Complex Numbers

Groundhog Year

This one's been hanging out in my queue for three months. If I thought I'd still be around in 9.75 years, I'd drag it out then. As it is, I'm leaving it here so y'all can laugh about it at the end of 2029.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/12/new-technology-2020-will-change-life-as-...

“It Won’t Be Pretty”: How the Next Decade’s Technological Tsunami Will Change Life as We Know It
Self-driving cars, iPads, Uber: The technological advances of this decade have happened so quickly that their breadth is difficult to comprehend. The next decade? That, times ten.

The great thing about prognostications is how terribly wrong they all are in hindsight. Even, sometimes, three months later.

This time a decade ago, there was no such thing as an iPad.

As far as I'm concerned, there still isn't.

There were no food delivery meal kits.

Or these.

You didn’t speak to a machine called Alexa or Siri

Still don't.

or get laid with an app called Tinder.

hahahahahahaha

You stayed in hotels, not Airbnbs.

I have a prediction about Airbnb. It's short-term. You can guess what it is. Anyway, I've never used it. Too much potential for scamification.

You telephoned a cab company, rather than pressing a button and waiting for an Uber or a Lyft.

Okay, I do the ride-share thing. Or I did, back when there was anywhere to go.

You didn’t waste hours of your day on Instagram, scrolling from one box to the next like a gerbil running on a wheel as an algorithm watches and takes notes.

Still don't.

Jobs that are now performed by hundreds of thousands of people—Uber driver, gif-maker, social media influencer—didn’t exist.

Out of those three, only one is an actual job.

You likely read the newspaper in the morning, watched the news at night, and consumed a trickle of information in between by going to Yahoo News or through the RSS feed you’d painstakingly constructed, rather than drinking from the fire hose that is Twitter.

What's a "newspaper?" And I've never had cable TV, so no nightly news. I still have an RSS feed I comb through daily, because I fucking hate Twitter with the fiery power of a thousand supernovae.

Things felt slower.

Did not.

Now, this whirlwind of a past decade could be just a taste of what’s to come.

Or it could be the last gasp of a dying civilization.

We’re just now seeing deep fakes used to make even more believable fake news for political gain.

Thus leading to the inevitable conclusion that everything you see is fake, so you start to disbelieve everything.

And yet a decade from now, on the eve of 2030, we’ll look back at today in astonishment at how primitive life was in 2019.

While the last dregs of humanity are stalking bison on the prairie.

By then, it’s likely that cars will drive themselves.

Right, because we'll have convinced people that 10,000 deaths a year from driverless cars is objectively better than 30,000 from human drivers.

They won’t even look like cars, more like traveling gyms or gaming cars or mobile beds to nap on during your commute.

Mine would look like a drunk tank. What's a commute?

Some will fly. (Maybe most of them will.)

Uh huh. And we'll have unlimited clean energy from fusion, and warp drive, and teleportation, and a post-capitalist utopia.

Your phone could be replaced with a contact lens, or some glasses that (finally) look like glasses.

A little bit of actual thought would tell anyone why contact lenses won't work for communication, at least not until we have a better brain/machine interface, at which point, what's the use of lenses?

On the flip side, health care will go through the most substantial changes since the invention of antibiotics.

Snort.

And you might get to live until you’re 150.

In this world? Dear gods, please, no, just end it already.

My guess is that a decade from now, society will look nothing like it does today—and it won’t be pretty.

And finally we get a prediction we can actually bank on.



That's right. I poked my head out of my hole and saw my shadow, and I'm predicting six more decades of winter.