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The longer you report on tech, the extra you notice how usually we get the long run fallacious. Predictions have a method of not coming true. The issues that appear so clear now can shift and alter, rearranging themselves into wholly new types we by no means considered.
But additionally, predictions that we snort off as having been so fallacious usually have a method of coming true ultimately. One nice instance of that’s the Segway. (And, uh, bear with me right here.) Earlier than Dean Kamen’s private mobility gadget was revealed in 2001, hints of it leaked out to the general public. Among the many most infamous was a declare attributed to Steve Jobs forward of its unveiling that the Segway would trigger folks to re-architect cities round it. When the gadget lastly made its awkward debut and was revealed to be nothing greater than an electrical scooter, the Jobs quote was extensively derided—and typically employed for instance of his fallibility when it got here to predicting the long run.
And but. Right here in 2024, we’re doing just about what Jobs predicted. Okay, so the Segway by no means actually did catch on, however scooters and all method of different electrical micromobility units are all over the place. We’re growing infrastructure to assist lanes and docking bays for scooters and e-bikes, writing laws about the place and how briskly they are often ridden, and basically reimagining the way in which we get round—even in cities that already had nice transit infrastructure. Take Taipei, for instance. In that metropolis, charging banks for scooters from Gogoro (a 2023 MIT Expertise Evaluation Local weather Tech 15 firm) now outnumber gasoline stations and may even be used as a supply of grid energy when the lights exit. To place it one other method, we’re lastly redesigning cities round this stuff.
Which is to say: Even once we get the turn-by-turn navigation fallacious, we are able to nonetheless handle to no less than gesture in the proper route. And so, all through this subject you’ll discover a few of our greatest bets as to what the long run might maintain. We might not get it precisely proper, however we predict we’re no less than pointing towards the place issues are headed.
On this subject, Casey Crownhart seems at our clean-energy future and the assets we might want to create and preserve it. Niall Firth examines the challenges that archivists face as they attempt to protect details about our present lives far into the long run. Antonio Regalado investigates the methods we might all play God within the coming years, due to the flexibility to alter our very DNA. And nowhere can we get extra predictive than in Kara Platoni’s story, which imagines the experiences a baby born at the moment can have interacting with AI and different rising applied sciences over her lifetime—all 125-odd years of it.
You’ll additionally discover a very good package deal of essays asking huge questions in regards to the future. Cliff Kuang and Lydia Millet each argue for the significance of taking issues into our personal palms, whether or not it’s laptop interfaces or responses to the local weather disaster. Jessica Hamzelou takes on the query of (a lot) longer life, Clive Thompson imagines the altering position of video, Ray Kurzweil believes machines will make us free, Katya Klinova interrogates what AI will imply for financial inequality, and Leo Herrera weighs in on, effectively, porn.
And as in each subject, there’s lots to examine what’s occurring proper now. I hope you take pleasure in it.
Mat Honan
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