Comment:

From 2000 onwards, there's been a tendency for people to say we're "living in the future". I think that's largely due to the science fiction of the preceding century establishing dates beginning with 2 as being futuristic.

You hear it all the time, don't you? Some new smartphone function or drone or social innovation challenges the status quo, and people say "wow, the future is weird" or "what an [amazing/awful] future we live in". It's basically just another way of saying "the world in which I grew up, and learned to think of as normal, is very quickly going away, and won't ever come back". I assume the phrase, if not the idea behind it, will gradually phase out as the people raised on 1900's sci fi age out of the population.

That's the real future, of course. That's what's really scary and different about it. You won't be there.

Transcript:

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0006 - 2167/07/05/17:48 - Lee Caldavera's apartment, living room
LC: You know what the problem is? I was born in the wrong era.
Doc: You would prefer the aesthetic and social milieu of some bygone age?
LC: No, no, the future. I'd be a perfectly well-adjusted and productive member of society if we just had the technology to support it.
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LC: I mean, some day, if we need some new body part, we won't have to wait two damn weeks for it to be grown and printed in a lab, we won't have to schedule an hour-long surgery for it to be swapped in, we won't have to spend another two whole goddamn fucking weeks waiting for the thing to heal into place.
LC: It'll just be click, swap, go.
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LC: And... and we won't have to go anywhere, and there won't be this societal pressure for people to interact face-to-face all the time.
LC: And we'll have AIs that don't just read subvocal cues, they actually read our minds and do it properly so we won't have to try to explain what we want. They'll just get it right the first goddamn time. Life won't be so frustrating and demoralizing and draining.
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Doc: You don't think that the act of consciously verbalizing a thought is what clarifies and refines that thought, or that forcing yourself to do something difficult is an essential component of personal growth?
LC: And we'll have psychologists that give me solutions instead of arguing with me and trying to blame me for the problems in my own life! Can't you just agree with me and then fix everything?
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