Monday, October 26, 2015

Thoughts on the future.

There are people out there who believe.

They believe in an always on, driven by data, written in code, interconnected future where your doctor will ping you if you have a bacon cheeseburger or take a shortcut during your seven mile run and all the terabytes you generate will be fed to a supercomputer which will tell you to lose two pounds, or barring that, will summon a tiny sewing robot to let out your pants.

There are people out there who believe.

I must confess....I want to believe.

I want to believe in driverless cars and getting hot food delivered in an instant and speedy internet and superbrains that have access to all the information ever-generated and curing leukemia will be no more difficult than curing bacon.

I want to believe.

And then.

Then, you get to work early, for a conference call with Bangalore.

And of course no one is on-time.

And then 31 people dial in, and it's echo-ey, as if all 31 people were inside 31 buckets and talking simultaneously and you can't understand a word.

So beep beep beep, all 31 people hang up and hold-music hold-music hold-music, all 31 people dial in again, and  now there's a sound like a busy signal so you can't hear a thing, much less yourself think.

I want to believe that the future will be a seamless place of never-ending bliss, where things just work.

I want to believe we'll make more intelligent decisions and be able to discover and learn and communicate like never before.

I want to believe all that.

But in reality, I believe that the future will be like the world's always been.

Full of dumb mistakes.

Missed connections.

Beeps and echoes and static.

Where we believe the future will be better.

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