Because the future has just started
Of all the superpowers that I could get, if I could have any superpower, I think one of the most powerful would be to be able to go back in time one minute for a do over, whenever I needed to.
Often that’s all that is needed to make the difference between a bad situation and a good situation. Unfortunately, life doesn’t give us that option.
But wouldn’t it be wonderful if it did?
Nobody really knows how we manage to find something meaningful in every day.
And yet somehow we do.
We are now all used to the fact that Google Street View provides a digital double of our physical world. On your computer, you can now wander down many streets in American cities and suburbs.
Eventually such digital doubles will start showing up at home. At night a small drone will scan your house and update a digital representation of every room. By day you will use that representation for many purposes.
Of course there will be important privacy issues to work out here, but there will also be large paradigm changes in your relationship with where you live. The representation of your home will be processed by AI, which will keep an updated model of the state of everything.
If you are running low on bananas or shampoo or coffee, your AI will know that. And eventually, robots will be able to do something about it.
If you’d like, your AI will order you new bananas, and a robot will put them in your favorite place in the kitchen. And when you are running low on clean clothes, a robot will do your laundry, and then neatly fold and put away the clean clothes.
I don’t know about you, but I, for one, am looking forward robots doing my laundry.
Yesterday somebody asked me what is my favorite Beatles Song. And I realized that for me it is an impossible question.
The music of The Beatles — particular their master works, written from 1965-1970 — have influenced me in myriad ways. I probably I have a Beatles song for every mood, and to me each of their songs is its own profound little universe.
It is still an astonishment to me that so many brilliant, daring and diverse musical ideas could flow from the same small creative team. And I am sure I am far from alone in that opinion.
The last half century of writers of popular music — from Elton John to Taylor Swift — have been inspired by their unparalleled influence. And now we all live within a rich and luminous aesthetic Universe enabled by the genius of The Beatles. It is part of the very air we breathe.
So please don’t ask me which is my favorite Beatles song. You might as well ask me which is my favorite cubic foot of air.
In the future, when everyone is wearing sophisticated smart glasses, children will grow up learning how to have face to face conversations while also looking things up, checking social media, and having little text chats on the side. I wonder what this will mean for the future of attention.
Will people in general start to become distracted, as multitasking intrudes upon even the simplest conversation? Or will those children grow up to develop an entirely new skill set?
Those kids might grow up to develop the ability to be fully present in more than one conversation at a time, something that I don’t think I’ve really seen people do in today’s world. On the other hand, society might just start falling apart, as everybody finds themselves trying to engage in too many conversations at once.
I wonder which way it will go.
As you can see from the title of this post, I wanted the previous year to finish as quickly as possible.
Happy New Year everyone! Let’s all hope for a 2024 that is much, much better than the year that just ended.
What, in essence, does New Years mean to people? Clearly there is a lot of celebration involved.
At the stroke of midnight, many people go wild. They hug total strangers, and there is a general sense of good cheer and camaraderie.
But what exactly is it that is being celebrated? I used to not be sure, but after watching people celebrate New Years enough times, I think I know.
Although nobody really wants to admit it, New Years is really about one thing more than anything else. It’s about the fact that you and I are still here. We are the ones who will get at least one more ride around the merry-go-round.
That’s why we raise a glass at midnight with total strangers, and maybe also give them a big hug. We may not know who they are, and we may not have much in common with them.
But in that moment we have at least one thing in common. And it’s the most important thing.
Today is the birthday of Rudyard Kipling. The man was born on Dec 30, 1865, so if he were alive today, he would be 158, which would be very impressive.
As it happens, Kipling gave the best advice ever if you are a teacher:
If you give someone more than they can do, they will do it. If you give them only what they can do, they will do nothing.
Can you match title and subtitle?
| 1. Birdman 2. Candide 3. Frankenstein 4. Middlemarch 5. Oliver Twist 6. Peter Pan 7. Roots 8. Slaughterhouse Five 9. Tess of the D’Urbervilles 10. The Hobbit 11. Twelfth Night 12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin 13. Vanity Fair 14. Walden |
A. A Novel Without a Hero B. A Pure Woman C. A Study of Provincial Life D. Life Among the Lowly E. Life in the Woods F. Optimism G. The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up H. The Children’s Crusade I. The Modern Prometheus J. The Parish Boy’s Progress K. The Saga of An American Family L. The Unexpected Virtue of Innocence M. There and Back Again N. What You Will |
I am now used to the idea that I can have a skylight in my ceiling, even though I am not on the top floor of my apartment building. And I can have a portable chess set that can grow until the board is 10 feet wide.
I can make it snow indoors if I want, and I can draw in the air to create shapes that come to life, like Harold with his Purple Crayon. I can rotate a hypercube in 4D right in the middle of my office, and I can pull the Moon down from the sky right into my bedroom.
These are wondrous experiences, and I was able to create them because I have a Meta Quest 3 and I know how to program in WebXR. But such experiences won’t stay wondrous forever.
Sometime soon, everyone will have magic glasses. And when that happens, things like this will becom an ordinary part of daily life.
And then people won’t understand what the fuss was about. Just as people today don’t understand why a train coming toward you on a movie screen could ever have frightened anyone, or the how sound of a movie actor speaking could ever have seemed magical.
And when that happens, I will miss these early days of wonder.