It’ll be the fifties. The twenty-fifties. Forty years from now. We’ll be so different.
Yesterday’s column talked about the almost incredible changes in our way of life during the last sixty years. Ubiquitous screens, lights and air-conditioning would not have happened if electricity was costly or undependable.
Consider the changes coming to our way of life by the year 2057. Unless of course electricity becomes costly or undependable.
Can screens, lights and air-conditioning become even more ubiquitous? You bet.
Video screens may become our constant companions by then. Not just in our hands or pockets but attached to us. As Apple watches and Google glasses have already attempted.
Super-screens have already been put on the face of buildings. Not just in Times Square. To glimpse this future, walk along some boulevards of today’s Tokyo. In 2057, building super-screens may be commonplace.
Lighting – spurred on by the LED revolution – is becoming smart, sensing, dynamic, informational. And far cheaper to power and maintain. Will night be like day? Will lights point out where we want to go? Will they amuse and entertain us?
As air-conditioning also becomes more efficient and cheap, we can expect interior spaces to grow further. And some to be immense. Futuristic enclosed urban neighborhoods? Days at a time spent in perfect climactic conditions notwithstanding the weather outside?
And we haven’t even touched on 3D printing, virtual reality, drones, body implants, and so on. Trying to imagine all this is like going back to 1977, and thinking up the fantastical technological and cultural changes since then.
Whatever the future brings, we know one thing. It’ll be powered by inexpensive and dependable electricity.
The magazine for commentary, opinion and debate on utility regulation and policy since 1928, Public Utilities Fortnightly. “In PUF, Impact the Debate.”
Steve Mitnick, Editor-in-Chief, Public Utilities Fortnightly
E-mail me: mitnick@fortnightly.com