I’m very disappointed. This is not the future I was expecting to be living in. I feel like a fool, surrounded by little improvements in technology, still very far away from those mind-blowing stuff we were meant to be experiencing by now. Looks like we are left to be enjoying the last brand new smartphone, the newest gaming console, and the last 8K smart TV released as some kind of breadcrumbs, left to relieve our declining hunger for technological improvements. Like I said, very disappointing.
I would like to ask you this: ‘what type of future did you expect to find 20 years ago?’. I don’t want to sound too naive but if I had to answer that, I would say I wasn’t expecting this future...at all.
Take yourself back in time. It’s the year 2000. You probably were doing something different from what you do now. Back then the world was a bit different as well, remember?. Technology-wise we were struggling with the famous year 2000 problem -The Millenium bug- on computers, smartphones still didn’t exist, the Internet was pretty much a luxury and the first hybrid car ever made was released that very year.
In my case, my life was indeed quite different. At then I was a very young adult enjoying my movies, books, and video games. Pretty much like now but with fewer responsibilities. I remember watching movies back then showing a future with flying cars, time travel, androids, DNA mutations, spaceships, aliens, extremely advanced gadgets and more exciting stuff like that. So where the hell is all that? Instead of living a neat future like in the movie ‘Minority report’, we find ourselves trapped inside the plot of ‘12 monkeys’.
If you have asked me back in the year 2000, what type of future was I going to expect in 20 years time, I would have never imagined something even near similar to our current reality. And you?
As a technology enthusiast, I try to keep myself in the loop of the last released piece of engineering, waiting for that special thing that will transform the way we live today. Yes, I’m fully aware of this quiet revolution of electric vehicles and I celebrate the increasing use of renewable energy but it’s not enough. I think we are still very far away from the situation we supposed to be in. Everything seems to go very slow and 20 years is a lot of time. The fact that we are severely struggling to fight a virus coming from the depths of nature has to mean something, don’t you think?
Obviously, we need money for everything. Every research, every type of investigation in new technology has to be funded by someone. But money is just a type of energy so it doesn’t disappear, it just transforms into something different. So where did it go all this money during the last 20 years? It went to Google, to Youtube, to Microsoft, to Facebook, to Amazon and to the smartphone developing industry. Very little left to medical research -pharmaceutical industry?- and some promising stuff like graphene and solid-state batteries. Luckily, there are still some crazy and brave people like Elon Musk, trying to fulfil a pretty challenging dream by colonizing Mars, in case our beloved planet Earth goes to hell any time soon. Although when is that going to happen it’s still to be seen.
Let’s face the ugly truth; we live in a selfish world where nobody cares about their neighbour. At the first sign of trouble, we run away without looking back. Rich people get richer by the minute and they don’t care about the rest of us. The entire world is ruled by a handful of enterprises that only pursue the increase of their benefits. They don’t care about pollution, nature or anything other than keeping their bottomless pockets full of money. That’s the only reason why we don’t happen to see bloody flying cars around us, among other cool stuff that our eyes most probably won’t ever see. But forget about flying cars, what about that everlasting promise of a real alternative to plastics? Or a global ban on fossil fuels? Or a propper medical research on those rare diseases that affect so many people worldwide? Am I the only one thinking all these technological advances are not coming fast enough?
So disappointing.
I don’t know you but given the picture I can see from my window, I rather keep myself visiting some exciting near futures provided by the rich entertainment we’ve got at hand. At least that’s something they will -hopefully- never take away from us.
Sometimes reality is a too tough sip to swallow.
Today is not tomorrow, it feels more like yesterday and tomorrow doesn’t seem to be coming soon.
Let’s see what’s on Netflix...
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