The Future is Now!

In addition to have one of the cooler and more memorable names, ever, Faith Popcorn has a very cool job: she's a futurist.

Her website, however, sucks.

I've been watching this series on the Discovery Channel where they're looking ahead fifty years and reporting on how we'll live. Well, I won't be living then, but you will, and I'm afraid, like most of these predictions, they're being far too generous. Their depictions of future life, I predict, won't be true.

Many of the city scenes look to be the same ones recycled from the 1950s when they were talking about the year 2000. It didn't happen in the last fifty years, and I doubt it will in the next. With the exception of Los Angeles, most cities just don't feel the need to tear down every existing structure just to make room for the new ones, but these depictions of future cities pretty much look like they have to do that. There's nothing but tall, stately buildings connected by walkways that hang in the air and are visited by flying machines, which I also doubt we'll ever have.

Oh, sure, we may have flying cars, but given the density of most urban environments, only an idiot would think we'd be flying in them. If we get flying cars at all, I can't see them being illegal inside any city limits. They'd be fine, I suppose, for dashing between cities, but I wouldn't want to fly surrounded by the same million people who have trouble aiming their cars on the streets.

What I would like is personal blimps. We could all putt around at no more than thirty miles an hour, and if our blimps collided, we'd just bounce off each other, anyway.

The future, I'm convinced, will be more or less like the present or, to take it further, like the past couple of thousand years. Life hasn't changed all the much, but many of these predictions, somehow, seem to think we'll all be completely different. Computers and the Internet may well have changed how we get information and brought us all closer together, but it hasn't changed human existence all that much. Sure, you can pop in here and read what I'm thinking about, or visit a better site and actually learn something, but life is pretty much the same as it was before we were all connected. We just spend more time looking at monitors and less time reading and talking.

I'd like a job making predictions. It has to have even less accountability than telling people about tomorrow's weather (which, I think, will be more or less like today's).