Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.
I have often wondered what the future might be like. Will we have flying cars, robot butlers, or corn on the cob as big as a person? We’ll never know.
Unbeknownst to me, the future has already arrived in the form of a website. This website may be poorly localized, but that hardly matters as it is written not in HTML or PHP, but magic.
I give you akinator.com!
After that depressing end to the Steeler game today, Katie and I caught up on the last couple FlashForward episodes that we missed. While the show itself is a nice LOST replacement until 2010 rolls around, I find the premise pretty intriguing.
Barring all the grisly death and disaster that the blackout caused, what would life be like if we had a brief flash of our future? What if we saw a relatively true vision of what we were doing for a little over 2 minutes on April 29th?
There’s an interesting facet of human nature that the show portrays through several characters, and that’s the fact that by even being given a small glimpse of the future, the future has already changed. There are people throwing parties on April 29th because the date was significant due to the flash forwards. There are chance meetings that are already written because of the flash forwards.
There is a set of future events that are opened up as possibilities by the simple fact that the future has been seen. This idea is fascinating to think about.
Of course, equally interesting is the simple question of what I personally would expect to see in my flash forward. Most of our lives are relatively simple; I assume my flash forward wouldn’t involve people trying to kill me or seeing people I had presumed dead. But I would get to see my baby, which would be rewarding enough for me.
Would seeing that future change my daily actions? Would I try to drive towards that future? Let it manifest itself? See if I could change it? It’d certainly be a fascinating conversation topic for the next six months.
From what I understand about the future, we’ll all be living in the cloud. Or, at least, our data will. We will no longer need to keep buying bigger and bigger hard drives because all of our important data will be living on several infallible servers spread across the world, accessible only by the right people.
Which is all well and good, even if I’m a bit doubtful when it comes to the transfer time of my huge picture, music, and growing video files and I’m a tad worried about what sensitive information cybercriminals will be able to hack into.
Still, I’m excited about our cloudy futures.
You know what I could use clouds for right now? Save games. I know, I know, it’s just a bit of fluffy entertainment garbage. It’s not medical records or anything important like that. But losing a save game (and I lost a few when I upgraded this computer’s OS to Windows 7) is a heartbreaking experience.
It’s mainly a loss of time, of course. It means that in order to progress in the game (especially if it’s story or level based), I have to replay everything up until the point I reached previously again. At times, this is can prove how good a game is. But more often, it makes a perfectly acceptable good game tedious and a mediocre game unbearable.
And this would all be saved if my tiny save games (at least, I assume that save games are tiny, compared to things like audio, video, and pictures) were on a cloud somewhere safe and far away.
So, when it comes to video games, I say put it on the cloud! Imagine a world where every computer has your saves, where all consoles would pull from your central online ID, where you never lose any progress you’ve made. Such a world is possible. I believe.
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