It's hard to believe, but back in 2014 people still read paper magazines. As an exercise in nostalgia, we asked some of our favourite writers, artists and photographers to convey 2024's news in the format we used to love.
Margaret Atwood: Through the glass brightly
Greetings, archaic sarx-humans! I am messaging you from inside a jar. Within it resides a self-replicating and thus immortal Planaria worm, into the DNA of which my entire neural network -- including sensorium, thought processes, memories and so-called personality -- has been encoded. My jar is in the main NSA surveillance Black Room, so much of the world's fibre-optic and wireless traffic flows through it. I am thus equipped to tell you almost anything about 2024 you might wish to know.
Here are a few highlights. Hemp has been legalised, and is being used for everything from cloth to face cream. So has pot, thus reducing prison populations and the cost to taxpayers. The demand for carbon fuels has plummeted, due to many senior citizens choosing the Plan-immortality Option and shedding their energy-consumptive fleshly carapaces. Life in a jar may not sound like fun but all input is available to us, and our feasts and sexual orgies, though simulated, are more enjoyable to us than yours were to you. No hangovers or resentments or STDs.
More good news: the planet is on its way out of the downward spiral you experienced in 2014. Humanity at last realised that if it killed the oceans, all oxygen-dependent life would die. Even those profiting from pollution grasped the fact that they, too, were air breathers. It took a few coups, but the job got done.
Thank you.
That's all I have time for, as my worm host is about to divide.
Thisthis willwill taketake somesome readjustmentment, as wewe will have to figure out which oneone of usus has the talktalktalking shtick. Stick. Signing off from the jarjar nownow! Enjoy your old-fashioned bodies, while they lastlastlast!
Margaret Atwood's most recent novel is MaddAddam
(Bloomsbury). A collection of her short stories will be published in September.
Russell Davies: Your happiness is mandatory
It's day 435 of The Happiness Project and this is your personalised report and update from the Algo-news team at Science Story Magic.
Great job! You exceeded the following 30-day targets: steps, protein, smiles, savings, friend encounters, social touch events, family touch events, gratitude, unplanned social encounters, loading domestic appliances, attention to commercial messages.
This qualifies you for nudge exemption on those criteria for the next 30 days. Our friends in Team Nudge will be trusting you to meet your targets, but please remember to quantify and share!
Oh no! Bummer! You did not deliver against these key 30-day metrics: crunches, sit-ups, five a day, breadth of reading, news awareness, lifetime learning, a deep swim in lake you, dental care.
Team Happiness associates are in your area now. They will be calling to engage on these issues within five minutes of your receipt of this message. Excellent! Now, please read the news.
Reading this news is a mandated target under the terms and conditions of your Happiness Project community settlement.
Your news from FilterBubble:
The Istanbul Olympics start this week! EU athletes are targeted for medals in most events and will be well excited to get your positive attention. Crucially, the Social Games athletes cannot win without your aggregated metrics -- so get running and let's get the Social Gold for the EU!
Thirty-five years of the world wide web! Since you are
<age> years old you'll probably remember the world wide web -- the famous predecessor to WeiboWorldWide. It was clunky and grey but we loved it. Engage #35years for news of the big celebration party at the Silicon Roundabout Dome -- a great opportunity for social touch events!
World War IV. It looks like it's on! Shouldn't be a biggy though, with no predicted impact on house prices. Also the Bell Riots are happening in San Francisco. Again, don't sweat it.
Nothing to worry about. Also, climate change might be a thing, say scientists.
End News.
Here we are! Team Happiness associates are knocking on your door right about now. Say hi and engage on key metrics. Our commitment to your satisfaction is your commitment to you.
Russell Davies is a creative director at GDS as well as a partner at Really Interesting Group.
Nick Harkaway: Who could predict Google's subdivision?
I did not expect it to be this hard. I didn't expect it to be easy -- I've never believed in sudden revolutionary change such as the Rapture or the Singularity -- but I reckoned our profits and deficits would cancel one another out and we'd keep moving roughly forwards and upwards. Moore's law for digital, something related and more remarkable for biotech. Call it "Church's law".
But William Gibson was more correct about the future than I realised and, when it came, it came not in blurry edges but in sharp, weird angles and precipices. "Unevenly distributed" all right -- like rocks after a volcanic eruption.
