Cities and suburbs, real and imaginary.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

The Future of Everything

I am in Texas, at my mother's house, surrounded by brown, drought-ravaged yards and plants, sitting in an air conditioned house with a glass of water beside me and the constant distraction of dogs.

I have decided to reveal the future of everything.

The future of business, every business, is the death of every business, because they will all collapse under the weight of changing business models and bad investments and better competitors.

The future of reading is the end of reading, because literacy was invented and is more precarious than we could possibly imagine in a world where reading is not as valuable a skill as programming, and it is only a matter of time until programming is the preferred language in text form.

The future of programming are programs that design other programs, because people couldn't be bothered to learn all the intricacies of whatever language of programming iterates while machinery produce tool after tool after tool.

The future of machinery is to get smaller. There are only so many power plants that can run on this earth without killing us all, and we are already over our limit.

Get smaller. Think local. Think illiterately.

We will walk away from all these futile devices, and return to agriculture.

We will tumble away from agriculture as crops fail and new insects learn to eat old plants. We will have to forage.

We will all be foraging, with no businesses to hire us, and no books to teach us, and no programs to bother reaching out a robot hand to ours and no power plants to send the bill collectors after us.

We will all be foraging.

There will be tribes.

They will want to leave messages for each other that will look like heiroglyphics on stone walls.

This is what will happen to us, and to everything with us.

Also, the sun is a finite resource, and even if it is a slow burn, it is the only burn we have.

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