Who Wants a Frictionless Future?
It’s July 14, 2041. You wake with the gradual brightening of your bedroom lights, the shower already running at your preferred temperature. As you lather, you recount your dreams to your ButlerBot, the sophisticated AI that runs your smart home. It responds through the bathroom speakers with trenchant analysis consisting of Freudian factoids gleaned from Google. Once dressed, you use your brain implants to summon your commuter drone, and your ButlerBot hands you a packed lunch as you step into the drone’s mood-lit passenger pod.
Your ears pop as you are sucked skyward into a roiling, seething city-bound swarm of similar drones, each flight path controlled remotely by quantum computer. Noise-canceling speakers insulate you from the furious metallic buzz that surrounds you until the swarm spits you out and your drone glides down to your office basement. You step onto a conveyor belt that ribbons you up to your floor. Your firm’s ButlerBot greets you with a cappuccino, upon whose foam your initials are delicately traced.
Set aside for now the potential downsides of a twice-daily locust plague of flying robots (the hellish din, the blocking out of the sun, and so on), worries about where all this energy is coming from, and any qualms regarding the implants’ potential to permit remote access to your brain. Apart from all that, sounds great, right? No more sweaty…