Antibiotics was the hardest. In 2014 I lived in a world mostly without disease, unless you were unlucky. Not now. Antibiotics stopped working really fast, and we weren't prepared. Thank God for CRISPR/Cas -- but there was a time when it looked disaster-movie bad.
But what surprised me most was the Google break-up. They voluntarily split themselves into competing mini-Googles. Why?
Because it's more important to them that the whole world should be more like Google. Flexitime, innovation and enthusiasm, a sense of moral obligation, fixing what doesn't work and making things reasonable and accessible. They wanted that to become the norm for work in the world, and that was more important than moneymaking.
Not that it hurt the global economy to have a bunch of seeded tech powerhouses.
What comes next? Well, we're all waiting for a little life extension. What will it do to our sense of time and priority? What do long-term issues look like if you've got a chance of seeing them play out?
Nick Harkaway is the author of The Gone-Away World*,* Angelmaker (both Windmill) as well as The Blind Giant: How to Survive in the Digital Age (John Murray)
Cory Doctorow: PM Lane Fox reinstates modding
Quick: what do all of these have in common? Your gran's cochlear implant, the WhatsApp stack, the Zipcar by your flat, the Co-op's 3D-printing kiosk, a Boots dispensary, your Virgin thermostat, a set of Tata artificial legs, and cheap heads-up goggles that come free with a Mr Men game?
If you're stumped, you're not alone. But Prime Minister Lane Fox had no trouble drawing a line around them today during PMQs in a moment that blindsided the Lab-Con coalition leader Jon Cruddas, who'd asked about the Princess Sophia hacking affair. Seasoned Whitehall watchers might reasonably have expected the PM to be defensive, after a group of still-anonymous hackers captured video, audio and sensitive personal communications by hijacking the princess's home network. The fingerpointing from GCHQ and MI6 has been good for headlines, and no one would have been surprised to hear the PM give the security services a bollocking, in Westminster's age-old tradition of blame passing.
Nothing of the sort. Though the PM leaned heavily on her cane as she rose, she seemed to double in stature as she spoke, eyes glinting and her free hand thumping the dispatch box: "The Princess Sophia affair is the latest instalment in a decades-old policy failure that weakened the security of computer users to the benefit of powerful corporations and our security services. This policy, the so-called 'anti-circumvention' rules, has no place in an information society. "Anti-circumvention pretends to be a rule against picking digital locks. These rules prohibit modifying your WhatsApp so that it can place a call without police listening in. They prohibit changing software on your NHS cochlear implants to stop your conversations being analysed by terrorism scanners. They prohibit tinkering with your goggles to allow you to cheat on games; they prohibit tampering with your thermostat so that you can keep your heat turned up when the power company needs you to turn it down.
They prevent 3D printers from making guns; they prevent wet printers from mixing prohibited narcotics. They allow Wonga to immobilise and repossess your artificial legs, and they stop car thieves from making off with Zipcars. "This government supports many of these goals, but we cannot and will not support the means by which they are achieved. If three decades of anti-circumvention have taught us anything, it's that it doesn't work. Clever people have always figured out how to get round these locks and the computer scientists tell us they always will. But these rules also have a chilling effect on security research. "Scientists who go public with information about weaknesses in systems protected by anti-circumvention are at risk of prosecution, and face powerful adversaries when they do. So, a system covered by anti-circumvention becomes a reservoir for long-lived security vulnerabilities -- programming defects that attackers like the ones who compromised Her Highnessleveraged in the course of their grotesque and unforgivable crimes. "The princess will have her systems audited by our security services, but the rest of us are not so fortunate. What do we say to the man who is robbed by thieves who take over his artificial legs? The grandmother whose privacy is violated by eavesdroppers who listen in on her most intimate conversations? The driver whose car is hijacked and driven to a remote place where she is at risk of robbery and even rape? What do we say to the family whose heat is disconnected by pranksters in the dead of winter? These are not mere hypotheticals. This parade of horribles are all real-world examples from the past year. It is for these reasons that we will introduce legislation this week to eliminate all anti-circumvention statutes."
PM Lane Fox's own backbenchers grew increasingly jubilant through the speech. At the end, they were on their feet, roaring and gesturing for the cameras. And the Lab-Cons? Apart from one or two of the more savvy members, most of them seemed baffled by the whole affair.
