In gratitude for Paul’s suggestion that all blogjune-ers post about the same topic on the same day, I created a pre-packaged question and offered it to other #blogjune folk as a topic for today.
Or – if you have been lurking, you could make this your one #blogjune post and play too. As long as you pop it somewhere with a URL then post the URL to Twitter with the #blogjune hashtag then I will slurp it up into a Storify here tomorrow. The topics are below. Respond to just one or both.
- If you could go back and tell your 20 year old self one thing that was going to happen to you between then and today, what would that be?
- In 20 years time (presuming the world gets better, not worse) what do you think will be the biggest technological difference between your life now and your life then ?
And – although I have had a lot of time to think, I am not really prepared.
If I went back to when I was 20, I guess I would let myself know that my mum would die in 12 years time. I am not sure whether the rules of this question allow it (heck – it’s my question, they do) but I would tell my younger self that there was a test for that kind of slow-growing cancer and that I should persuade mum to get checked regularly.
In 20 years time, I think the biggest difference will be around being able to be identified without any doubt. I can imagine some kind of remote DNA scanner that would be incorporated in many of the sites that we are today hooking up as “Internet of Things”, but super-augmented to the point that everything in my environment was tracking me and recording data. Since the world gets better, rather than leading to some kind of dystopian enslavement and restriction, it would mean incredible freedoms. Shops would “know” whether I had funds to pay for something, so I could just take it. Take it? They would know where I lived and would deliver it. I could even shop somewhere that understood my inherited metabolic needs, so would tailor my diet to any intolerances that I may have or foods that would be better for my body. No need for a library card, customer loyalty card, even for keys.
Your idea about 20 years time is both interesting and terrifying to me. Shopping is one thing that is already changing so much, from apps that show you where to find items on your shopping list, to fridges that reorder items that you are getting low on, etc. Self-service checkouts are already popular in NZ supermarkets, and make me wonder about the future of automation. I think I’ve got another blog post idea!
I like your future – but I’d need an inbuilt restrainer (do not let Ruth actually take things home once she has bought more than 2 things) as I tend to use shopping as retail therapy.