Life in Techtopia: Part I

With this Part I, I am starting a new series of essays to point to the end-state of where 21st Century technological evolution is ultimately heading and bringing us towards; A Technological Utopia that I call Techtopia.

This series is an effort to describe the Techtopia to look forward to and work towards. My hope, is to accelerate our journey in that direction. By the end of this series, I intend to compile all the parts into an eBook, for free distribution, in PDF format.

Waking Up

John's eyes open to sunlight shining through his window. His mind wanders through the list of warm breakfast options, from across the world's food cultures, that his fully autonomous and robotically equipped kitchen can freshly prepare for him, with the ingredients available in the cabinets and on the shelves.

Once John decides what he wants, the kitchen starts preparing the first meal of the day, as he gets up, and heads into the bathroom.

Brainwave sensors around his home remotely detect his thoughts, to transmit them to the cloud, so that the myriad of devices, appliances and equipment around him execute his will, seamlessly and instantly. John is able to constantly, interact with his technological assets, both physical and virtual, dynamically, uninterrupted, directly via thought.

While brushing his teeth in the bathroom, John quickly reviews the recording of his dreams from through the night. He selects certain recordings he finds particularly interesting, instructs the software to carry out slight tweaks and edits for clarity of visual, and he posts them for sharing, on his social network timeline, in the virtual world, so that his friends and family, can experience those dreams.

While in the shower, John's home management system updates him on groceries that are running out as well as other home essential items. John mentally instructs the system to make the purchases with some additions and changes. He wants to try a new deodorant he's seen being promoted through social media.

The purchase orders are automatically placed by the system. By the end of the of day, a driver-less vehicle will arrive at a parking space closest to John's home, and will dispatch drones carrying all the items ordered, to his home. His domestic robo-butler will collect, check and store the items. The robobutler will alert John to any discrepancy. If there is none, the payment is automatically transferred from John's bank account to the supplier.

Breakfast

As John, dressed up and ready, sits down at his dining table for breakfast, his robobutler places the tray with his freshly prepared breakfast, along with hot coffee, in front of him. John puts on his smartglasses that stream sound directly to his skull.

He enters a simulation of the outdoor sitting area of a cafe in Venice. The weather is nice in Venice this particular morning. Whatever John is seeing, is streamed in real-time, with onsite 360-degree cameras. He has virtually teleport-ed himself to the cafe location in Venice. He sees the food that his kitchen has prepared on the table in front of him. Next to him, is Alice, who is also, not really in Venice. She lives close by, about half a kilometre away from John, in Singapore.

"Nice choice", Alice comments, on John's chosen simulation for his breakfast environment. She has peeked into it.

John decides to peek into the simulation Alice has chosen. She has decided to have breakfast on a terrace, in Oia, Santorini, Greece, facing the Amoudi Bay. "Yours too", John replies, before reverting back to his Venice cafe.

Both John and Alice see what the other is eating, for real, in this mixed reality. They see their own respective chosen environments around them, streamed and simulated, with the help of the lenses on their respective smartglasses.

They can jump from one virtual space to another, at will thanks to Brain Computer Interface, built into both their smartglasses, as well as in their home surroundings. They indulge in a conversation while eating, as if they were seated right next to each other, in the same physical space. Their images are streamed into each other's simulated reality, thanks to hardly noticeable micro-cameras placed around their homes, that capture and stream in real-time, their 360 degree images and movements. They speak to each other with thought, and hear each other's simulated voices, streamed directly to their skulls.

When both end their breakfast and decide to part, they agree to meet in the evening, offline, in the physical world.

The Gift

John pictures a creative, moving, shape-shifting vase in his mind, that he wants to give to Alice. He instructs his 3D-Printing service to produce one for him.

In the current time and age, John no longer subscribes to a phone company or internet service provider or even a cable television company. These days, people subscribe to very different types of services, from those of the twentieth century or the early twenty-first century, a period in which John was born. He vividly remembers people walking around with rectangular objects that were called "smartphones" when he was a child. His Mom and Dad used to get monthly bills for using those.

A swarm of nanobots enter John's apartment through his window, converging, coordinating and collaborating over a table, to 3D-print the vase John wants to give to Alice in the evening. It will be precisely emulating of the image in John's mind when he conceived it, in appearance, dimensions and transformation functions, thanks to the use of 4D material.

These nanobots are floating about, owned and managed by a service provider, that charges a monthly fees to users, who can instruct them to 3D-Print objects for them. The bills cover material use, bot maintenance and management, as well as mark-up for the company's profit.

The nanobots draw energy from the sun, or otherwise thermal energy from the ground. When neither is possible, for whatever reason, there are charging nodes within proximity of where the swarms are deployed, that remotely charge the nano-bots, without contact, using stored energy from other sustainable sources. The nodes also serve as points for reloading depleted material. The different materials are supplied to the nodes by autonomous drones, which are deployed when each node detects a threshold depletion of any type of material it loads the nanobots with.

To be continued....keep a lookout for for Part II

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting and Keynote Topics include EmTech, Industry 4.0, HR, Digital Transformation, Product Development, X Reality, Marketing, Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking and Organisational Future Proofing. In an Open Letter in 2019, Harish has called on fellow Futurists around the world to emphasize in their course of work, on the need for Environmental Salvation.