But the PM clearly knows what she's about. She was trending throughout the Anglosphere and Commonwealth last night, and has had letters of support from Pirate Parties from Tunisia to Iceland.
Elsewhere in today's edition, Italian PM Beppo Grillo's exclusive editorial supports PM Lane Fox, saying, "The Prime Minister is the only global leader who knows what she's about. The world has long waited for a political class that understands the importance of technology: finally, it has one."
Cory Doctorow is a non-fiction and sci-fi author, and co-edits Boing Boing
Alain de Botton: Having reached peak pizza delivery, capitalism is now helping us to confront mortality
Throughout the 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries, the big fortunes were made selling people things at the bottom of Maslow's famous pyramid (the "hierarchy of needs"): the plutocrats serviced our needs for pizzas, running shoes, cement, copper and roofing material. Now something new is on the market. Yes, humans still need the basic material things, but we're also starting to attend to the higher needs of our fellow human beings: the need for love, for functioning relationships, for meaningful bonds with others, for community, for happy fulfilled working lives and so on.
This, of course, used to be the realm of artists and gurus, shamans and life coaches. But then corporations realised that there was money to be made from branding and systematising the field of emotional intelligence. Today, one of the biggest multinationals, twice the size of Nike, helps relationships go better. ExxonMobil has been overtaken in market capitalisation by a company offering people assistance with their anxieties about death. We have entered a new phase: psychological capitalism. People still complain that their jobs are meaningless, but a lot less: there are now far more corporations taking care of the soul of man (no religious associations meant -- religion is so much a thing of the past).
Today, money is being made on an industrial scale helping people to live and die well.
*Alain de Botton is a philosopher, writer and broadcaster.
His latest book,* The News: A User's Manual (Hamish Hamilton), is out now
Marcus du Sautoy: 'The two cultures' were in fact one all along -- how did we forget that?
In the UK you always used to be able to tell how old someone was when they started talking about their O levels as opposed to their GCSEs. This year marks another such shift as the first generation of school leavers emerges with a single ED, or education diploma.
No longer a long a list of subjects studied in isolation, the ED is one diploma that aims to unify education into an integrated holistic experience.
Already, pupils are looking back at their predecessors with a sense of bafflement. Why on Earth was the school day divided up into separate subjects, the school building partitioned into separate classrooms? The graduates of ED find it hard to comprehend why you would study mathematics, music, history, literature, science and geography all as isolated subjects.
The educational reforms that tore down the artificial walls dividing the chemistry lab from the music room, the mathematics block from the art studios, were greeted originally with a great sense of unease. To experiment with a generation's schooling in such a radical manner was considered by many as educational suicide.
And yet educators have found their teaching invigorated by the chance to weave prime numbers through music, put scientific advances in historical context and teach coding as an art form. Of course, those who were reared in this new era will be the first to tell you how unradical the whole proposal really is. It is a return to the idea of the quadrivium -- the ancient curriculum outlined by Plato in The Republic -- where arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy were regarded as four strands of a common education.
The UK economy is likely to be one of the major beneficiaries of these reforms. Those who can seamlessly move between the language of genes to the poetry of Coleridge, between the physics of time, to time signatures of Björk, are going to be well placed to mine the extraordinary treasures that have been hiding in the cavities of the walls between those subject silos we used to teach in schools.
The education diploma reflects what many have known for some time. There are many ways to look at the world, but an education system of silos was always an artificial construct. Finally, students no longer have to choose between being a scientist, an artist, an inventor or a philosopher. We are all part of one holistic culture.
Marcus du Sautoy is the Simonyi professor for the public understanding of science and a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford. His latest book is The Number Mysteries
(Fourth Estate)
Lauren Beukes: Reuters: Two million viewers suffer brain damage after InXtremis Games fatality
Algiers: The death of Kenyan Alice Oduku in the InXtremis Games has affected two million people, including Hollywood star Matt Balantine, who were illegally connected to her nervous system via MindWire.
The viewers experienced a surge of biofeedback, which induced cardiac arrest in some and varying degrees of neural damage, when the 23-year-old runner went into brainmelt in the women's 1,000km.
The notorious anything-goes annual event draws an audience of over a billion people, who tune in to watch athletes using a mix of robotic prosthetics, trangenics and performance-enhancing drugs to compete in a variety of sports, often with fatal results.
