The Committee to Nuke Elysium

Shirts, shoes, and trousers will still be worn.

Most things will change, but no one thing will change everything.

No extrapolated trend will continue ad absurdum without modification by other influences.

At any given moment, every year of the preceding fifty to one hundred years is still current somewhere.

When you’re thinking about what life will be like at some date in the future, subtract 70-75 years to get the range of birth dates of people who will still be around. That’s living memory: the set of directly experienced events that inform the worldview and decisions of the people that lived through them.

Intermediate technologies will always be where the rubber meets the road. Even when everyone can see the direction technology is taking, new breakthroughs can only be realized via incremental developments in implementation, manufacturing, and distribution.

Exporting our manufacturing without exporting our standard of living will turn out to have been a serious mistake.

New power-generation systems must exceed, not replace, our current capacity. We’ve got a water supply problem coming up, and we’ll need more energy to deal with it.

If we can’t lick the problem of cheap power for personal vehicles, there are large built-up areas of the United States that will be cheaper to abandon than maintain.

There are going to be interesting developments generated by the increasing power and accessibility of smaller-scale precision machining and fabrication systems. (3D scanners will also be involved.)

One of these developments will be the ability to make replacement parts for older manufactured items, or even replicate the entire item. The material culture of the industrial age amounts to a vast body of largely unclaimed and unrecorded “intellectual property.” This didn’t matter when the prohibitively high setup cost of manufacturing components for the Sunbeam T-9 toaster was an effective bar to casual reproduction. Like copyright, theoretical ownership rights have been enforced by the technology itself. The increasing ease of physical replication may make that a live issue.

Other potential issues arising from small-scale precision fabrication technologies depend on how cheap it gets and how easy it is to use.

Early fears about the misuse of biotechnology will turn out to have missed the point in much the same way that early fears about the misuse of computers did. The street will still find its uses. More to the point, the quietly conformist Silent Majority will turn out to have rich inner lives they can now do something about.

The future will understand that in 2008, online marketing techniques were in their infancy.

Fugue-state nonstop online research for its own sake will be recognized as a disorder.

The last generation before practical immortality will all write memoirs. The next generation will ignore almost all of them.

The most complex, sophisticated user interface will continue to be language.

Most of the people in the world will be able to speak something they regard as English. Some versions of it will be mutually incomprehensible.

If the United States continues to prosper, being able to pass as a native English speaker will continue to be valuable.

The publishing industry’s expertise is in finding, editing, packaging, and selling interesting texts. How those texts get reproduced and distributed is always changing anyway. Electronic text is just one more new to do it.

Proofreading will increasingly be automated. Copyediting will continue to require trained, talented human beings.

(Here endeth the serious part.)

Religion will not disappear. Neither will atheism. However, mainstream Mormonism will fracture into multiple tendencies, syntheses, and groups subscribing to private revelations, which will have a broad range of theologies. Their internecine squabbles will be enlivened by debates about (1.) the contents, provenance, and import of the General Authorities’ secret stash of historical documents; (2.) whether the Doctrine of Free Agency applies to acts of prophecy; (3.) ditto, acts of divinely inspired translation; (4.) whether the Doctrine of Eternal Progression applies to Jehovah; and (5.) whether Mars is overseen by a different God.