A day in 2050

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A Day in 2050

New York - I am 43, married and father of 3. Before going to bed at 22:00, I set my personal wearable bio monitor at 7:00 o’clock which means I want to wake up the latest at 7:00 tomorrow, Thursday. Then I kiss my kids goodnight, go to bed and read my e-book with interactive case studies before falling asleep.

Here is what happens next…

During the entire night, my PWBM (personal wearable bio monitor) monitors my sleep and it analyzes when is the best time to wake me up between 6:30 and 7:00, considering I want to wake up during a light sleep cycle while I am calm and rested and not during a deep and profound dream. So at 6:47, I am welcomed to the day by my personal mini-robot, sitting on my night table (this technology is based on a popular product introduced in 2008 time frame which was then called the Rabbit).

While gradually opening the blinds, my personal mini-robot says: “Good morning David, hope you had a good night of sleep. It will be a beautiful day today, blue skies with a forecast of 28 degree Celsius, your first meeting is at 9:00 with Mr. Johnson, Vice-President Marketing of 5Deka International. The stock value of 5Deka is now at 85.06$ up 3%; the most recent news concerning 5Deka is their acquisition of Web5.0 technologies, a new start up from Finland. Remember that you have a dentist appointment at 15:00 and your son’s live hockey practice at 19:00 tonight is cancelled. In sports news, Lance Armstrong Junior son’s announces his participation at the Tour of Europe for this summer with the US Government Web portal team.

Then I walk to my bathroom, where the light intensity increases as I enter the room and my favourite music starts to play. While I am approaching the shower, the shower starts automatically at my personal setting temperature, thanks to my PWBM and its wireless capability.

My house concierge, Asimo 5, a sophisticated robot manufactured in Japan by Honda, detects I am up and prepares me a nice cup of coffee. While I am enjoying my coffee, my news is 100% online and displayed on my holographic screen. My information is obviously adapted to my preferences. So great, no more dirty fingers after reading newspapers and recycle bins full of old papers. Each day I have my routine, first I want business highlights then comics followed by sports. This morning, I particularly enjoyed a business article which I simply asked Asimo to forward to my staff. My other key interests are nanotechnology and brain research; I am therefore receiving worldwide news on these topics every day.

After dressing up I eat my breakfast based on my nutritionist recommendations. Asimo tracks my calories intake at breakfast and suggests what to eat for lunch, considering my diet restrictions. I am over weighted by 1.7 kg. By the way, I love the new cereal boxes, my kids favourites’ are the Frosted Flakes. They enjoy the Tiger waving at us in the aisle at the grocery store…thanks to new Thin Electronic Paper technology, the new cereal boxes are now fully animated, no more 2D basic colors cover as they had in 2009…so fun but at the same time quite distracting while doing our groceries. I have to say, we were glad when they passed the new law, stating that boxes are not allowed to talk anymore unless they are at home, it is so much more pleasant to shop since then. (Note: we continue to go to the supermarket for food purchases because we prefer to choose our fruits ourselves).

While the family is having breakfast and the kids are getting ready to leave for school to learn social skills, my son Matt has time for a hockey practice with his teammates. By wearing his immersion full body suit connected to his Wii 3, he logs on to his hockey club practice session; they will do a 20 minutes drill as usual. My daughter Megan realizes that there is one player missing and offers to wear another immersion suit so she can evaluate if she as the ability to join my son’s hockey team herself (she always claim she could make it…). At the end of the practice, Matt manages to score two goals in a simulated reality hockey game. Once practice is done, Matt and his teammates are ready to leave for school, they all receive a message on their PCD (Personal Communicator Device) (the latest generation of the iPhone) with all their practice’s stat, including calories burned, heart rate curve and some highlights, including the two goals of Matt.

Every members of the family leave the house for school or work. The children take an AirBus on the skyway 15 north to reach their 260 km away advance school. Thanks to the new skyway network, the best North American schools are now reachable within minutes for everybody.