This year's death toll is already 35, including Oduku, who suffered a massive heart attack from the reaction between her adrenergic nootropic stimulants and her leg prostheses, which release adrenalin. Haptic biovoyeur systems like MindWire, which allow viewers to remotely plug in to the episode by tricking their autonomic systems into experiencing an extreme biological response, have been banned since 2022, when Pakistan's Yunis Chottani burned to death in his exoskeleton during the K2 Downhill. The 100,000 people plugged in to him were treated for trauma.
Lauren Beukes is the author of Zoo City, Moxyland
(Angry Robot) and The Shining Girls (Harper Collins)
Mark Miodownik: Sun shines on photovoltaic firms
Oil and coal company share prices fell to an all-time low yesterday with the news that the efficiencies of Google's perovskite solar cells had jumped, up four per cent to 45 per cent.
Perovskite solar cells account for more than 80 per cent of the world's total installed photovoltaic capacity. This latest rise in perovskite efficiency seals the fate of oil, coal and gas as forms of energy generation, and carbon capture as a means of dealing with CO<sub>2</sub> emissions. This was reflected in the share prices of the major oil companies. The CEO of BP said: "Oil is too valuable to burn."
Mark Miodownik is the author of Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World (Penguin)
Mitchell Joachim: Promised jet packs
New York City's traffic is not the way of the congested past. The rise of smart-cluster ballooning around the Brooklyn Bridge was highly successful. Wafting from cantilevers at the promenade in Brooklyn Heights to Wall Street is an easy three-minute trip across the East River. If personal ballooning isn't for you, public Blimp Bumper Buses tethered to funiculars under the bridge traverse the same distance. An increasing number of citizens are using Martin jet packs to zip through their daily commute.
No one misses the shiny manually controlled precious metal boxes called automobiles any more. Those things were designed to be obsolete, if not death traps. No brains and all speed, early hard-skinned cars were not created for cities. An entire century was devoted to adapting dense urban cores to the car. Large turning radiuses and ultra-wide lanes were required to support these atmospheric carbon-loading devices.
Soft cars eventually replaced them. Their quilted air-bladder skins now move in slo-mo flocks guided by actuators in the road.
You don't own one; they are shared and can park anywhere. Our new city cars are big batteries on wheels, an integral part of the smart city grid. When parked, they help power buildings and vertical farms for food. The most popular are the In Vitro Meat Towers. Most urban protein is harvested from lab-grown meat in skyscrapers, known as "meatscrapers". The soft cars assist in powering the low-intensity laboratory paraphernalia to keep the buildings in GM-food production. In the 20th century, Henry Ford wanted to merge the agricultural economy with the automobile industry. He even imagined and built a few soybean-based Model T car bodies in the 40s. But now it is GM meat by GM cars, whose slogan is "Where's the beef?"
Mitchell Joachim is an architect at Terreform ONE and professor at NYU
Tim Harford: Flexible pricing will eventually snap
In 2014 it was obvious that the once-arcane topic of flexible pricing was going mainstream. Consider the strategies adopted by the big digital players then. Apple had set out its stall with simple, predictable pricing -- from an iPhone to an iTunes track.
Amazon, in contrast, seemed to change prices every day.
For a long time the world had been priced like Apple -- prices were predictable and did not change often. Amazon wanted none of that. By 2017 algorithmic flex-pricing was ubiquitous. We can all remember the excitement of walking around a supermarket with smart glasses on, and having the head-up display offer us better deals on whatever product we were looking at. But the next step was obvious: the shop prices themselves began haggling with your wearable tech, price tags blurring and changing under your gaze.
When did flex-pricing jump the shark? Perhaps it was the IPO in 2020 of Slivr, the in-your-face descendant of TaskRabbit, Amazon Turk and Slivers of Time. Slivr allocated tasks to temporary workers in six-minute intervals depending on the highest bid. Who can forget the price gouging? Or the slazumping -- whereby the person you thought you'd hired walked out of the job?
Such flex-pricing worked for Uber but we can only take so much.
It turns out that prices that stay put aren't a relic of hand-painted menu boards. The real reason that prices stick isn't technological; it's psychological. An ever-shifting landscape of prices makes us feel exploited, if not motion sick.
