As the year draws to a close, here’s a glimpse of what life might be like…some day, according to a group of futurologists . . .
• Facial recognition: “In 30 years it’s quite possible that you will not use a key or even a credit card. You’ll use your face or iris to make purchases and open locks.” — Martin Ford, author of “Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything.”
• Drones: “We will need 3 million more Artificial Intelligence engineers by 2030. We’ll need people to be drone command-center operators who will fly surveillance drones” to help stop crime by providing eyes everywhere, responding to gunshots (picked up from sensitive receivers all around cities) and following criminals until police on the ground can cuff them. — Thomas Frey, founder and executive director of DaVinci Institute, a futuristic think tank in Colorado.
• Food: It’ll be different. Largely due to global warming, fish will be 30% smaller in the coming decades. On the upside, your water will be exquisite. “People will pay a lot to get perfect water,” according to Frey. “But it will be exactly what you should be drinking. It may have more potassium, vitamin C or oxygen.” Restaurants? Robotic kitchens “will prepare hyper individualized menus for diners. Now, people are picky about “eating or not eating certain things” — like dairy or gluten — “and it will be even more so in the future. You may order a cheeseburger or chicken wing and it will be individualized for you with robots adding trace elements [such as fluoride or zinc] which will enhance your health.”
• Vacations: Hyper-loops will zip humans through vacuum tunnels at 750mph and hyper-speed jets will take passengers “from New York to Los Angeles in a couple hours”, according to Frey. Drone taxi cabs will transport them from the airport to a hotel. And not only will there be space hotels, there may be luxurious hotels under the seas and floating cities with zoos and animals that you can’t imagine…such as a revived species of woolly mammoth.
• Other highlights: Designer babies (pick your kids’ hair color, athleticism and even intelligence), Longer lives (AI, customizable medicine and disease-curing tech will allow us to live until we are “hit by a bus”, according to Ford and Google’s futurologist Ray Kurzweil.)
• Hollywood: You’ve heard of “Deep-fakes”? “Within 30 years…the heirs of deceased movie stars will continue to make movies [starring their ancestors]. None of the characters we see in movies will be ‘real’. Producers will create characters by having conversations with artificial intelligence. (So, no use for actors…which of course means no TMZ!)
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