2035 - Flashback to dystopian Sam's journal

I cast my mind back to the year when it all started falling apart. 2035 - The age of AI was well and truly entrenched and all the dystopian future scenarios that the pundits were talking about for the last ten years were rolling out with exponential speed.

Coming across Sam's journal is what triggered this flashback. Sam had initially survived two rounds of layoffs at the Port Authority, but was now unemployed for the last five years. Survived. That word keeps coming up when I think about that period. Like it was something to overcome rather than something that simply happened as the normal course of life events.

I kept reading.

SAM’S JOURNAL: March 14, 2035

5:47 AM - Waking

The alarm on my phone doesn’t go off anymore because I stopped paying for the premium tier. Instead, the light from the east-facing window of my allocated apartment gradually pulls me from sleep. The morning is grey and soft, and I lie there for a moment, noticing the familiar pain in my lower back. Ten years of irregular sleep and stress have that effect.

I’m 45 years old and I’ve been unemployed for five years. That’s strange to write, even after all this time. The first few years of job losses hit others harder, I thought.

My apartment in the Westbrook District is 340 square feet. It’s clean because I maintain it obsessively, as it is one of the few things I can control. The synthetic wood furniture came with the unit. The paint is institutional beige. Two windows. One small kitchenette. A bathroom with a shower but no tub. The government-issued mattress is reasonably firm.

I get up.

6:15 AM - Morning Routine

The shower is lukewarm, not by accident, but by design. The water is metered. I get 8 liters per day for bathing and drinking combined. It’s enough if you’re careful. The government’s AI water management system calculates precisely how much the island’s desalination plants can sustain. Every resident knows their allocation. Mine is displayed on the smart meter in the kitchen.

I shower every other day now. Today is a shower day.

The water pressure is weak. I remember showers from the before times - 2020s, early 2030s - where you could let the water run hot and heavy. Now even the wealthier residents have begun to accept constraints. There’s nowhere to go. This is an island nation.

I shave with a razor I’ve kept for three years. The blades are getting dull. I’ve thought about ordering new ones, but they cost 12 credits, and I want to save my monthly allotment. I dry myself on a thin towel that has been patched twice.

My medication is waiting on the bathroom shelf - a small blue pill and a larger white one. I took them yesterday too. The smaller blue one is for blood pressure. The white one is for anxiety. Both are covered by the Basic Health Protocol, maintained by the island’s Health Ministry AI. Anything beyond basic care requires credits, which I don’t have extra of.

6:50 AM - Breakfast in a Quiet Apartment

I make tea with water from the kettle and eat two pieces of bread with a thin spread of the subsidized margarine. The bread is dense. It’s made from the island’s agricultural AI system’s optimized grain blend. It’s not unpleasant. I’ve stopped expecting taste to be a priority in food. Nutrition per credit per calorie is the equation. The system has optimized it well.

I look out the window while eating. Westbrook is quieter now than it was five years ago. Not empty. There are people around, but there’s a rhythm of absence that wasn’t there before. The commercial street level on the east side used to bustle with small shops. A coffee place, a clothing boutique, a bookstore. Two of those are now boarded up. The coffee place is still there, but it’s a franchise now, run by the city council’s Tourism and Service Bureau. It’s cheaper but tastes like it was designed by an algorithm.

Which it was.

I finish my tea and rinse the cup carefully. I have six cups in my small kitchen, and I’ve broken three in a decade. Every replacement is a credit I didn’t want to spend.

7:30 AM - The News Briefing

I sit on my small couch, a donation from a charity redistribution center, and pull up the daily briefing on my allocated tablet. It’s 7-inch screen, about 6 years old. The government replaced all phones and tablets on a strict rotation in 2032 because the previous technology had become too fragmented for the central government’s efficiency protocols. Mine still works fine, though the battery dies faster than it used to.

The Island Daily Brief is administered by the Department of Information Systems. It’s generated largely by AI, with human editors to ensure compliance with public health and morale guidelines. I don’t know where the truth ends and the curation begins anymore.

