No shit.....
"Water Quota"....seriously?!?!?
Nothing will change (Score:4, Interesting)
Not Very Accurate (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Wait, what? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:CID? Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Can't I just have one authentication device?
No because patents.
hour before dawn I feed the pigs and chickens (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:But... (Score:5, Interesting)
Spot on.
If not having face time, why travel at all? I already only travel in to my main client a couple of days per week, and only then for the benefits of working cheek-by-jowl with my co-workers since my human firmware needs that sometimes. And my transport is already self-directed and all-electrified and fairly decent (train, underground, elevated light rail ending close to Canary Wharf). Wasting time and energy on travel for the sake of it is silly.
Yes, it'll be the thing we don't expect and cannot predict that is interesting...
I'll not start ranting about ID cards, save to point out I happen to be wearing the t-shirt from the only political campaign I've participated in: No2ID (against a previous UK government's heavy-handed attempt to introduce universal ID here),
Rgds
Damon
Minor Corrections (Score:5, Interesting)
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".