Job posting from 2040: Entry level construction job Will be supervising 20 employees No physical limitations You’ll be building bridges and...
The End of Backbreaking Labor
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Living in the Future
Every now and then, some mundane thing in my daily life makes me pause and realize that I’m living in the future. Sure, there’s plenty of room for both SciFi dreams and nightmares in the future future, but lots of things today really are kind of amazing. This recurring “Living in the Future” topic explores those, along with past SciFi roots that might have inspired them.
Google Maps Timeline: The Argument-Killing Machine
"We haven’t been to X in ages." "What was the name of that little Italian place we stopped at the day we went to Y?" "Yes, we went to Z on our...
Yachts Are Evolving – Into Starships?
Early space travel was never going to be cheap… When I came up with the story of Hotel Caledonia (mission 7 of Black Ocean: Mercy for Hire), the...
Genetically engineered plants
Your Garden Center Doesn’t Carry THESE (yet…) Maybe you wanted to add a pop of color to a living space or just enjoy tending to living things and...
SciFi contact lenses – the biggest monitor is the smallest
Early in Terminator 2 we are privy to a view from the terminator’s perspective. Cast in villainous shades of red, it shows an augmented reality...
Inspector Gadget had nothing on the modern smart watch
Can we take a moment to appreciate the technological majesty of the smart watch? Dick Tracy was an American comic strip that debuted in newspapers...
Portable Payment Processors – No cash? No problem…there is an app for that
How are we going to explain the change jar to our grandkids? When I was a kid, I had a wallet that had velcro to keep it closed. It usually only had...
Hot Wheels, Matchbox…and microchips?
Your age will determine your relationship to them, but just about everyone will at least be familiar with a particular type of tiny toy cars called...
AI-generated artwork: Move Over Dalí, it’s DALL-E Time
In the earliest days of machine automation (we’re talking about looms here), workers worried that they’d be rendered obsolete revolted. These...
Ballpark In-seat dining
Press 1 For Peanuts. Press 2 For Cracker Jacks. A few weeks ago, my wife and I ventured out to see our former hometown (or at least, home region)...
Who needs eyes to see?
Well, science has taken another step into future tech. Essentially since the inception of reading glasses, science has combated blindness and visual...
Books don’t exist until you buy them
Before the nitpickers arrive, some books still sit on shelves in dusty, musty, boxy warehouses waiting for shipment to a bookstore or your house....
Real estate without the “Real”
Back in 2019 (in the "Before" time), fed up with losing 5 months of the year to cold weather and snow, my wife and I decided to move cross country...
In a Few Years, This Will Feel Normal
Once upon a time, there were games you played with rocks on a table. Then carved pieces on a table. Eventually, people developed little cardboard...
The Rosie / Terminator Continuum
Imagine a future where you wake up to a freshly brewed coffee and the morning news, provided by your personal robotic assistant. You dodge deftly...
Your new genes won’t be denim
Science news is an endless drumbeat of “on the verge” when it comes to gene therapy. It’s almost become background noise by now. In and of...
Vacation in Space?
Captain Kirk has now actually gone to space. Well, there’s some debate these days over what qualified as “space” for the purposes of quickie...
Where we’re going, we don’t need tables
When I was a kid, there was a set of shelves in our basement stacked with board games. Monopoly, Sorry!, Clue, all the old classics....
It Used to Come in the Mail
2007... Fox was still trying to make Fantastic Four movies, the iPhone had been announced and was a year from stores, the Oklahoma City...
Frumious Bandersnatch
A younger version of me had some pretty clear ideas about what the future might look like. Somewhere between the emergence of the internet and the...
2 techs I want to mash up
For me, the "present" is sort of permanently frozen in my mind as the mid-to-late nineties. As we drift ever onward into the future, we rob old...
Arguing with Alexa
I don't know exactly when the future got here; probably around the time smartphones became ubiquitous—definitely after widespread internet became...
(Virtually) home for the holidays
As we spend more and more of our time indoors (those of us not deemed "essential", anyway), we're seeing an uptick in what was once solely the...
Are You Ready to Upload Your Brain?
So, who's ready for the robot revolution? Will you rise up and join our new robotic masters in a shiny new machine body? Or fight to preserve...