HEADLINES:

AI Manufacturing Sector Reports 22% Productivity Increase The agricultural and clothing production facilities have integrated newest optimization protocols. Output now sufficient for island population with only 180 workers across all facilities, down from 1,240 five years ago. Surplus production being stockpiled for potential export revenue.

City Council Approves Expansion of AI Healthcare Diagnostics Dr. Sarah Chen, Director of Medical Services, announced integration of third-generation diagnostic AI into all primary care. Reduces wait time for initial assessment from 8 weeks to 2 weeks. Estimated 40 positions eliminated from radiology and phlebotomy departments.

Minor Civil Unrest in South District - Handled Effectively “A small gathering of residents expressing concern about UBS payment schedules was peacefully dispersed yesterday evening. City security protocols managed the situation without incident.”

I click for more details. The article offers none. There were three paragraphs of explanation in the past. Now there’s a sentence, a link to city council’s page, and a poll asking “Do you feel safe in your district?” with options: Very Safe, Safe, Neutral, Unsafe, Very Unsafe.

I click “Neutral” because it feels truest.

UBS Payment Processed Successfully “Your Universal Basic Stipend for March has been deposited. Current Balance: 184 credits.”

I do the math in my head. 184 credits for the month. That’s about 6 credits per day. Rent and utilities are covered by the housing allocation. Food is subsidized at the core level - bread, grain, protein substitute, standard vegetables. 6 credits for everything else. Medicine is mostly covered, but not all supplements. Transportation is free on the buses and the tram system. Clothing from the redistribution center is very cheap. But if I need anything -a new pair of shoes, which I will before summer, replacement kitchen items, a book, a haircut - it comes from these credits.

Last month I had 47 credits left over at the end. I’ve been saving. I have 1,200 credits in my savings account earning 0.1% interest annually. It’s enough to live for maybe 200 days if something happened to my housing allocation.

;;;;;

I could not continue reading. Sam's story was just one of the millions of others in similar situations. The AI fuelled post-work world had been tough to navigate in the transition era. Coming back to today, in 2050, I am grateful for having received the right breaks to be able to enjoy today's successes in the Xanonet era. One stark difference is that there are no doomsday scenarios with Xanonet, like they were being predicted in the AI era. I guess we all evolved to realize the diverse and stratified reality of co-existence as the way forward for man and machine.

Xano-Neural-Net | Another frontier crossed | Blog from the future | 2050

Good morning xano-world,

It has been more than ten years since my last post. A lot has changed since my last post. Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, and our lives have been completely transformed.

Let me start by telling you about the most revolutionary advances in Xonet technology that have - the Xano-Neural-Net. It's a network of computer processors that are designed to function like the human brain. The Xano-Neural-Net has transformed our lives in ways we never thought possible. It has made our lives simpler, faster, and more efficient.

For instance, we no longer need to use physical interfaces to operate our devices. All we need is to think about what we want to do, and our devices respond accordingly. This has made our lives incredibly convenient. We no longer need to fumble with buttons, switches, or keyboards. We just think, and our devices do the rest.

The Xano-Neural-Net has also enabled us to create immersive virtual worlds. We can now enter virtual realities that are as real as the world we live in. We can interact with people from all over the world in real-time, as if they were right there with us. It has also transformed the way we learn. With the Xano-Neural-Net, we can upload information directly into our brains, making learning faster and more efficient.

All of this is easily accessible on my SQ-Xon that I had purchased a decade ago. No further purchase of devices required since then as the yearly upgrade cycle not only upgrade the OS and the firmware, but also the hardware including the photo-lens. Of course, that is possible only with the subscription model and not the perpetual license of the legacy device.

We now have the ability to predict natural disasters, understand complex systems like weather patterns, and even simulate the universe itself right within our brains at the blink of an eye. Literally. This has opened up new possibilities for scientific research and discovery.

