You've probably read (or at least read the Cliff notes of) the grim, fatalistic futures predicted by mid-century authors like Ray Bradbury, Anthony Burgess, and Isaac Asimov. Or you've watched The Jetsons.
In the Science Fiction genre, space wars are a daily occurrence, levitating cars rush through traffic veins in the sky, and there's always an imminent threat of robot takeover (I'm rooting for the robots).
While authors' accounts of these chrome-plated, shrubbery-forsaken worlds are often accurate, no past author could have predicted the cell phone epidemic, or the idea that an entire music collection can be stuffed into a fiendishly small iPod.
That's why, by standing on the shoulders of giants, I hope to make accurate predictions about the high-tech, cutting-edge future of our world.
This is how it's going down.
First of all, paper money will not exist in the future. Instead, a chip will be implanted into one's left hand at birth to create a digital bank account. Money can be added or withdrawn via the chip, like a regular credit card. The government can also easily withdraw taxes to do ... whatever they do with tax money.
Of course, access to the account can be denied or doled out in small allowances to wasteful teenagers and children attempting to buy diabetic candy (cane sugar will have been banished due to Atkins Law), and to distraught gamblers who sold their wife and children on eBay in an attempt to pay back their Yahoo! Electronic Poker debt.
But let me further explain this chip. The chip in fact can be used for everything: as a tracking device, a vehicular levitation portkey (a garage door opener), alarm clock, mp3 player, and cellular phone. You know how people make that little hand motion with their pinkie and thumb when they tell you to call them later? That's how talking into your handphone will work. And when the government needs to, they can use the chip to track down your criminal record, location, and worth as a human being.
But technological convenience doesn't stop there. All corporations and industries in existence will team up to create a company called "Corporation Incorporated." Each individual will then have constant access to the Corp Inc. Shopping Network, where the desire for a movie, latte, or cigarette will be sensed by the handchip and materialize in front of a person's eyes, funds providing. It's like Willy Wonka meets The Matrix, only the candy tastes like cancer and you have to pay for the guns.
Oh, I forgot to mention that people won't have legs either. An accidental genetic modification during a fetus-perfecting incident will in fact create an amazing new trend.
A genetic glitch causes little 944-43-4759 to be born without legs. The distraught parents, fearing for their child's ability to cope in the modern world, sue the cloning industry and receive a hefty sum of money in their handchips, as well as a motorized, levitating chair for their child.
Jealous neighbors see the chair and suddenly question why they don't have one as well, or why they've been walking their whole lives, for that matter. Mass surgery and genetic modifications go underway, and soon everyone is chugging along in their legless antigravity chairs, sporting plastic FF-cup breasts and expressionless Botox faces (metro-sexuals get in on the action, too).
Once pampered by legless mobilization, people will also begin to complain that the process of eating takes too much work. Enter intravenous feeding, where Burger King and Krispy Kreme (both affiliates of Corp Inc.) are pumped through your veins around the clock. At the end of each month there will be a "dumping season," - what the p.c. Corp Inc. refers to as "Human Lipid Disposal Management"- where the excessive fat is pumped out of the individual and used for cooking McDonald's french fries.
Further, the concept of "love" will be lost, grades will be the sole measure of a child's worth, people will live underground due to o-zone depletion and the polar ice caps melting, and most people's lives will be spent staring at a screen that flashes brief, seizure-inducing commercial messages 24-7. In fact, you'll barely have to move at all, except maybe to adjust your catheter tube.
But perhaps this is just some far-off, idealistic dream.
