Predicting the Future

Sunday, April 23, 60 Minutes ran a story on the MIT Media Lab. Entitled Where Tomorrow’s Technology is Born, the video depicts a young man who developed a headset that reads what he’s thinking, and searches Google for an answer that's whispered into an earpiece. Scott Paley asks him what the largest city in Bulgaria is and its population. In a few moments, the man answers “Sophia, one, point one million.”He can also order a pizza of your choice by thinking about it.In 2014, I wrote the short story Google Boy in my science fiction anthology Tales From Our Near Future. That story tells what the outcome might be were someone given the ability showed on 60 Minutes, sans the headset. Within four years of my publication, the reality seems within reach.I’ve found an interesting phenomenon in predicting the future. It seems we’ve moved from “Wow!” to “Isn’t that already done?” In my novel Leaving Lisa, the story revolves around a device a woman develops before her untimely death. Her widowed husband can talk to the device and it answers in Lisa’s voice, providing answers that Lisa would have likely provided. Many times, readers told me, “Don’t we already have something like that?”Predicting the future is fascinating, especially the near future. The 60 Minutes story shows visits to MIT’s Media Lab years ago, where touch screens were first shown and a precursor to a GPS system taking you through a map of the city. Back then, we might have been able to predict a GPS mapping system that you carried in your pocket, but could we have predicted what changes it would make in our lives? Could we have predicted Uber?Read Tales From Our Near Future and Leaving Lisa. You’ll get an entertaining look at what might soon happen.