However, with all the benefits that technology has brought into our lives, it has also created new challenges. One of the most significant challenges is cybersecurity. With the rise of technology, cybercrime has become a prevalent threat. They are no longer hacking our devices and our accounts, but directly our nervous system. Interesting fringe scenarios were discussed at the security conference I attended last week, but thankfully all that is in the realm of fiction for now. The Xonet is thankfully powered by AI that is constantly monitoring the rise of threats and patching vulnerabilities in real time. 

In conclusion, the technology that we have today has transformed our lives in unimaginable ways. We've come a long way since the first Xanogranth was written and standardised, and we can only imagine what the future holds. With all the advancements in technology, we need to remember to use it responsibly, ethically, and with caution.

Until next time.

Twin City Tunnel

20-Feb-2052

Finally the much awaited insta-tunnel between Bahmko-Vale and Jadeko-Dale has been thrown open to the public. A journey which used to take 24 hours a century back, 8 hours at the turn of the century and 3 hours by the fastest Levito-modules is now reduced to less than 5 minutes. I am told it could have been less than a minute, but they are yet to control the heat dissipation caused by those speeds.

In order to understand how the insta-tunnel works, imagine dropping a heavy object from a great height, the heavy object emitting nitro-boosts and further large magnet at opposig ends attracting and repelling the object in the desired direction. Ok, I know, I made you imagine a large crater from the impact of the heavy object.

So, let me describe my experience in the insta-tunnel, and hopefully that will throw some light on its workings. I arranged for attending a conference in Jadeko-Dale as soon as I heard of the insta-tunnel opening. Reached the departure lounge where I encountered a group of hyper-enthuastic teens excited over their first journey in the insta-tunnel.

At the departure lounge, you join your module co-passengers - current capacity : groups of four - and get into your designated bubble-module. The bubble-module is all fiber, transparent, 360 degree view (somewhat wasted inside a dark tunnel). The bubble-module travels some 300 meters taking you from the departure lounge to the drop zone. The module is now dropped into a magnetic hold chute, which lands you in the containment chamber. From here on it is a suction vacuum ride of just a few minutes to cross a distance of 1587 KM!

Though objects can travel at uniform speed in a suction vacuum, care has been taken to increment and decrement the momentum to ensure least dis-orientation. That is why the five minute ride instead of the theoretically possible under a minute ride.

What made things move in a vaccum? Objects are supposed to float and not accelerate in vaccum. Well, initial attempts were focused on thrust or push principles. That was too energy inefficient to work. The Sail-Bots required huge space to move and were too slow. Back to the object I made you imagine. What worked was a combination of using gravity to provide the thrust, nano-netcells emission to provide the push and vaccum suction to provide the speed.

See you in Jadeko-Dale ...

Land Land everywhere .. not a yard to sow!

1st Sept 2051 -
Water was predicted as the resource which would trigger the next great wars. With 70% of known earth being water, I always doubted this axiom. Why would most of the mafias concentrate on grabbing more and more of land resources when water was to become the scarce commodity? Every don, rogue, politician, and people of similar hue were spending every waking moment dreaming up schemes to grab the next inch of land.
Pray, what value land, if it were to be used for it's god given purpose - to grow food to feed the masses? No sir, land becomes gold only with development. That is where we turned against nature and as we all know, nature scorned is nature infuriated. Now where was the largest opportunity? The largest swathes of fertile land available were in India, China, USA. And rightly so, these were the producers feeding the world's masses. As fertile land kept on being gobbled up in the name of growth and development, India and China in their blind race for world supremacy were the first to turn net consumers instead of producers. The US desperately kept trying to play catch up and hopelessly trying to regain its old glory, saw its big opportunity in 'green' energy - food as fuel. And so came the seven lean years which once again proved the truth of Malthusian economics.

