Build your own future

In the last issue we had featured the future of transportation based on what could happen in the coming days. But there are many who would predict the future by simply building it themselves. One such attempt is by Toyota. Their planned Woven City in Japan near Mount Fuji will be a 175-acre project that will just go ahead and build a future prototype. It will have autonomous cars powered by Hydrogen cells. Robots, smart homes and other forms of personal mobility will feature in the project.

The Bitcoin project also comes under that category. Man first adopted barter, then gold, then metal coins and then paper money. Finally everything was traded online so it was inevitable that a totally virtual currency created from scratch would one day rule the economy. But it was quite difficult to see governments and central banks getting together and making such a currency. Not anymore thanks to the creators of Bitcoin who just went ahead and created it using blockchain. Today Bitcoin is worth billions of dollars, has led to other virtual currencies flooding the market and brought the entire technology of blockchain firmly into public discourse. It will now be much easier to agree on a single virtual global currency sometime in the future.

China also fast forwarded the future by bringing in a credit system and facial recognition system for all its citizens. Such a thing is not possible today in most democracies. However the very fact that such a system exists anywhere in the world makes it inevitable that other countries will start adopting it one by one. The first universal biometric system was India’s Aadhaar which came after similar projects had been shelved in countries like the UK and USA. These two systems alone mean that more than 2.5 billion people in the world are already under some biometric scheme or the other. The entire human race will follow.

People pushing grand schemes like creating human colonies on Earth, creating artificial meat that could one day replace the entire global livestock system and creating quantum computers which could have a runaway effect all technologies. Another brave new world is being created via Virtual Reality-Augmented Reality-Mixed Reality.

The biggest X factor is Artificial Intelligence which was mostly conceptual till the 2000s and really took off in the 2010s. Will the 2020s see a HAL 9000 (Arthur C Clarke’s Space Odyssey series) or Skynet (Terminator series) or Data (Star Trek: The Next Generation) or even a Samantha (Her)? There are currently hordes of visionaries working 24X7 to make all of them possible.

The future could come sooner than you think!