The Future: An Optimistic Look

I am skipping current events in this post. This is going to be a journey of speculation. I am going to attempt to be a futurist and speculate on what things might be like in the future from an optimistic perspective. I will be talking about things such as over population, automation, virtual reality, augmented reality, block chains, and crowd sourcing.

First. In this future government is not what we consider government today. Government is a global blockchain where everyone has a fixed amount of crypto currency allotted to them per day. How that currency is used is up to the people. Actions occur in the form of crowd sourcing petitions which people that are interested in supporting can send however much of their crypto currency into. These petitions will result in contracts which people can pickup to produce the work required and they will receive the crowd sourced crypto currency.

The other obvious usage of the crypto currency is in the form of purchasing of products, and services. These are free exchanges between people on the blockchain. You can buy food this way. You can sell your art, videos, stories, games, and experiences this way. This means if your works are popular that it is possible for people to accumulate more crypto currency, yet they do so on a purely voluntary basis.

If a crowd sourced initiative is not funded sufficiently for someone to pick up the contract then eventually it will expire and the crypto will return to the people that tried to back that project.

Laws and government as we know it do not exist other than in the form of contracts between each other and crowd sourcing for larger initiatives.

There are occasional cases where people exploit the system, extort people through coercion, or by fraudulent contract behavior where they receive payment and do not complete the contract. Such people will earn a reputation for their activity and they will become considered more and more likely to be a risk for contracts. People can voluntarily agree to contract with them still, but they likely will expect MORE from the riskier person(s). They may also have such a bad reputation they cannot get contracts at all.

The crowd sourcing initiatives could also indicate a minimum reputation required to accept a contract for that crowd sourced project.

The currency that flows into the block chain would be in the form of a fixed amount per living person tied to the block chain. Multiple accounts would not exist. There could be a group escrow account that holds the funds for crowd sourced initiatives, and their could be individual escrow accounts that hold part of funding until a contract is indicated as complete.

People could also subscribe to services and have a fixed amount of their crypto income automatically sent to a specific account with a memo to indicate what it is for.

There would be no such thing as an anonymous financial transaction. At early days this would bother some people, but in reality it ended up being freeing.

With the constant flow of new crypto into the system per person inflation seems like a problem and the wealth would accumulate in more and more crypto wealthy people due to products, services, etc. The big problem with this is that there is no where for this crypto to exit the system.

The entertainment segment tapped into this and offered services that allowed competition like sporting events where large amount of crypto went into the events. Participants in the event are awarded a portion of that pool of crypto based upon their performance and depending upon the contract designed around the entertainment. A large portion of the pool is destroyed removing the currency from the pool.

This brings us to the other aspects of the future.

As AI and Automation increased at an ever accelerating pace since slightly before the 21st century most of the traditional manual labor jobs have been replaced by robots. Many of the service jobs such as receptionist, dispatching, and other basic communication jobs also were completely automated. Most services that could be simulated were automated.

People could still survive due to the daily crypto that was supplied, but jobs as were known prior to the 21st century were largely gone. It was no longer the case of looking for a 9-5 job in a help wanted advertisement.

People had their daily crypto and if they wanted to achieve more than that it was on them to produce products and services that the AI and automation could not and offer those up either as a vote to support service (like steemit posts), or pay to play services and products. Artists still had these strange qualities of the mind that we had not determined how to completely mimic using computers so some artists could still sell their products either in a patreon like sponsored by patrons basis, or by people purchasing their physical products.

The thing about physical products is that 3d printing had progressed to being able to print out in most materials. Thus, a sculpture while unique one moment could be mass produced the next. Being the person to own the first ever with a note of that transaction in the blockchain became bragging rights but the old school intellectual property concepts no longer existed so people cloning art is common. Yet, it is expected at this point so this is why the patron support mechanism is popular. The patronage of many people sending small amounts of extra crypto to the artist per day is incentive for them to keep producing. The exceptional artists might even seem to be quite wealthy.

The AI and automation had eliminated a lot of the common jobs. The jobs that remain tend to be those around creativity, entertainment, etc. Literature, Art, Poems, Stories, Movies, Video Games, Augmented Reality, and VR experiences. They also would often involve people that were popular on vote for post social media/blog sites. These could result in people getting extra money.

There is another aspect of society that over time the automated systems have out lived those that created them. If they are automated into providing food for example then it is soon realized these can become avenues for removing excess crypto from the economy. Keep enough crypto in a fund for when human contract is needed to do maintenance on the equipment that has not been automated and the rest can be removed from the economy. This means food, and many other things might end up being ways to remove currency from the economy.

