The Future We Should Have By Now
On the promise of technology, and why it hasn’t shortened our workweek yet
Okay, so we’re still waiting on flying cars and transporter beams and matter replicators, but to be fair, the technology we have is pretty remarkable. From the computing power in our smartphones, to solar power, to robots and learning algorithms — the future is coming along pretty well. Our daily lives today are packed with things that were all but unimaginable twenty, or even just ten, years ago. For all the technologies that haven’t materialized, there are others that would blow the minds of the sci-fi writers of past generations.
And while some of those imagined technologies may seem a little fanciful through a modern lens — like replicated-to-order food or a domestic robot servant — they are, in spirit, very much aligned with technologies that have come to be, in that they are technologies designed to do things for us to make our lives easier.
From washing machines, to cars, to the internet — the best advances in technology are the ones that take work off our hands and make our tasks more efficient. And on that front we have made incredible advances.
We can see it in the proliferation of machines in our own houses (coffee machines and stand mixers, not to mention dishwashers), and we…
