Why We'll Take Longer Baths in the Future

The fully wired smart home will thus exist for some, but many of us will reject it in favor of its opposite. David Bowie allegedly once said, 'I spend all day in a recording studio surrounded by technology. When I get home all I want to do is have a cup of tea and touch some wood.' Even those who fully embrace technology (generally the younger generations) will use it to escape from reality. This will mean further growth in fantasy-related industries, ranging from gaming to virtual sex -- the latter becoming increasingly realistic and acceptable to a vast swathe of society. People will take virtual vacations and have serious relationships with real people who they never meet in person.

The real will also become virtually indistinguishable from the virtual. Again, some of this is already happening right now. It has been estimated that Everquest is the seventy-seventh largest economy on Earth despite the fact that it doesn't really exist. Gamers are even spending real currency to buy virtual currencies and virtual real estate. In another example of our escape from reality, the top five worldwide grossing movies in 2005 were all escapist fantasies: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Star Wars Episode III, The Chronicles of Narnia, War of the Worlds, and King Kong. Why? I'd suggest that if present realities are too much for people, one way to deal with it is to escape into a fantasy world. If we experience another Great Depression I'd fully expect the entertainment industry -- movies, for example -- to do rather well.

By 2050 Hollywood, the computer industry, neuroscience, and the pharmaceuticals industry will have all merged into one. This will enable people, legally and illegally, to spend days inhabiting what are quite literally (according to all five of our human senses) other worlds -- like the films Matrix and Logan's Run, but for real.

What are the implications of this? First, we will become socially and emotionally inept. Relationships will be originated, consummated, and terminated digitally. A court in Malaysia recently upheld a divorce that a husband sent to his wife via SMS; while I don't think that this will catch on, relationships will undoubtedly become more superficial and fleeting. People will still get together physically, but it will be less common, and they will commit to each other through renewable ten-year contracts downloaded from the Internet. Divorce will be even more common (it hit 60 percent in the US in 2006), but when people do finally settle down they will tend to stay together for longer, more out of fear of loneliness than love in many cases. Virtual adultery will become a reasonable cause for a divorce, although everyone will be doing it.

Second, we will be exposed to more experiences earlier, so childhoods will be compressed, while the ability for adults to remain 'children' indefinitely will become easier. Indeed, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood will become less distinct in the future. Ten-year-olds will want the same birthday presents, and forty-year-olds and sixty-year-olds will dress identically to eighteen-year-olds. At least buying birthday presents will become easier.

Inventing new types of fear

What will people be running away from in the future? What will we be afraid of in the year 2050? The answer is reality. People will be disorientated and uncomfortable due to the level and speed of change, so they will seek refuge in other places (holidays, books, games, films, and so on). The entertainment industry will therefore become the biggest game in town. Add to this the natural human inclination to see what's next, and you have a society that will refuse to tackle current problems such as debt, education, healthcare, and transport, while simultaneously worrying about things that happened in the past or might happen in the future (such as asteroid strikes).

We will be afraid of not knowing. We will be afraid of things that are outside our control. We will be afraid of uncertainty. Most of all, perhaps we will be afraid of 'them' -- people who come from somewhere else, and I don't mean the planet Mars. These fears will drive the accumulation of information. We will crave 'scientific' data on the statistical probability of everything while simultaneously seeking out the personal stories of people, products, and organizations as some kind of faux reassurance.

By the year 2020 people, products, and organizations will have reliability ratings. These will be ratings of honesty, integrity, and transparency created by and available to everyone. You will be able to rank everything from politicians to personal computers based on past claims, actions, and performance, much in the same way that buyers and sellers are currently rated on eBay. Reputations will therefore be actively managed and, in some cases, even traded or stolen.