The World of Later On
Thinking One Thousand Years Ahead
Our lives are the merest blip. To a very accurate approximation you don’t exist; billions of years passed prior to your arrival on this earth, and billions more will pass after you have gone.
Which is to say that there is nothing particularly special about right now, apart from the fact that you’re extremely lucky to be aware of things at this point in time.
Technology is accelerating at an amazing pace. Things that we take for granted today—things that seem to have been around forever—these things will sooner or later prove to have been a stepping stone on the way to something altogether different.
To drive the point home, let’s consider one piece of technology that we’re all familiar with: motor vehicles. They are a status symbol, a form of entertainment, a home away from home. They are one of the most expensive items any of us will ever own. And yet they won’t be around for very much longer, relatively speaking.
Owning a motor vehicle is completely irrational. They cost a lot of money. They consume a lot of money, in terms of taxes, insurance, servicing and fuel costs. They sit idle 99% of the time. They are large, and need to be stored securely wherever we take them. We’ve modified the design of our dwellings to incorporate multiples of them, to the extent that the frontage of most modern homes in Australia are significantly garage-esque. Instead of garden, over half of my front yard is driveway.
Do I need to mention expensive multi-storey carparks taking up space in all the places I like to visit? Cramped street parking? Peak hour traffic? Our cities are designed around the idea of motor vehicles. Even though freeways filled with single-occupancy vehicles heading in the same direction are incredibly inefficient caricatures of a good transportation system, with components moving and fighting against one another instead of co-operating to achieve a common goal.
In the world of the future there will be less pressure for each of us to leave our dwellings and travel somewhere else at the same time. It will be easier to get work done from wherever we happen to be, as jobs become increasingly dependent on the computer and the network. The same goes for education. The idea of needing to own a motor vehicle will slowly become less and less commonly held.
Imagine a world without all of those things we’ve created to accommodate the motor vehicle. How would you design a dwelling if it didn’t need a garage or a driveway? What would you do with a massive room right at the front of your house that overlooked a large space of unused land? Imagine what it would be like if travelling to other locations was most usually done for social reasons. This is what the future will bring; perhaps not in a century, but certainly within a millennium.
It will begin with driverless taxis in a populous city with readily navigable streets, such as Manhattan. Then to subscription-based taxi services (imagine paying a flat monthly fee to travel as much as you need to). Someone will solve the problem of how to move your belongings around with you, although that problem will eventually be redefined anyway (as copies of things become acceptable substitutes for the original). Our lives will become enriched as we transition to travelling only when desired, and continue to conduct our affairs as we do so.
So, that’s my prediction. Driverless taxi service in Manhattan by 2020. Subscription-based taxi service available in multiple locations in the US by 2030. Vehicles per capita to drop below 50% in the US by 2050. Houses commonly built without consideration of motor vehicle storage by 2100. Roads, highways, parking garages, petrol stations and all such ameneties to be relocated away from places of public gathering by 2200. No traffic signals. No signage. No accidents. No drunk driving. And newborn children to grow up in a world where the idea of motor vehicle ownership is almost laughable well before 3013.