Now, is today's headline the start of the seven good years? One is the attempt to once again conquer the seas and turn them into productive swathes of crop producing areas which came predictably from Japan. The technique is amazingly simple. They had already mastered the art of creating floating airports, floating stadia and floating fun-dromes. Now they have floating acres of land growing crops, insulated from the salty airs of the ocean by green-domes. These floating green-domes are monitored remotely and also contain water filtration cum irrigation plants. The surrounding insulation is covered with equal areas of planktons, mangroves and sea resistant plants while the core growth areas are multi-storeyed fertile land stores, yielding multiple crops. Now there is no fear of whether the rains will be good this year, since these floating green-domes are portable and can be towed to areas which are experiencing rain as and when needed.

The multi-storeyed part of the technology was first tried on land but was not so successful in terms of yield ratios. The main disadvantage of land based multi-storeyed plantations was that they needed an radius equal to their height to be kept open to ensure the lower levels received their necessary sunshine and free flowing air.

Post Script : A week after I wrote this, I found an article in the newspaper mentioning this very concept already being tested.

Xonic Revealed

15th August 2051 -

Xonics played a major role in how the recently concluded world council elections played out. I finally got myself the latest SQ-xon and blame all the hoop-la for giving in to this temptation. With this my conversion to xonet is complete and I have divested myself of all my old devices [well almost - the TouchTable still lies connected in my den].

As we all know, the origin of xonet is in the xanogranths. But before all the tech and the specs came the innovation. And that root is what we will examine today. For in studying our history do we get clues to our future.

The whole logic behind xanogranths is based on sharing of resources. For too long we had suffered the inefficiencies and impediments to progress of fettering resources to the major producers and providers. This had resulted in the quashing of all innovation which was inimical to the vested interests of the providers.

Xonet would never have become a reality had the concept of shared resources not caught on with the advent of cloud computing. And even cloud had its origins in the sharing of real-world (old-world) resources like cars, residential spaces, DVDs (remember those round shiny discs?).

People started realizing that they need not block their resources in things which would become obsolete in a few days, months or years. How many times would you see a DVD which you bought? Did you buy a gaming equipment to find an upgrade with higher storage available a few weeks later? Did you find yourself with one room less than what you need in your apartment after a few years? Do you find yourself envying the car in front of you?

The answer came in the form of providers who were ready to invest their capital and let you be the user of the best, the latest and the resource most apt to your ever changing needs. Apartments were the most emotional decisions of all to let go of, but once people saw the advantage of convenience in staying closest to their educational and career areas, SWITCHOME succeeded in breaking new ground and there was no looking back.
SharCars were pretty easy to sell when we saw that we could drive a BMW this week, a Merc the next and zip off in a Ferrari for the beach vacation. All this at the same cost we would have paid the bank for the next five to seven years in buying a sedan.

When this same concept was applied to the apps and storage domain, cloud computing was born. In a sense we went back to the dumb terminal concept of the previous century. Only this time there was no terminal to own also.
Just like apartments were dogged with emotional attachments, cloud was also hampered by fears of privacy, security, controls and again an emotional attachment to data. CFOs were loath to see their accounting data stored in invisible clouds instead of their ERP servers kept under vault like security.
It was only the great wars and economic shocks preceding the '20s which took the decision out their hands. With scarce resources and their organisations very survival at stake, they had no choice but to opt for shared resources.

The need to converge and co-exist with competing equipments became a necessity leading to Shared Specs and Unique Communication Protocol Support (SSUPCS) across technologies. The first commercially viable application was the WallScreen in the '20s where it was possible to simultaneously perform streaming, gaming and computing all with networking capability. The screen of course gave way pretty soon to the HoloProj which eliminated the need of screens for all equipment. (Luckily it was possible for me to upgrade my TouchTable with the HoloProj converter - one of the few old devices still around for nostalgic reasons)

Anyway, once the screen was converged, came the question of the viability of so many different equipments to connect to. That was what germinated the very idea of the xonic. With the discovery of nano-netcells and shared networking capabilities, Xonify was adopted by World Government as the technology of the future. The research was compiled into xanogranths (or xonogranths depending on which side of the Atlantic you are speaking to) and the specs were designed into the Indian Standards IS.X..509.w17

Published from my SQ-xon ....