While going to the office, Jack (my neighbour) forgets that his FlyCar is equipped with GPS tracking device, which measures, amongst other things, speed and he receives a speeding ticket on his onboard computer in real time. Big Brother (or the Matrix, as some people call it based on a movie of the 90’s), is watching for these types of things in 2050. But I am not angry because since its inception, road accidents, due to bad drivers’ behaviour, have been declining at a tremendous rate. In fact, on top of it, FlyCars are now all equipped with ADD (Anti-Drunk Drive system) and casualties related to drunk driving have disappeared since.

My day at work is fun and filled with great opportunities on a worldwide basis. In 2050, closed offices are back as a way to reward strong performers and are not necessarily related to hierarchy.

I arrive at the office at 8:55 (today I have decided to work at the office vs. from home where I now work every other day). Anyhow, I need to jump on my 9:00 Holographic Tele-Presence meeting with the VP Marketing of 5Deka International. He is using a PowerPoint slide deck shared on my personal Tele-Presence system (PowerPoint is still used in 2050 with 3D multimedia enhancements and automated slides creation tools). With the new productivity tools, I now take notes directly on my 42” interactive screen by dragging items from the slides and writing directly on the screen which perfectly recognizes any handwriting. (By the way, when meetings take place in conference room, which is very rare these days, projectors are wireless and they transmit the presentation to your PCD directly, so you can refer to them during and after the meeting). Note: Mobile phones have completely merged with computers in the early 20’s.

While I am at work during lunch time, looking at my Kids Location (since the inception of the service, kidnapping rate has reduced drastically), I realize Megan is near my preferred bike store, ABC Cycling, I then send her an IVM (instant video message), and ask her to purchase a pairs of cycling socks, I am an avid Mountain biker.

I know I could avoid the physical visit and go to ABC-Cycling @Virtual-shopping-experience.com, hosted and powered by Amaze technology, but my family knows very well the owner and we still enjoy the human contact).

Note on history: back in 2014 timeframe, Amaze technology, Buy-Buy, Fruit and many other companies launched brand new shopping experiences, converting their 2D Web environment to fully 3D virtual shopping experiences. These new sites, influenced by multiple factors, such as the generation Y as well as online video games like WoW (World of Warcraft), Second Life and Barbie.com. Today shoppers have two options, either to navigate the site as a simple Avatar or as an Avatar-Plus. Most teens and young adults prefer the Avatar-Plus option because, on top of their online shopping experience, they are constantly under attack and challenged by Aliens and other creatures. They, of course, are rewarded and earn product rebates. This is a marketing strategy for having them shopping more often on their site and it has been working very well.

Let’s go back to Megan. As she enters the ABC Cycling store, she receives a personal greeting, welcoming her. She is the only one hearing it, thanks to her PCD and her newly integrated wireless ear piece, a brand new nanotech wireless device fully integrated to her human body. Of course, she could decide not to receive these welcoming messages, in a similar way as people used to ban ads on the internet, but my daughter likes them, it makes her feel important. On top of this, they know her profile and preferences due to FACE (a universal and global human library) and she’s told all the promotions targeted for her. SaSa, an intelligent Robot-Clerk, helps her in choosing the right socks for me.

As my daughter leaves the store with the two pairs of socks, she is scanned by a Human Body & RFID (*) Scanner and a thank you message comes to her Personal Communicator Device, with the detailed cost of her purchase. It has been billed to her bank account, automatically of course. Credit cards and other forms of plastic (waste) are history since 2039, thanks to the integration of bank account information in our PCD. This, not only makes purchases and transactions much easier and seamless, contributing to a drastic reduction in credit fraud as well.

(*) RFID, which means Radio Frequency ID tag, completely replaced barcodes in 2020 and are now on every single product. They can be scanned wirelessly. They increase productivity in the industry by a large factor; for instance, there is no need any more for laborious and costly inventory tracking. At any given point in time, a company knows exactly every single products it has on its shelves and in its warehouses.

Note on history: SaSa is the third generation of robot developed in Japan in 2007 timeframe, at that time her name was Saya; initially developed as an experiment receptionist in a University, and as a teacher in 2009 in Japan. Japan was very concerned in early 2000, by the drastic drop in birth rate. With population aging, Japan saw no other alternatives then to develop a strong national program to build intelligent robots. The goal was to help Japan’s society, with a target date of 2025, to create about 3.5 million robots. It happened as planned, and that was the era of Saya2, the predecessor of SaSa, which was introduced a few years ago on a worldwide basis.

