11 Futuristic Signs Tell the Story of What the World of Tomorrow Will Look Like
By Tom McKay, Policy Mic, 28 May 2014.
By Tom McKay, Policy Mic, 28 May 2014.
Signs From the Near Future catalogues the ominous future of science-fiction safety warnings, one eerie sign at a time. We took a look, and found that many of them actually will, or are, a sign of things to come.
1. Present your hand for payment, citizen
This one isn't so far off. Swedish firm Quixter claims to have 1,600 active users around Lund University registered to biometric scanners capable of automatically processing payments at 15 stores and restaurants.
Convenient? Probably. Drawbacks: Not many, except for the possibility of cybercriminals cutting off your hands.
2. Super fast trains. Maybe TOO fast.
Super-fast maglev trains are already running down tracks in Shanghai and are being tested in Japan (but no longer at Germany's Emsland Transrapid Test Facility). But they probably won't be coming to tracks in the U.S. or the West anytime soon.
3. Don't be a glasshole
Expect this one in the next few years. Google Glass users are already such a public nuisance that Google wrote a formal request for them to be a little less creepy and overbearing in public spaces.
4. Attention. This is a driverless car. Please fasten your seatbelt and hold on.
Google's self-driving car may be as close as five years from commercialization. It now knows how to avoid annihilating cyclists, drive aggressively, and speed, but not how to drive in inclement weather, pull over for cops, or avoid annihilating squirrels.
5. Drivers in the driverless lane will be shot on sight
Then with a drone.
6. User takes full responsibility for use of, and consequences of use of, the jetpack
Sorry, but this is really never going to happen. The best personal jetpack commercially available is marketed for search and rescue use, but there's nothing a jetpack can do that other flight technology (like a helicopter) doesn't already do better. And even if they do become available, they'll cost at least US$100,000 and likely require a sport pilot's license to operate.
7. You are in violation of the Preventing Indecent Photography Act. Please await the arrival of the authorities.
Considering how creepy pornographers are already without the ability to take snapshots just by creepily winking, this is pretty much a foregone conclusion.
8. The TSA has the right to confiscate, but is not limited to confiscating, the following body parts
Really fantastic neuroprosthetics are probably decades away, but the potential for brain augmentation and other such technology is virtually limitless. Whether or not the society they create will be one you'd want to live in is another matter entirely.
9. All banned items will be removed from your person, if necessary via surgery
OK, that's a little extreme. But considering the TSA's already interested in metal implants, its authority to regulate other kinds of technology could come into question.
10. All of our meat is 100% synthetic, but may contain arthropod, feline, and human DNA
The world's first lab-grown burger was consumed in Aug. 2013 at a news conference in London, and said to be a "very good start." Taste-testers said the burger had a good mouth-feel but different flavour than regular beef. But the research needed to create it cost US$330,000 of Google co-founder Sergey Brin's money, so you might have to wait a few years for truly suffering-free ground beef - and quite a while longer before you're slicing a three-inch-thick ribeye off the end of a 300-foot-long rack of meat.
11. I, for one, welcome our slimy fungal overlords
Just take a deep breath and submit to the almighty slime mould computer. It's easier if we don't have to get violent.
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