Happy birthday, baby! What the future holds for those born today
DAVID BISKUP
If getting from point A to point B is becoming difficult, maybe you can travel without going anywhere. Green, who favors a blank-slate room, wonders if you’ll have a brain-machine interface that lets you change your surroundings at will. You think about, say, a jungle, and the wallpaper display morphs. The robotic furniture adjusts its topography. “We want to be able to sit on the boulder or lie down on the hammock,” he says.
Anne Marie Piper, an associate professor of informatics at UC Irvine who studies older adults, imagines something similar—minus the brain chip—in the context of a care home, where spaces could change to evoke special memories, like your honeymoon in Paris. “What if the space transforms into a café for you that has the smells and the music and the ambience, and that is just a really calming place for you to go?” she asks.
Gerber is all for virtual travel: It’s cheaper, faster, and better for the environment than the real thing. But she thinks that for a truly immersive Parisian experience, we’ll need engineers to invent … well, remote bread. Something that lets you chew on a boring-yet-nutritious source of calories while stimulating your senses so you get the crunch, scent, and taste of the perfect baguette.
2149
Age 125
We hope that your final years will not be lonely or painful.
Faraway loved ones can visit by digital double, or send love through smart textiles: Piper imagines a scarf that glows or warms when someone is thinking of you, Kao an on-skin device that simulates the touch of their hand. If you are very ill, you can escape into a soothing virtual world. Judith Amores, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, is working on VR that responds to physiological signals. Today, she immerses hospital patients in an underwater world of jellyfish that pulse at half of an average person’s heart rate for a calming effect. In the future, she imagines, VR will detect anxiety without requiring a user to wear sensors—maybe by smell.
“It is a little cool to think of cemeteries in the future that are literally haunted by motion-activated holograms.”
Tim Recuber, sociologist, Smith College
You might be pondering virtual immortality. Tim Recuber, a sociologist at Smith College and author of The Digital Departed, notes that today people create memorial websites and chatbots, or sign up for post-mortem messaging services. These offer some end-of-life comfort, but they can’t preserve your memory indefinitely. Companies go bust. Websites break. People move on; that’s how mourning works.
What about uploading your consciousness to the cloud? The idea has a fervent fan base, says Recuber. People hope to resurrect themselves into human or robotic bodies, or spend eternity as part of a hive mind or “a beam of laser light that can travel the cosmos.” But he’s skeptical that it’ll work, especially within 125 years. Plus, what if being a ghost in the machine is dreadful? “Embodiment is, as far as we know, a pretty key component to existence. And it might be pretty upsetting to actually be a full version of yourself in a computer,” he says.
DAVID BISKUP
There is perhaps one last thing to try. It’s another AI. You curate this one yourself, using a lifetime of digital ephemera: your videos, texts, social media posts. It’s a hologram, and it hangs out with your loved ones to comfort them when you’re gone. Perhaps it even serves as your burial marker. “It is a little cool to think of cemeteries in the future that are literally haunted by motion-activated holograms,” Recuber says.
