The World in 2030

246 The World in 2030
It will be almost impossible to tell the difference between a
real world experience and a virtual experience and many of
us will be engaged with the real world and several virtual
worlds (and other versions of ourselves) at one and the same
time.
On our way towards our virtual lives of the future we
will be able to understand, and to speak and write, in all
languages, as super-intelligent computers on our body and
in the networks translate speech and the written word in real
time. XV
On the other hand, some aspects of daily life in 2030 will
seem very similar to today. We will still live in houses and
apartments as we do today (although even older properties
will have been upgraded to maximum energy efficiency),
children will still go to school (the interpersonal dynamic
between teachers and children and between children
and their peers is a vital part of learning that cannot be
replaced wholly by virtual communications) and we will,
it is to be hoped, still have all of the political, legal and
social institutions which make the developed economies
civilised; parliaments, the law, police, free media, hospitals,
universities and so on.
As the noted American futurist John Naisbitt remarks in
his 2006 book, ‘Mind Set! Reset Your Thinking and See The
Future’:
XV
Ford Motor Co. began using ‘machine translation’ software in 1998 and has so far translated 5 million
automobile assembly instructions into Spanish, German, Portuguese and Mexican Spanish. Assembly
manuals are updated in English every day, and their translations — some 5,000 pages a day — are
beamed overnight to plants around the world.