THE FUTURE IS HERE, AND IT’S AWESOME

THE FUTURE IS HERE, AND IT’S AWESOME

If you’re anything like me, you grew up watching sci-fi movies dreaming that the technology they showed was commercially available. You watched people interacting over screens, and holograms flying around, and cars driving themselves, and even commanding your home with your voice…

Oh wait…

All of those things exist now! Look back at that list, we have all of those things now, and more! Today, I’d like to just go through some technology that we currently have, that was just the stuff of Sci-Fi only a decade or two ago.

  1. FaceTime: This was such a big thing in Sci-Fi films, where people would open up some sort of futuristic tablet (also something we have) and speak to a video of any person around the world in real-time. Not only do we have that, but it’s old news at this point. We even add real-time filters on top of the video now to make ourselves look like anything we want… which leads me to.
  2. Augmented Reality: Sure, we can talk about fun filters on Instagram or Snapchat in this bullet, or we can talk about deep fake technology and how you could literally look like any person in the world in a live recorded video with AI matching your facial movements to those of a completely different person. Yup, it’s definitely the future.
  3. Holograms: While you have always been able to buy those fun trinkets at tourist shops where they encase a ghostlike 3D image into a big chunk of glass, you probably didn’t expect that they could hologram celebrities into concerts long after they had passed away… and they can… and they did. Tupac.
  4. Home Assistants: How about Alexa and Google Home and Siri? You can actually speak to these individuals and ask them complex questions that they answer for you like it’s nothing. I can ask my Alexa to turn on the lights, and I can ask her how old Jim Carrey is, and I can ask her who won any World Series and she will tell me instantly. Not to mention the fact that she can purchase items for me, and even remind me where I was at any given time and what I bought there.
  5. WiFi Hotspots: I think this deserves a spot in this list, not necessarily because it is such an incredible piece of technology by itself, even though it is, but more so because of what it can do. If you get a hotspot for a company like this you could literally take your entire office and move it to a remote forest almost anywhere and still be able to work. Being that mobile with your work is something that has just never been available before.
  6. Self-Driving Cars: Although this has been available for a while, it has only recently become commercially available with Tesla. Your Tesla can auto-pilot itself with this myriad of sensors and get you from A to B while you sit and read the news. Now THAT is the future.

Some of these pieces of incredible technology have not even been around for that long, so there is no telling of where we will be in 2030 or 2040, but I’m hoping that maybe it involves space travel… but that’s just me.

Jody Greene