AND NOW FOR SOMETHING 
- One of the Royals dies in a high-speed car crash — (now that was one of my very best one from Jan '97) Lame year in '98 nothing much is going to happen.
- The Terror War of 2002 looks rather interesting. Modern office buildings failing and cut in half -- religious loons slaughtering tens of thousands in the streets for no reason that anyone can fathom.
- World War III -- after those bio-chemical attacks in California -- but never mind -- too depressing, and speaking of depressing...Expect to find nifty devices that make tracking blood hounds look very tame and mostly harmless indeed. With the capability to replicate
DNA from trace quantities into meaningful sample sizes, it won't be long before technology will allow every creature — from human to waterfowl to be accurately tracked — weeks or months later. Forget Mr Spock's Tricorder, this will make the howling bloodhound look tame indeed!
A tool that makes our current concerns over personal privacy look as misplaced as the Trobriand Islanders fear that their souls were being captured when their photographs were taken. (Of course nobody will be able to go anywhere they aren’t authorized to be — and this will be a great tool for fascism in all its incarnations!
The great news is that there will now be no mistaken identies — unless someone mucks around with the data records of course!
- Intelligent consumer products which communicate with each other will become about as unique and expensive as cellophane wrap is today — expect to see the microchip encoded food packaging which tell the computer in the refrigerator how to store its contents — and direct the oven how to correctly cook it...likely all in the same device.
- Want a job? Perhaps you would like to assure your employability by being trained for the so-called High Tech job sector… important if true! Not too long ago the key to good income and success in the information age was the ability to perform hot typesetting — you may expect to see the Certified Network Engineers in the same leaky boat as the typesetters of yesteryear — except they won't have the Printers Union to look out for their interests!
Today, businesses don't plan to build a highway, dig a canal or forge a rail link in order to ship products, or to build an electric generating station for power or invent telephone codes and switching systems to contact their clients… Information Technology will become a basic utility and move along the same trajectory as other infrastructure services.
Do you have any idea how many people it once took to cut wood or
Information Technology will follow much the same the trend.
Information Services Departments will become foggy memories like the paper tape, toggling in machine code and punching card decks. (Hey, I've coded with them too)
YES!In my day, we couldn't afford shoes, so we went barefoot! In the winter we had to wrap our feet with barbed wire to improve traction.
- Kurt Vonnegut
had the basic idea in Player Piano: an elite ruling class with the critical mass of knowledge and contacts needed to succeed; a vast underclass without that existential knowledge. - Artificial Intellegence. It was after all my main area of academic study. The seeds of what will become the Intellect of tomorrow (no not AI Corp® Intellect© in Boston, where I once took some courses) — this intellect is the artificial mind which will spring from what you're most likely searching for information with today... super-powerful, and eventually comprehending search engines with instantaneous access to all the knowledge of mankind. Intellgence := the ability to produce novel AND appropriate solutions to problems (Brewer, 1892).
- Worried about your retirement? You may not have much to worry about there! The planet is over due for another pandemic. This will kill off at least 300,000,000 people over say — six to eight months and if the tea leaves (and the frequency plots) are to be believed, it could hit on or before 2008. What goes around — comes around.
- The spasms of reverse division of labour being caused by the displacement of a large percentage of the middle class through downsizing, rightsizing and restructuring and the race to the bottom will fragment the fabric of society and corrode social solidarity between generations, genders and especially between the ruling class and the ruled.
- Want training for the future? Become a street person! These folks will have far better survival skills than the bank presidents in a time of mass dislocation and REAL GLOBAL DOWNSIZING... human-wise!
- Disintermediarization will cast off millions and millions of workers — a restructuring of services and labour on a scale which no society or state has so far ever endured or survived.
- More important perhaps: the economic restructuring in the far-east will redraw the geopolitical landscape eventually lead to catastrophic conflict — driven by here-to-fore unimaginable environmental pressures, and the inherent territorial imperatives found in all of god’s creatures: lust and greed.
Desertification. No, not extra helpings of apple pie and ice-cream. River of Sand deserts. This isn't specifically the growth of the Sahara Desert — but that's one good example. Desertification is the loss of crop growing soil due to poor land management, improper crop selection, over use, over-grazing, poor irrigation practices and deforestation. (And why not give the bio-engineers a chance to produce seeds that commit suicide and may mix this trait into natural plants! The result: poverty and hunger.
You can feel it out in traffic
Everyone hates everyone!
And the gas leaks
And the oil spills
And sex sells everything
Sex kills...
Sex killsTo really understand
In every culture in decline
The watchful slaves
Know all that is genuine
Is scorned and cast away
DOG EAT DOG
People looking, seeing nothing
DOG EAT DOG
People looking, seeing nothing
DOG EAT DOG
People lusting, loving nothing
DOG EAT DOG
People stroking, touching — nothing
DOG EAT DOG
Knowing nothing
dog eat dog...PS...
- The global struggle for transnational competitive perfection leads to a dismal end: Earthlings fail to meet arbitrary demands of the galactic marketplace and are consequently downsized into cosmic dust.
PPS...
- The cosmic dust will be consumed by a huge black hole located in the center of the Milky Way galaxy...
So you've checked our species creature features and probed the human psyché — now you think you want to know the future…
|
Been there, done that,
got the T-SHIRT — always a combination of
tragedy & farce!
U n d e r s t a n d!
If you see it in the future — it means it has to has to
H A P P E N!
So here's some quasi-clairvoyant pseudo-insights I’ve gleaned from reading those intragalactic deep-space tea leaves on what's just over the event horizon…
-Vernor Vinge, 1993
I won't bore you with the Great Stock Market collapse of '00 (starts in Feb '00 ends May 2007 with Dow at 2987), what happens to Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, or the Buffalo Bills or that "like nuclear thing" 
— we should expect that climate change will kill 96.3% of us sooner or later, (hey — now where do you go for a drink of water when the Great Lakes drop like Lake Titicaca?) so I'll just stick to the mid-term stuff…
Y2K Y1K
