I'm
currently awaiting a revision letter for my new contemporary
young adult book,
The
Sweetest Thing You Can Sing, and getting ready to leave
the future behind me, at least for now (science fiction
is far too captivating for me to make the goodbye permanent!).
As you can see, I made a few cosmetic changes to the website
to reflect the return to contemporary fiction. But before
I completely leave 2063 and the U.N.A. in my wake, I wanted
to discuss some of the science behind
Yesterday
and
Tomorrow.
Many of the forces that define the North America of 2063
in
Yesterday
and
Tomorrow —
global warming, nano-medicine, the ubiquitous presence of
full immersion virtual reality, and the widespread replacing
of human workers with robots or other technologies —
are highly possible given where we stand today. As the rate
of technological change and climate change increases, we're
in for a wild ride.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, by the twenty-first
century I expected many changes that haven't come to pass
— flying cars, much more extensive space exploration
than humanity has actually accomplished, sophisticated robots
(or should I say Replicants?), and cures for countless deadly
diseases that still plague us. Meanwhile things I never
expected have either greatly impacted our daily lives or
loom large just around the corner. I'm chiefly talking about
two things — how intertwined our "real" lives
have become with the Internet and other technologies, and
the enormous threat climate change presents to most living
things on our planet. Bizarrely, even now that the threat
is well recognized, we've barely begun to respond to the
problem, and procrastination will only make our future direr.
CLIMATE CHANGE
In March the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change will issue a report on global warming.
A
draft of that report was leaked in November 2013 and
stated that, "Many of the ills of the modern world
- starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war
and disease - are likely to worsen as the world warms."
"Throughout the 21st century, climate
change impacts will slow down economic growth and poverty
reduction, further erode food security and trigger new poverty
traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging
hotspots of hunger. Climate change will exacerbate poverty
in low- and lower-middle income countries and create new
poverty pockets in upper-middle to high-income countries
with increasing inequality."
A
recent University of Hawaii study projects that world
temperatures will be off the charts hot come 2047, with
various cities reaching the boiling point much sooner. Kingston
Jamaica will be likely be permanently off-the-charts hot
in just a decade with Singapore following in 2028, Mexico
City in 2031, Cairo in 2036, Phoenix and Honolulu in 2043,
San Diego and Orlando, Florida in 2046 and New York and
Washington in 2047.
According to study author Camilo Mora, "the 2047 date
for the whole world is based on continually increasing emissions
of greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural
gases. If the world manages to reduce its emissions of carbon
dioxide and other gases, that would be pushed to as late
as 2069. But for now, the world is rushing toward the 2047
date."
ROBOTS
Google and numerous car manufacturing companies
have been working on self-drive car technology. "
Rice
University computer science professor Moshe Vardi says that
in 25 years "driving by people will look quaint; it
will look like a horse and buggy. So there go many of
the approximately 4 million driving jobs out there. Same
for sanitation, and those are just a couple examples of
how physical jobs will be replaced."
A recent report from the Oxford Martin School's
Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology concludes
that 45% of American jobs are at high risk of being taken
by computers within the next two decades. The authors of
the study "believe this takeover will happen in two
stages. First, computers will start replacing people in
especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics,
production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services,
sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage.
Then, the rate of replacement will slow down due to bottlenecks
in harder-to-automate fields such as engineering. This 'technological
plateau' will be followed by a second wave of computerization,
dependent upon the development of good artificial intelligence.
This could next put jobs in management, science and engineering,
and the arts at risk."
VIRTUAL REALITY
Most of us already spend quite a bit of time
in an alternate reality known as the Internet, or immersed
in increasingly realistic videogames.
According to
eMarketer's
estimate of media consumption among U.S. adults, average
time spent with digital media per day was set to surpass
TV viewing time for the first time in 2013. "The average
adult will spend over 5 hours per day online, on nonvoice
mobile activities or with other digital media this year,
eMarketer estimates, compared to 4 hours and 31 minutes
watching television."
Because eMarketer estimates all time spent
within each medium (for example if someone spends an hour
watching TV while also multitasking on a tablet, the time
would be counted as spending an hour with TV AND an additional
hour on mobile) the overall figures are sky high. U.S. adults
spent an average of 11 hours and 49 minutes with media each
day in 2012, and were forecast to spend 12 hours and 5 minutes
with media in 2013.
In terms of gaming, full-body virtual reality
has arrived with
Virtuix
Omni and virtual reality headset
Oculus
Rift. Palmer Luckey, Oculus' founder, says, "I
think in a few years, maybe a few decades depending on how
lucky we are, we'll be able to get Matrix level virtual."
Given the above info,
inventor
and futurist, Ray Kurzweil's belief that, "by the
early 2020s we will be routinely working and playing with
each other in full immersion visual-auditory virtual environments.
By the 2030s, we will add the tactile sense to full immersion
virtual reality" doesn't sound at all far-fetched.
Kurzweil posits that, "There will be
limited ways of adding the tactile sense to virtual and
augmented reality by the early 2020s, but full immersion
virtual tactile experiences will require tapping directly
into the nervous system. We'll be able to do that in the
2030s with nanobots traveling noninvasively into the brain
through the capillaries and augmenting the signals coming
from our real senses."
NANO-MEDICINE
"
South
Korean scientists are developing a new treatment for cancer
that will be more efficient and less harmful than chemotherapy.
A team at Chonnam National University has developed nanorobots
that can detect and treat cancer cells in a way that avoids
the harmful side-effects of modern drugs." Imagine,
no more chemotherapy!
So if you were ever curious about where my ideas for 2063
U.N.A. society came from — here are the roots of the
Bio-Net, gushi, robots workers creating mass human unemployment,
and climate chaos rendering areas of North America almost
uninhabitable. Roots that are firmly planted in the world
of today.