Now it's back to the good old days of prices and wages that stand still long enough to grab. We're grateful Slivr has gone the way of Pets.com.
Tim Harford is a Financial Times columnist and author of The Undercover Economist Strikes Back (Little, Brown)
Srđa Popović: Protestors unsettle a corrupt government with laughtivism, tech and blinking lights
Ten years ago, in 2014, a protest that began in Kiev's Maidan Square shocked the world with images of violence. Barricades between protest camps and government buildings showed the division between securityofficers and protestors. The government buildings that protestors had captured over months looked like something out of a war zone.
Now, ten years later, people are protesting against a corrupt government but the protestors and activistshave dramatically changed their tactics for resistance. While loud rock music pounds on speakers, throngs of people dance and chant slogans in something that resembles a carnival. Even while riot police are lined up around the square, protestors are still having fun, and offering cakes and flowers to the police. "After 2014, we understood that violent struggles always fail," says a young girl. "Back then, we wanted to take down our leader and many of us took up guns because we thought that non-violence had a breakingpoint. But in our excitement we didn't know that in the long term this would actually hurt our future prospects for democracy. We have learned not to make the same mistakes that other freedom fighters of ten years ago made. Now we have learned that we must maintain non-violent discipline at all costs. It is better to challenge the police and the government with beauty and a smile. "Plus," she goes on, "those stiff, corrupt politicians hate jokes -- and always make stupid mistakes when mocked." "Yeah," adds one of the protestors, "police are our friends. Like us they have to deal with corruption. They are not our enemy. We are basically on the same side, so why would we fight them?"
Yesterday there was a case of police brutality against one of the peaceful protestors, but thanks to a new app called Making Oppression Backfire it was taped and distributed to human rights groups all over the world. The protestor uploaded it swiftly on to 25 TV networks with the click of a button. Naming and shaming restrained the government from any further attacks.
Misha, one of the protestors, says: "I am kind of pissed off with technology. Our Facebook page gets millions of clicks every day, but we are still lacking real people on the square. That's the menace of clicktivism." As night approaches, the city is lit up by flashing lights. People switch their lights on and off in a form of protest that does not involve them going out on to the streets. And loudspeakers in people's windows have replaced the hitting of pots and pans.
I can't predict whether the government will meet the requests of protestors, but I know that it was a very different bloody square in 2014.
Srđa Popović is a biologist, political activist and executive director of the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (Canvas)
Nicholas Lovell: It's dumb to be smart if people want dumb
For so long, we got used to the idea that screens were getting bigger. TVs grew from tiny, grainy screens to 50-inch behemoths that dominated the living room. It seems as if the trend was bigger, bigger, bigger.
Oh, how wrong we were. And how right. In the average suburban home, a flick of a switch will transform one wall of the living room into an audiovisual output of astonishing fidelity. But the cables and ugly plastic machines that went by the ill-suiting catch-all name of "set-top boxes" are now nowhere to be seen.
Because as screens got bigger, they also got smaller. By the early 2010s, the majority of us carried a powerful audiovisual entertainment device in our pockets (smartphones) or our bags (tablets). That device was personal. It contained our credit card details. Our entertainment preferences. Our friends. Our relationships.
So it was not surprising that successful media businesses started innovating around the device we already owned, not the one that they wanted us to own. Not everyone adapted, though. The makers of TVs tried to make them smarter, only to discover that people wanted them dumber. The manufacturers of consoles tried to tie us to living rooms, only to discover we wanted to be able to watch what we wanted in any room. The controllers of the pipes through which information travelled tried to tie us to our homes, only to discover that we wanted to watch our entertainment and access our info wherever and whenever we want.
TV manufacturers saw a collapse in sales of smaller screens. Why would you buy a television for every room of the house when every family member already had a screen of their own? Consumers rejected second televisions in favour of tablets and phones that were interactive, could be used throughout the house, outside it too, and offer a vast array of entertainment and information streams, not just the broadcast ones.
Of course there were naysayers. "You'll never be able to get the experience of a blockbuster movie on a small screen," they said. "A game on a tiny tablet can't compare with the immersion of a first-person shooter on my Xbox." Like the audiophiles lamenting the transition to digital file formats or readers who detest ebooks, they raged.
