Lately I have been thinking about the future and serendipitously I found this post about Life in 2020. Several weeks ago I read T.C. Boyles book "A Friend of the Earth" which takes place in the mid 2020's. It is a wonderful book about eco-disaster, life in the future, and looking back on the 1990s. In today's Financial Times (27/09/04) there was a whole section on the future of employment and how we will work in the future. As it asserts in the lead article, I do believe that privacy will no longer be an issue and all of our activities will be monitored. Communications mechanisms will be ubiquitous and unregulated. Much, much more work will be done remotely and coordinated via the web. Machines will communicate more than they do today but will still require direction from humans. In the next 15 years the magnitude of change will be far faster than anything we have ever seen before.
British newspaper The Guardian is running a Guardian special: the world in 2020 series.
Yesterday's It's all for your own good article forecasts how by 2020, no aspect of your life will be safe from prying eyes, or from interfering official nannies: analysis of your urine in your workplace, remote control of your car speed, facial recognition systems, etc.
Technology will be at the service of the government, and its use will increasingly force us to consider the balance between the freedom of the individual and intrusion into our daily lives by the state.
Quite insightful is also the article Only connect which examines the impact of wireless on our lives by 2020, from RFID chips to robots and artificial intelligence, cars, energy, etc.
[Smart Mobs]
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