There would still be chefs and as automation could make most meals once the technique is known a chef would be like an artist who was adept at creating new tastes, smells, and experiences that were not in the current automation circuit. They might also resurrect old flavors that the automatons are no longer producing. They would in a sense become the trend setters.

Educating on the sciences and how to produce and maintain this equipment and to give those with engineering and inventive minds an outlet was still very much a thing. Such initiatives were crowd sourced like art and scientists, engineers, and inventors often had patrons just like the artists.

The work in the future exists. It is just VERY different from work today.

This brings us to the Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality areas. There are still very much human jobs tied to these as it is in these realms that humans will often encounter new things that have not yet been automated.

Space exploration occurred in a big way, but not as people were thinking. They realized that drones, and robotic technology combined with Virtual Reality were the keys to space exploration.

Instead of focusing on manned missions going everywhere the future focused on getting drones and robots that were directed and assisted by human pilots or assistants who only interfaced with these drones and robots via virtual reality. In the early days the greater the distance between the pilot and the drone the longer the communication lag. For this reason most of the drones and robots had automated routines so that a pilot could queue up a number of activities to take and in what order that the robot and drones would receive and then be able to do step by step without needing constant real time communication. Sometimes this would prove to be a problem, but for the most part it could handle most needs.

This enabled the construction of stations in space, in orbits, on planets, and in and on asteroids without a human ever setting foot on them. The advantage is that these were human capable habitats so that when humans finally did go to these places they already had a fully constructed home.

It was worth building these homes as that allowed the VR operator/pilot/assistants to be closer to the drones and robots to reduce communication lag.

As time progressed advances in quantum entanglement related communication made it so real time VR piloting again a possibility over great distances.

As to the augmented reality. This was provided mostly through audio devices, and visual devices at first. At first it was usually visors and such that could provide extra information in the form of heads up displays based upon what the person was looking at. This later modified into being able to show them different light wavelengths they couldn't normally see such as infrared, ultraviolet, etc. It was much like the predators vision in the Predator movies that allowed them to cycle through different visual spectrums. Yet it went further than that. It also enable things like seeing sounds, and seeing smells. New forms of entertainment and exploration came in the form of representing old data and input in new ways. It was sometimes called a sensory meal.

Eventually the visual tech advanced enough for augmented reality to where their were contact lense versions, and some people would totally embrace trans-humanism and have permanent modifications to their body made to add some of these features into themselves.

There were also tactile (touch) augmented reality devices and gloves that could be used to exaggerate textures. This had been found useful for detecting fine imperfections in surfaces and to provide new tactile entertainment and exploration experiences.

Life revolved for humans largely around information, social, and entertainment. So new ways to experience life were always embraced with gusto and explored in every conceivable direction. Often these would be sexual in nature.

Yet that brings up the problem of over population. That had not been a problem for a long time. This was not purely due to being able to colonize and inhabit new places. It had begun before that.

As people went more and more online and into social media, and began using virtual reality, and things like teledildonics more and more there was actually a gradual decline in actual human interaction. It still happened, but some people actually found it to be messy, too personal, and inconvenient. This lead to a decline in unplanned pregnancies. It also lead to a decline in planned pregnancies as the interactions of people in order to procreate became less common. It still happened and there were even people contracting to be impregnated. People also would contract in prostitution for in the future you are free to do what you want with your own body as long as it is voluntary and of your free will and not due to coercion of any kind.

Yet all of this already slowed population growth and in some periods it actually declined enough to where it was a concern and people were paid from a crowd sourced contract to intentionally procreate in order to increase population numbers.

The real problems tended to be in some of the areas and things that occurred with trans-humanism. People were more and more obsessed with being able to live forever and become machines themselves. This actually lead to great understandings in what services and traits of actual humans were valuable. Eventually they did learn how to transmit minds into computers and some people essentially became immortal. Sometimes this was a problem, and sometimes it was not. What they soon realized though was that there were things about the person that were missing after this transfer. Many aspects of the mind they had figured out, but there were still elusive qualities that just could not yet be digitized, but might be in the future.

With people living potentially forever population again became a concern. And then it wasn't one. Once a mind could be moved it did not need to be into a human body. It could be into pretty much any shape. Some people chose to not even have a body and they just lived in the solar system wide internet that was a descendant of the IPFS (Interplanetary File System) project that things like DTUBE ran on top of.

The future had its problems. Any new idea, brings with it new problems to overcome. People persevered and they evolved into new ways. There were black times, but they learned from these and moved on. The jobs and opportunities were always there, just what they manifested as changed.

I hope you enjoyed my stab at futurism. I am no Alvin Toffler. I intentionally tried to keep this positive.