Grave New World
Strange things are in store in the future. Today's portable telephones fit in a shirt pocket, and we can use them anywhere in the city. Eventually, some may be implanted in our bodies and we'll be able to use them anywhere in the world. You could call Mom from the jungles of the Amazon or the Gobi Desert, and she could answer you even if she's shopping in Tibet or white-water rafting in Colorado. You could reach anyone, anywhere, anytime. Future communication might as well be telepathy, since people with implanted telephones could carry on conversations invisible to everyone else.As we hurtle into the future, technology may make possible changes so drastic they'll have no visible connection with what came before. Imagine, for example, a world in which suing a doctor means suing the diagnostic program the doctor used. Imagine a world of greater financial instability and even shorter boom-and-bust cycles as government regulatory agencies designed for a slower, more leisured era utterly fail to keep up with the speed of international electronic money transfers. (Even as you read this, all the money you own is chasing everyone else's money around the world, twenty-four hours a day.)
Imagine a world where you can instantly alert the police if you are threatened with assault, sending them your exact location and a video of the potential attacker. Not even masks or darkness would help the mugger if your personal computer has infrared cameras and image-reconstruction software.
On the other hand, imagine real time cosmetic software that interposes itself between you and the camera of your picture phone, so that callers see only the face you want them to see. Imagine a world in which no news is trustworthy since any sound, image, scene, movie ---including those with apparently live-action famous personages---can be complete fiction. Imagine too a world of little or no privacy, of even greater earning power for the computer literate, of even bigger disparities between the haves and the have-nots, of wholesale social disruption as new and ever more volatile technology boils through society.
When mail is delivered in four-tenths of a second instead of four days, would you like to be a postal worker? What will it be like when the proportion of the work force in manufacturing in developed countries---now roughly 20 percent---drops to 10 percent---less than four times the 3 percent presently employed in agriculture, which itself once occupied over 90 percent of the population? In such a world postal workers may have lots of company.
Everywhere is Here