What does the future hold?

Posted by "insert_name_here" on October 18, 2012 06:49 am 2

As a long time daily-reader of the Verge, I often find myself refreshing the landing page hoping to lay my eyes on that new piece of tech or news that will truly revolutionise the way we look at things. Last night was different though, with a little more time on my hands than usual, and hitting F5 a little to many times, my thoughts have started going into overdrive, and with the new upcoming events from Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc I had to ask myself.....first….what should I have for my evening meal? And then…. what's in store for the future?

via engineersweek.com

Whenever you here the word "future" you may often here the terms "flying cars", "sky-trains", "food pills" and maybe even “teleportation” just to name a few. But thus far our future predictions haven't always hit the mark. So how can we realistically envision our future in lets say 40-50 years from now, I think a good place to start is in the past, taking a brief look at our technological timeline brings back that sense of realism and appreciation for the likes of our new tablet's and smart phones.

It's hard to believe that only 40 years ago we didn't have a handheld mobile phone, with the first Prototype Handheld being used in 1973 by Dr. Martin cooper, weighing in at 2.5 pounds and measured 9 inches long this 5 inch deep and 1.75 inches wide prototype only offered a mere 30 minutes of talk time after a gruelling 10 hours of charge. Safe to say that’s a fair bit away from the SGSIII I use on a daily basis. The mobile phone though isn’t the only thing to focus on here; there have been many first’s that have become many peoples necessity in life in such a short time. Let’s take a look at the small table below starting with my favourite, “The Tele-Box”

Product	Description	Date Created	Today’s Equivalent
Television	Philo Farnsworth made the world's first working television system	1927	LED, Super Hi res, HD TV’s
Handheld Mobile	Dr, Coopers first handheld mobile telephone	April, 1973	Apple, Android etc smartphones
Laptop Computer	The IBM 5100 was the first commercially available portable computer	September, 1975	Quad core processing ultrabook’s and Tablet devices

Although these are just a few devices that have a big impact on our daily life there are other things in the past 40-50 years that have had dramatic improvement, improvement that is continuing and aid’s your mind in conjuring up possibilities for the “future”. Public transport “Planes, trains and automobiles” are a big thing for the future, will they all fly, float and zoom about in a ridiculous uncomprehending fashion or will we all simply just stand in our doorway and think about where we want to go and…poof…were there. Going to the town will never be the same again, although with the growing age of online shopping will there even be towns to go to or will every city have its own AMAZON styled distribution centre. “Welcome to New-York Amazon” please choose your item from your handheld device to have your item delivered by teleportation in minutes to your door (talk about same day delivery improvements ha!)

What are your thoughts on all of this and what do you see for the future? What are the things’s in life you see developing into our sci-fi styled future? And what would you like to see?

Regards: “insert_name_here”