Everytime I watch a science fiction show, I can't help to notice the same silly mistake occurring over and over again. The future is pictured based on the past, not the...future.
For example, when Star Trek was a thing, people thought that we would have more light flashing buttons thus the electrical panels in the show were overwhelmed with flashing buttons. Imagine how silly the cast felt when they had an iphone in their hands. Guns also seem to follow the same handheld design. Apparently even centuries in the future, people are imagined to shoot some kind of projectiles to each other.
I was having a discussion today with a friend and she asked me whether or not we will have flying cars in the future. My reply was a simple no. The reason for this is that I believe people will communicate entirely online with minimal physical presence. Most of the commune routes that we observe today are useless. For example, people go to offices when they can work from home. Materials are transferred from point A to point B, usually accompanied by a human. In the future transportation and construction will coordinated by drones and similar automated machinery rather than human beings. Traveling physically from one point to another will be considered some kind of weird fetish.
Our jobs will be creative. There would be no need for anything that can be executed by an algorithm. Population will drop dramatically as our life expectancy will grow more and more. Nothing of the future will remind us the present. Even TV shows and formal entertainment will be a thing of the past. Stories for our minds will be generated randomly based on a theme — much like the screensaver on our computer screens. Computer screens will also be obsolete along with the things we called "labtops".
Medication will be given from the first day of our birth. The cause of most of our illnesses is due to chemical mistakes. In the future nanobots in our bloodstream will coordinate most of our functions much like our immune system works. Unless a grave injury occurs, there would be no need to visit the doctor.
Schools and universities will also be obsolete since information will be able to be downloaded in our brains. Even the ability to think critically, aka combine different data sets, will be a downloadable feature. The only individual thing that will persist is individual creativity which will be subjective based on a given consensus — much like art works today. In essence it will be pointless.
If people in the past were able to see how people in the future are going to live, they would describe them with one word — boring. The reason for this is because humans always work towards efficiency, cutting off the "magic" or the "middle man". For example, in the past people needed to court each other excessively and follow specific rituals in order to have sex. Today, you flash your finger on the right on Tinder and in 2 hours you are having sex. This very idea from someone in the 1900's would seem grotesque.
Humans are helpless romantics. We like to believe that what we value today will be carried out in the future and will be presented in a much better way because most things in our present define who we are. The truth is that most of the things that we value today will cease to exist. In all likelihood, they will be laughable material from those looking back to our century. The fault of our future fiction is that we overestimate our importance and place in the overall course of human history. This is also the reason why every single generation believes that the world is coming to an end in their lifetime. We handicap the future because we cannot picture our own self in it.