After leaving work, at a decent hour I should add, I decide to stop by my local community health center and visit sick kids by giving 30 minutes of my time. This is a new society rhythm, established and influenced greatly by some movie stars.

My 12 years old daughter, Loly, who arrives home at 17:00, receives an IVM (Instant Video Message) from her best friend, inviting her for the coming long weekend to visit Spain with her parents. The problem, she said to her friend, is that she does not speak Spanish. “No problem replied her friend; I’ll send you the link for the Spanish 101 download”. Thanks to Braindownload.com, a solution of Brain Research Inc., she schedules the upload of Spanish 101 to her brain for the next night so she can have some basic Spanish for the week-end trip.

Note on history: Brain Research Inc. discovered four years ago (in 2046), how to store information in the human brain, how brain memory works and how to expand brain usage from 15% to 30%. This was done by pure coincidence; they discovered this while looking for a cure to paralysis. Funny enough, this is similar on how researchers at 3M discovered the famous glue of the Post-IT (which is not sold anymore as it was replaced by electronic devices in 2024).

Back in early 2000, this was only conceivable in science fiction and Artificial Intelligence conferences (i.e. uploading information to a brain). Advances in research on the human brain between the years 1950 to 2010 have shown little progress in this domain compared to the huge complexity of the human brain. Back then, the human brain was a huge mystery, and questions like: “how do you remember, at the age of 50, an odour you smelled for the fist time at the age of 4?” remained unanswered. Where this information could be stored in the human brain, how is it stored and how to extract this information?

After dinner my kids want to watch the hockey game live but, before, Matt asks if we can watch our last night dreams. I agree but, before watching with the whole family, I prefer to watch my dream in private first, in case the dream is not suitable for everyone. The new PDR (Personal Dream Recorder) technology is fairly new and still misses some important features…

Finally the NHL hockey game starts and wow, it’s exciting. One of the many enhancements is that each player now wears a camera and a PWBM (the personal bio sensor), so you can see in real-time the player point of view of the action as well as his heart rate. Quite thrilling to see how the goal tender heart rate increases when faced to a 2 on 1… I have to say though, my wife hates it, she feels it is too intrusive.

I am now ready for a good night of sleep… and enjoy a long weekend! (Every two weeks, weekends have four days for family time. This was achieved thanks to improved productivity in the workplace which allowed governments worldwide to reduce the average work week to a maximum of 30 hours. I love it so much!)

Wondering what happened during the weekend in Spain with Loly?

While she visits Spain’s new Walt Disney Park, Loly calls us just before lunch on the Saturday (long distance calls are part of history, communication worldwide are now free to and from anywhere in the world) and invites us to join her to the new Monster train ride, which takes place in 30 minutes. The whole family logs on to Walt-Disney-Experience.com, we all put on our immersion full body suit and sit with Loly in the train ride, in simulated reality of course (we are in New York after all). Thanks to the Walt Disney permanent robot installed in the last row of the train, we get to feel the ride almost as if we were there.

Did I tell you that Matt and Loly just got invited to Good Morning America? They won a competition. They built a modern school campus in Lego Universe 4 (an enhanced and immersive version of Lego Universe, basically a virtual game environment introduced originally in 2009 time frame), and were selected for their creativity and talent. I think they might become architects, they are for sure great leaders already… Loly was leading a team of 22 kids from around the world to build this campus.

From the authors: For sure, the future can be predicted differently and we respect each different vision out there. There is no guarantee that the future we predict here will happen in any way, this is just our own perception, based on our research, of what we see as most likely to happen. Some elements of the future are very much predictable and within reasonable time frame, others are far more complex and involve changes in ethics and human behaviours. Brain research is probably the area which is the most fascinating and perturbing at the same time, due to its potential impacts. We understand that. We have not covered too much global environment issues in this particular version, this is on purpose, we believe some leaders are doing an excellent job on that front like for instance Al Gore and his team. We support at 100% the environmental cause, a key aspect of the future, and we encourage any measure that can help reduce global warming, which impact the ocean’s level and worldwide drinking water reserves.

Hope you enjoyed.