Timewarp discovered: What daily life will be like in the year 2049
Have you ever wondered what life will be like in the year 2049?
Amazingly I seem to have stumbled across a timewarp. The blog p40y is being written every day in the year 2049, and each blog post appears daily 40 years earlier. Since the blog began on New Years Day 2049 (and 2009 via the timewarp) some fantastic insights into the future 40 years from now.
Here are a few excerpts that give a flavor for what we can expect at the end of this half-century.
Today I sat in a meeting with some people and some Claytronic replicas of other people that were unable (couldn’t be bothered?) to make the meeting in person. Now I know this is a new technology but it’s total rubbish. In theory you just pmail or gfax over some instructions to a giant programmable lump of clay sitting in one of the spare chairs and it automatically morphs into a life size 3-D, walking, talking replica of the real person.
However, it didn’t. In this instance the millions of tiny microprocessors didn’t seem to be communicating with each other correctly – or the electrostatic forces weren’t working because someone left an AiPhone™ on – and what we got instead was a giant brown talking turd. “Different day, same old talking shit” as one wit observed.
This is particularly interesting. Kil’n People by David Brin, one of my favorite science fiction books, describes a world in which people create animated clay replicas of themselves. I have also blogged about a Japanese professor who has created a doppelganger of himself – though not in clay…
DNA Hacking
Wealth Adaptation Syndrome (WAS): a defining malaise of our times and the opportunities that stem from it
I was interviewed last week on social trends in 2009 for a feature story in the Sunday Times magazine in Perth. In order to illustrate my ideas, I coined a term, Wealth Adaptation Syndrome, or WAS.
(One of the great things about the growth of Internet content and search engines is that when you invent a phrase you can check whether anyone has ever written it before. This post is the first ever appearance of the phrase ‘Wealth Adaptation Syndrome’. However note that Sudden Wealth Syndrome (a quite different phenomenon) was commonly referred to during the dot-com boom.)
Wealth Adaptation Syndrome is, quite simply, the process of adjusting to significantly different perceptions of your personal wealth. This applies quite differently depending on starting levels of wealth, but in all cases requires adjustment of not just wealth status, but also social status, and usually behaviors including spending patterns.