But consumers spoke. They chose the convenience, portability and personalisation of the small screen over the inflexibility of the large. They sat in the living room, negotiating over whose feed would be shown on the big screen. They gathered for events: football; the Doctor Who finale; The X Factor auditions. They argued over whose game or episode appeared on the large screen.
And, if they lost the negotiation, they played games, or chatted with friends, or watched their own shows on the personal screen they carried with them.
The first screen became the second screen. And entire industries suffered as they fought unsuccessfully to hold back the tide.
Meanwhile...
London, February 2024: a leading kitchen utensils manufacturer has sued a London man for "improving" its lemon squeezer.
Italian firm Salassi has apparently issued cease-and-desist proceedings against John Smith, 39, of London. Salassi manufactures the Citric Summoner, the iconic three-legged lemon squeezer designed by Pauline Severa. Smith downloaded a 3D image of Salassi's lemon squeezer and, claims Salassi, used its intellectual property to make an infringing copy on his MakerBot 3D printer.
Smith doesn't deny he made a lemon squeezer. He does deny that he made the Citric Summoner. "I adapted Salassi's original design for my own purposes. I'm only 5'9", and I find the squeezer is too tall for me to use comfortably, so I shortened the legs. It also washes poorly in my dishwasher, so I changed the grooves to be easier to clean."
Salassi was unavailable for comment, although a notice on its website says that it is vigorous when protecting its intellectual property from unauthorised use.
Smith commented, "It's all a bit silly really. We're only here because I downloaded the image and Salassi could track it. If I'd just made my own 3D image using the imaging app on my phone, they'd never have known that I'd adapted the lemon squeezer. And coming after me with legal challenges seems likely to backfire on them.
After all, it's what the music industry did in the late 20th century, suing their customers, and that didn't work out so well, did it?"
Nicholas Lovell is the author of The Curve
(Portfolio Penguin)
Dan Slater: Dear Johnny...
I'm sorry we haven't spoken in so long. Ever since my last divorce, I've had a lot of time to think about what makes for a good, strong relationship. The truth is that I never should've married your mother, or the four that followed. But we didn't have the predictive technologies that you kids have now. Algorithms.
Compatibility scores on hundreds of metrics. Not to mention the information! Health, financial and psychological histories. Quips by prior mates. So much information. You'd be a fool not to take advantage of it! So listen, Johnny, I know you like this Melissa. I can tell from the textual data on your feed. The ratio of positive emotions ("nice", "happy") to negative ones ("hurt", "bad") has been off the charts. Based on your browsing patterns, I see there is certain, ahem, content that you no longer require with such astounding frequency. But I've been running the numbers and I need to be honest. I have my doubts. Most disturbing is that while your feed-share frequency has declined in recent weeks -- typical behaviour in a new relationship -- this Melissa'shas not. This suggests a wide range of possible character deficiencies, I'm told.
Besides, what's with all the selfies? Just my two cents, Johnny.
I'll be back from China next month and I look forward to meeting her.
Love, Dad
Dan Slater is the author of A Million First Dates:
Solving the Puzzle of Online Dating (Current)
Michio Kaku: Total Recall is now a two-way street
Today, the world is anxiously awaiting the opening of Brain.net, which some commentators say will revolutionise commerce, human relations and our way of life. The internet is about to make an historic shift, from simply transmitting boring digital files to sending the first real-life emotions, memories, feelings and sensations. The very first memories are scheduled to be sent on Brain.net later tonight.
We'll look back at the 3D colour movies of today as if they were cave drawings. With Brain.net, you'll be able to experience "total-immersion" entertainment, running through the totality of emotions and feelings of the actors in a movie. These thoughts can be recorded, so we will have libraries of the memories and sensations of people long dead and be able to relive their lives.
Our dreams, hopes and desires will live after we are gone. We will have conversations with the great minds of history in a "library of souls".
Nowadays, we connect with the internet via our phones, watches or jewellery. In the future, we will connect to Brain.net via two devices. First, our internet contact lens will allow us to download any movie, visit any website, purchase any item, simply by blinking. We will live in augmented reality, so that we can see any map, blueprint, movie or file superimposed on reality. We will live in The Matrix. Second, microsensors, which use nanotech, will connect our brains to radically new, powerful servers which make up Brain.net.
