Once I found a magic lamp and when I rubbed that magic lamp, a giant Genie came out of it. I was surprised, but he eased.
He asked “What do you want, my boss?”
I thought and waited before blurting out “I want a magical city with flying cars, glasses that help me see everything, a crime detection system, decentralized social media platforms, a voice assistant, a gadget on my skin, robots that do most mundane jobs.”
“There you go, boss” Genie said.
I got it what I asked for. I was in a magical city. And I had everything I always wanted through technology.
Yes, even that was a fictional story, it is very much the truth of today and tomorrow. We, as a society, have made tremendous progress in different areas of technology Robotics, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, Virtual Reality, and Artificial Intelligence.
As a science fiction writer, I like to speculate about technology and brainstorm ideas. Even some of these ideas might be over the top, but they are completely possible in the near future. As I am finishing the draft of my novel The Songs of Farewell, I want to tell what futuristic inventions and technologies that I have used in my novel.
The only problem with predicting future inventions is that we see it as an addition to existing technology and in the process, make that invention or technology to not last long. As Lindy Effect goes, most futuristic inventions will be a subtraction from current technology. The technology from current times, that will last in the next 30 years, will be a lindy technology since it lasted. Any technology from current times that will be replaced with more sophisticated technology, is actually not Lindy technology.
Drone with intelligence
We already have automated drones that you can control remotely. With weapons and artificial intelligence improving, we will have intelligent drones that will help in wars. In the last 5 years, they had indicated delivery drones, but they haven’t been out yet. What happened? Something with drones, is that it can be very evasive technology, destroying individual privacy. In The Songs of Farewell, some of the characters use these drones to figure out the enemy area.
Flying Cars
Ever from the moment, man has seen a bird, he had the ambition of flying. He always wanted to fly. For that reason, we invented flying planes, helicopters. Planes are an inevitable part of our lives. One invention we haven’t been successful in is flying cars. We are on the verge of self-driving cars, but still no flying cars. There is a company from Germany that had announced flying taxis. They are in preliminary stages of experimentation. With space to drive and to walk reducing, we will need new modes of transportation and I guess flying cars will be our solution.
Thought Recognition Machines
With social media and people describing their experiences in many ways, the linguistic technology can help to identify emotions that one is experiencing. MRI machines can read brain waves and find out what one is thinking based on patterns, especially thought patterns. This might be scary technology. Imagine if someone is talking to you and find out what you are thinking, even before you blurt it out.
AI Robots
Something we have seen enough in Terminator movies, but what if we can create a human who is a robot, but looks like human and install all possible ways for him to act like a human. AI without identifying human intelligence wouldn’t be an AI. We are always fascinated by the idea that if our own intelligence is replicable. Most people have a fear that AI will be the cause of human extinction. It is completely possible if AI robots become smarter than us. The problem with this is that we don’t know what we don’t know. So we only speculate. If we can build AI robots that can help us in manual, repetitive jobs, then it can be helpful. But this technology will come with a feature on how to improve.
Most of these technologies, I describe in my novel The Songs of Farewell. The novel is coming in 2020. I hope you will enjoy reading the novel and the futuristic inventions.