Monday, October 26, 2009

A look forward

Awhile back I took a course I think of as a retirement planning course. it was that, too, but more of it was just career and financial planning, more for people new to the workforce than those about to retire. A lot of it of course was planning for the future, how to make sure you could retire and enjoy yourself instead of merely survive on the little money abailablr through unreliable retirement funds and social security.

I was struck, among other things, by the fifty year look back (including an average 10 percent annual increase in the value of stocks, which has in fact not been the case for the last ten years, so using it as a basis of planning seems unrealistic). A lot has changed in those fifty years, and averaging just doesn't say much. What, then, can we expect for the next fifty, or even the next twenty?

Yet that is exactly what we, as science fiction writers must do, and my preference is for much more than fifty (I like space fiction and we haven't made much notable progress in that direction in the last few decades, either. The next 50 slides too much into contemporary, speculative fiction, and I find that no fun at all).

Still, plenty else has changed for better and worse. Less than fifteen years ago, we didn’t have in internet or cell phones or maybe even wireless phones! We did have plans for solar power that haven’t made much progress... We've found cures or at least treatments for many diseases, but have many more that elude solution, including some that didn't seem to exist, or were at least far more rare, twenty and more years ago.

Here are a few of my guesses for the future:

Medicine: more drugs, less invasive procedures if we’re lucky, more cost without good (or apparent) cause. A short while back i might have said more active medicine, but recent trends suggest less may be better, that there will be more reliance on letting/helping the body do its own thing to take care of us, and preventing our getting diseases in the first place.

Culture:
Communication technology advances have reduced physical activity and social interaction, but movement for health in mind and body will eventually counter it, possibly through more organized activities (currently tending toward weak and lame in most cities, better in smaller cities and towns).

Online looked like a likely social route but I haven’t encountered many people who have discovered success in that direction aside from rediscovering lost contacts of the past, still requiring an initial physical meeting through traditional social contacts. In order to become more firmly established as an acceptible and effective way to make more than pen-pal like relationships, vast improvements will be needed in software that helps people sort through the morass to find not like people but compatible people, including the people we like to argue with. And it will be the older people, young now, who will cling to the computer world, if they can find a way to stay healthy and translate it to physical, human contact in the process.

Exercise programs are more likely to bring people together if they become more wide spread, maybe in the local parks so that people's need for nature and fresh air are met with light exercise and social contact.

Security: Biological coding will be seen as a necessity for identity protection, which will encourage online anonymity as an escape from the lack of privacy, the inability to go anywhere without everyone being able to see who you are with a quick check of some idnetity scanner.

Hobbies?: Many hand skills will be lost to automation and the only knowledge in some areas will be how to program the robotics, not the hand work, though a few easy ones may linger as a rest to teting-strainec fingers and computer beaten eyes. Most crafts will join arts in the art departments or die for lack of interest at craft fairs and in the home. Who uses doilies anymore? or embroidered pillow cases?

Food will remain the family activity, if only because the food industry seems incapable of providing decent, healthy prepared food in the least bit comparable to freshly steamed vegetables, oven roasted turkey, or even a decent bowl of rice. Besides, it will remain the only time the busy generations stop long enough to communicate with family.

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