The World in 2030

242 The World in 2030
In our homes, schools, factories, shops and leisure
facilities robots with varying degrees of intelligence (and
made largely of plastic) will be our contented slaves,
manufacturing wealth, easing our lives, caring for our needs
and overseeing our security. Software ‘personalities’ will be
our friends and assistants.
Our energy will be supplied from a mixture of low-carbon
fossil fuel sources, renewable energy sources and individual
consumer-based energy generation from wind-power, solar
power, biofuels and hydrogen fuel cells.
By 2030 we will be constantly connected to what, today, we
can only think of as a ‘super-web’ and that connection will, for
those of us who chose to make the transition, be a bio-digital
interface. At the very least our senses will be connected to the
super-web by microphones and mini-projectors and, perhaps,
some of us will have direct neural connections between our
own brains and the ‘global brain’ – which is what the super-web
will have become. Our communications and entertainment
will be wholly ‘immersory’, multi-media, multi-sensory, 3D,
holographic and fully tactile, telekinetic and olfactory.
By 2030 we will all have alter egos who live out parallel
lives in virtual worlds. You may not yet have your ‘avatar’ (a
graphic representation of your chosen personality) wandering
around Second Life (a virtual, parallel world) but in a few
years’ time you will wonder how we all managed before we
had our spaces in online parallel worlds.
I have long been convinced that humans are primarily
virtual creatures. Language itself is virtual – a collection of