But this is only the first step. If all our thoughts and emotions are recorded on a disk, then does this mean we can live forever? In the last decade, then President Obama and the EU initiated the BRAIN initiative, to map all the neural pathways of the living brain. Right now, we are only a third of the way through this ambitious initiative, but already we can map out how various regions of the brain communicate with each other and process information. Once completed, we will have BRAIN 2.0, a backup copy of our brain. Even if we die, BRAIN 2.0 will live on. So maybe this is a form of immortality.
And scientists working on these mind-blowing ideas are taking cues from sci-fi. In the last century, Asimov wrote about sending pure consciousness into space in The Last Question, his favourite story. Once BRAIN 2.0 is finished this information will be placed on laser beams, and then shot into outer space at the speed of light, to relay stations. No messy rockets, meteorites, radiation or weightlessness. Just press the "on" button of a laser and send consciousness into space. Maybe Asimov was right: the best way to explore the universe might be to send consciousness soaring at the speed of light.
Michio Kaku is the author of The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind (Penguin)
Alexander Grünsteidl: Hilarious: Disney's new resort in India features a post-war London 'high street'
Tomorrow the latest Disney Global Resort opens in Noida, India, along with a highly anticipated top attraction -- the "20th century London high street", a replica of shops, cafés and workplaces of times long gone.
At the press preview, Disney's Resort CEO explained how much of the collection had been donated by eBay, the exhibition partner, which a decade ago started recovering unwanted goods from auctions -- particularly artefacts that Google Glass had rendered redundant as we started to superimpose furniture and art on to our blank home walls.
To enter the high street we receive a printed replica of a British Airways ticket. A rare piece, now that most airlines have collapsed following the rise of online immersive conferences and virtual local resorts, which made travel obsolete and very expensive.
We pass through a decommissioned Airbus 380 business-class deck and get to the "high street", where we find a luxury Oxford Street wedding shop. Featuring a dressing room complete with real mirrors, a leather stool and hooks, the shop talks of a time before online body-metric avatars, social networkrecommendations and instant customisation -- a time when brides had to go to shops like this with their friends to try things on and get their opinion. Leaving the shop, we're reminded by the smell of flowers of those tangible presents of love we used to buy before virtual gifts.
Next stop takes us to an originally restored Hackney coffee shop where Arthur Carpenter, a recent immigrant and cast member playing the role of a former Shoreditch hipster, offers us a "flat white" and then drives us in a chauffeur-driven -- not robot-controlled -- black cab to a replica post-industrial warehouse, similar to the one he used to work in before the 2018 crash. Inside is an advertising workspace with an office desk, an Aeron chair, complete with a cabinet, computer, keyboard, mouse and monitor. This is truly a unique piece, and a stark reminder of how, not so very long ago, people actually "went" to work.
Alexander Grünsteidl is director of user experiences at Method, London
Karen Thompson Walker: All quiet on the western coast
Yellowing brochures for the community of Splendid, California, show children splashing in swimming pools, and picnic blankets spread out over thick, green lawns.
But, ten years after the worst drought in California's history, Splendid is as quiet as Chernobyl.
Sixty-three houses sit empty, dust filling the halls, while sidewalks crack in the Sun. Through broken windows, one can spot lizards making their homes on the cool tile floors of these skeletal houses. "It seemed like the problem would be temporary," said Barry Jenkins, Splendid's developer, now bankrupt. The community was designed to rely on well water but the wells, like the reservoirs, dried up.
In a region where water has become more expensive than oil, Splendid is one of dozens of communities that have been abandoned.
Some fear the major cities, so far kept solvent by water trucked in from other states, could be next. Several desalinisation plants are rising on the coast, but some say it's too little too late.
Los Angeles has almost no greenery at all -- it's illegal to water lawns. In a state that once produced two thirds of the US fruit and nut crop, most fields lie fallow.
As California struggles to adapt to a drought that experts say may last 200 years, debates continue about whether this is part of the state's natural cyclical climate. "This land was not meant to support so many people," says GordonMoreno, who lives in a trailer near Splendid, bringing in his own water and using it sparingly.
In the shade behind one of the crumbling houses, two lizards sleep, their bodies, like the cactus, specially adapted for drought.
Karen Thompson Walker is the author of The Age of Miracles (Simon & Schuster)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
