I can pose as Nostradamus Part 1: Short-Term predictions
Apartment building will not have corridors anymore. The door to the balcony will be the front door. People will stand on the two pedals of their Personal Flying Machines and just fly out. These machines for all commercial purposes will be called flymas(short for FLYing MAChines) and pronounced as falmies*.
There will be no traffic control. 3-D space will reduce the possibility of both accidents and traffic control. Umbrellas over traffic islands will be inverted and used to catch falling flymas and service them. Nobody will bother about the rider because if it’s system has broken down, it can be cloned(for reasons of usage of “it”, go to the reference to sexes below).
Instead of parking under office buildings flymas will be parked on the roof. Needless to say, car-manufacturing companies will close down or move into making flymas.
Cooking will become obsolete as food-processing machines will become common. They will have input for different items and keys to program the desired cooking like 'boil in water for 5 mins', 'fry for 10 mins' etc. Also standard dishes can be stored as programs with parameters for customization. Prepared food can be consumed by either directly connecting the FPs outlet to the mouth or stored in dishes. Different washing requirements will just have different inlets, buttons and outlets. As a result there will be no work left in the house. Cleaning apparatus can be set into periodic auto-scanning mode. So the only difference between the sexes will be their organs, but that’s just a matter of a small decision and a couple of minutes.
All information(newspaper, magazines, mail) will come and go through the wire into a device, which will be no more called the computer, because it is a highly programmable hardware, which can accept English commands and translate it into programs. It will be called domputer(because d comes after c). (A breed of workers called Programmers, who existed for some years will vanish. Plumbers will still be there because water has to come to the house still and taps will still leak. Nobody put in more thought into that.)
Worshipping can be done by logging in either over the wire through a domputer or taking a flyma to the religious institution. (But none of the religious instituions are anyway designed for roof-parking of flymas, so more and more people will prefer domputers). Companies will desing hardware that will to auto-generate novels,poems and paintings using AI, but the spreading disinterest in such artforms will cause these companies to heavily lay-off and go insolvent.
Scientific research will more and more target questions like “How and why did pursuit of science start?” and “Do we need science?”. Results in these will prove self-destructive.
* - to follow an old English tradition of having a spelling and a totally unexpected pronunciation. Wednesday, April 10, 2002
