In the week between Christmas and New Year’s someone always
posts a ‘what-we-predicted-for-the-future’ article. It’s inevitable. And usually the ideas presented for the
present day, then the future, at that time are a strange mix of absolutely spot
on and so horribly off base.
Whenever I consider the ‘future’, the images conjured are
from 1982’s Blade Runner, which, if IMDB is correct was set in 2019, 5 years
from now. Floating dirigible restaurants
that pull up to my moveable apartment wall, I don’t think so, but roving food
trucks, well maybe, if Toronto Council will get over themselves!
There’s no Rosie the robot to clean our homes but robot vacuums,
yes, which if you’re paying attention on youtube, are the favourite mobility
device of the domestic cat.
Personal, portable computers, sure, and in several formats,
but what are we doing with them?
Communicating yes. Finding ways
to entertain ourselves, sure. But primarily
because we’re all trapped in some sort of gridlock travelling back and forth
between work and home because flying cars, streamlined transit and transporters
never did materialize.
And those devices; of which access to them is still
determined by economics, meaning that educating children across economic status’
still isn’t a level playing field.
Food preparation. If
you want something decent, you still cook it.
And at my house on a gas stove that’s older than my parents. Collecting said food, still done the old
fashioned way, by going to the store and dragging it home because consumer
friendly online shopping of the basics still isn’t with us in a real way.
Online shopping – absolutely. But delivery and returns still done via ‘snail’
mail, which is, in Canada at least, as we speak, being serviced out of existence. And every password you use must be unique to
the point of inertia. My personal credit
card password requires so many specific elements I cannot usually remember it
for more than a day, and I don’t dare save it to my computer memory because the
banking system isn’t hack proof.
In a lot of ways the human factor dictates how quickly we
move away from known methods. The truth
is the tried and true often prevails even when it may not be the most ‘best’
way to go about something. Landlines are
still in use because when the power grid fails, and the cell networks go too,
the old land line still works. I see my
friends less, but talk to them more because of social media, in fact I talk to
people I don’t really know, if I’m honest because somehow the social of social
media makes it possible for us to congregate.
And yet we have the highest level of single person households ever. The future, the now, is bright, but it moves
at the pace we can stand it.
It’s all fascinating.
Some of it is digital. But the
real question is, since it’s 2014, why can’t they invent a decent mascara that
does not run?
