42 Points on the Future of Everything
by Nick Farr on May 24, 2009
in Economic Theory, Future Shock, SIGINT09
When I asked Twitter what I should bring up in a talk on “The Future of Everything”, the only consistent answer I got was 42. So, I came up with a talk featuring 35 points on the future that I’ve been thinking and invited fellow SIGINT participants to fill in the rest.
The More Things Change, The More Stay the Same
- In the future, there will still be bad, memory leaking code
- More data will be collected, and they still won’t know what to do with it
- More “content” will be produced, it will be cheaper and of lower quality
- LOLCats will not die, stupid memes will only get worse
- Privacy is a relic of the past
- Hackers will proliferate: Hacking in general will become more important
- You’re still going to die
Old Memes: Things Ain’t Like They Once Was
- Profanity
- Arbiters of Taste
- Context
- Linear Narratives
- Fixed Realities : Everyone Will Construct Their Own Reality
- Newspapers : The Daily Newspaper is Dead
The Future is Now: We Can See, Touch and Taste It.
- Voluntary Surveillance : The Creation of Parallel Realities
- Ethnic Identity as a Choice : Everyone Will Decide What Race to Be
- Smarter Terrorists : More of Them, More Creative Attacks
- More Democracy : People Have the Tools to Make Decisions
- People Will Do More With Less : Work 2.0, Energy 2.0, Materials 2.0
- World Population Will Shrink (Because It Has To)
- Money Will Lose Importance
- Information You Produce Will Gain Importance as Currency
- We Will Have to Use Less Energy: Fewer Resources, More Users, Heavier Load
- We Will Source More Locally
Tomorrow : Educated Guesses About the Future
- Makerbot = Altair 8800
- Girls Will Get Into RepRap…When They Find Out It Makes Shoes
- We Will Design Our Own Things
- We Are Making Backup Copies Of Our Personas
- Symbolic Interactionism ++
- The Future Will Be More Modular
- Microsoft Won’t Sell Software Anymore
- The Basic Income Will Be The New Idea of Freedom
- The Final Frontier Belongs to Us (Government Has Failed at Space Exploration)
- Sattelite Internet by 2020: Net Neutrality Fight Will Be Won in Space
- C-Base Will Pwn the Moon
Revenge Affects: The Future Is Not All Hope and Dreams
- Water, Water Everywhere : And Were Flushing Out What’s Left to Drink
- People Will Get More Spiritual
Crowdsourced Items
- Radioactive Mutant Vampire Zombie Robots from Outerspace (Corrected, see comments)
- Future of Warfare: Perpetual, Asymmetric Warfare
- Digital Drugs & Data Integrity : Your Best (and Possibly Last Trip)
- Risk Cannot Be Managed
- Crowdsourcing Works, Bitches
- Time is a finite resource … Even If We Have Club-Mate
Other ideas people have suggested since I’ve been in the Hackcenter:
* Wikipedia: We will spend more time thinking and researching, less time spent on reference.
* We will work WITH nature, not against it (follows with the argument of the law of entropy and revenge affects)
[Reply]
Nick, thanks a lot for your inspiring and entertaining talk at Sigint, I’m happy I had the chance to listen to it. (And let me congratulate you to being the most stylishly dressed hacker at the whole conference
I’ve got a couple of issues with some of your theses, though. You say that we will have to do less with more – marginal costs of production and distribution will continue to decrease. From that you derive that information will eventually replace money as the prime resource. Yet as we know, the internet has brought the production and distribution cost of information so low you may consider them nil for the future – this has been the real game changer, as the music majors and the knowledge industry may be all to ready to prove. Information is free, even ideas are free – which means, from an economic point of view, that they have no value as a trade community. Which isn’t to say that smart people won’t be able to build a reputation but I guess news of money’s demise may be a bit premature.
I’d also like to object to the points about digital natives not needing contexts and the death of linearity. We are (and in my opinion, always will be) story-telling machines, this is hard-wired into our mode of verbal communication, and this will always force us to a certain degree of linearity to be understood by others. Which is a good thing IMHO: imagine a world without stories – I’d be out of work even sooner.
But maybe it’s just a question of putting it: If you mean that the dominant mode of storytelling )i.e. communication) will be less Shakespeare and more Tarantino, I’m all with you.
[Reply]
Hi Nick… for Point 37, it was: radioactive mutant vampire zombie robots from outerspace
and nice talk, you rock!!!
[Reply]
42a. Gene hackers and DIYBiologists will create cool new creatures. Or not so cool things…
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