Logging on to a work meeting in the metaverse with your legless avatar. Emptying the vacuum bag of your humanoid robot butler every day after it’s finished the floors. Having to call the police to tell them you’re on a rollercoaster, not in a fender bender. And paying for it using a cryptocurrency with such fluctuating value that you’re never sure how much it’s worth. Welcome to our dull, uninspired version of the future.
There are exciting visions of the future in the making: driverless cars could rework cities, augmented reality could upend everything from entertainment to education, and robots could release us from physical labour. But right now, we’re building a suburban dystopia.
Why are we so bad at imagining our futures? “We spend surprisingly little time thinking about the future,” said futurist Tom Cheesewright. “At least, in a structured way. I try to get my clients to commit one percent of their time – one day every six months – to thinking about the future. But even that’s a struggle. We just have a lot going on.”
“Part of it’s actually evolutionary,” explained futurist William Higham. “Our brains evolved to focus on that which is most immediately essential to our survival. We evolved to pay attention to immediate threats – and things we’d faced before. So we learned to filter out thoughts of anything else: for instance, longer
