A Day in the Life of the Future

You wake up in the future, you’re not sure exactly what year. A noise from your smartphone wakes you – an alarm, you assume. Actually it’s a tweet from your thirsty plants: a rallying cry for some much needed water.

Baffled, but with a mission, you emerge bleary eyed from your bed and walk past the mirror. What you see is not a two-dimensional reflection but a 3D emulation of yourself.

After assuaging your foliage with a much needed drink, it’s time to see what the outside world has to say about the future. You don’t notice at first, but the pavement slabs below your feet are converting your kinetic energy to power the streetlights.

It’s now an acknowledged fact that gaming increases dopamine in the brain by offering up constant ‘challenge-achievement’ opportunities. These days, you don’t need to do anything but sit there with an external cranial device that knows what you’re thinking and controls the game accordingly.

Outside, it’s started raining, so you grab a driverless taxi to take you back home, where the plants, at least, are comfortable with this sudden meteorological permutation.

Back in the present and you’re itching to know what year this is. How long do we have to wait for the future, in all its grotesque and scary strangeness, to arrive? The answer, of course, is that it already has. Incredibly, all these ideas and inventions were demonstrated at TEDxBerlin last Friday.