IQ-Based Right to Office And Enfranchisement (I-BROE)

4th July 2051,

Finally I-BROE is adopted by World Government and is enacted into an international law. No world citizen with an IQ score of less than 130 will be allowed to run for office in world government and shall indefinitely forfeit his voting rights.

I will take a break from my old tech vs new tech rants this week. This is a movement too large not to comment upon. As you will notice my English also breaks in places as I struggle to put words to this historic moment for mankind.

The arguments in favor are very simple and basically the bare truth.

1. Running the simplest of machinery requires you to have the necessary qualifications. Why should it be any different for running world governments?

2. The same argument applies to who is entitled to choose the fine men and women who will be entrusted with wisely and astutely promulgating world objectives, priorities and standards.

It is just like asking - Who do you want running your HR department. Would you entrust a dork to run your HR and select people who will be working in your highly technical departments?

Well, in the same vein, why would you allow a person with IQ below 130 to decide who runs the government.

The arguments against are fatuous at best -

1. This will result in a select club of people running world government.

2. The lowest of the low has been left un-catered to and without representation.

Considering the numbers of population with IQ above 130, it can hardly be called a select club. The concept of a select club by itself is not to be disparaged anyway.

99% of world wealth has been held and controlled by 4% of the population for at least 5 millenia. And they have done a not too bad job of maintaining the world economy engine. No doubt there have been shudders and jerks along the way, but these wealthy individuals are not gods to foresee and mitigate every calamity. All in all, the economy has been kept on a progressive path and intermittent hiccups are to be treated as just such - necessary jerks to keep the momentum steady.

So now why not a select club of 5% intelligent people in whose capable hands lies the power to govern. (It is to be noted that the 4% wealthy and the 5% intelligent do not necessarily overlap)

And why should this result in the lowest of the low feeling unrepresented? Their fate is much more secure in the hands of the intelligent rather than one of their own fools, who rises to power based on sheer numbers, only to be slain at the hands of pride, greed or insolence. It is rather the economist, the scientist and the teacher who has the right frame of mind to govern in the best interest of mankind as a whole. Obviously they do not govern only to satisfy the needs of 5-9% of the population.

This momentous occassion also deserves the chronology of events leading up to it to be listed here. Might be a good lesson in history for all you know.

- 1912 - IQ tests devised

- 1914 - IQ tests of 1.7 million recruits carried out. (It is to be noted that 0.5% were dischaged while 3% would have been preferably discharged by their officers.)

- 2000 - Research indicates that IQ levels are increasing at the level of 3 points per decade on average.

There were various laws passed along the way to constantly remove the lumpen element from government. This is the culminations of all those efforts to finally get the world council on its way.

SolarPeds - Implications beyond commerce

11th May 2051 

The introduction of SolarPeds five years back was greeted with scepticism by the AWT industry. ToMa was the well entrenched global leader in all segments. The consolidation in auto industry which started at the turn of the century had been spreading like rapid fire across the spectrum of the industry which had historically been diversified across transportation means. And this consolidation had really paid rich dividends to the conglomerates.

Just a decade ago, ToMa had decisively won the round against world governments and succeded in overturning legislations it deemed harmful to the AWT industry. SolarPeds have changed the game and seem to be world governments way of getting back at ToMa. (Priority Entry to all public buildings for SolarPed walkers - WorNet News - 23rd Jan 2051).

Ironically, the origins of SolarPeds from Bahmko-Vale, was ushered in by ToMa's refusal to reverse the stoppage of hybrids production. The energy balloon crisis caused by the earlier version hybrids gave ToMa a ready reason to refuse to let go of its traditional production line of AWTs.

The events which favored ToMa and allowed it to rise to the heights of corporate leadership so far were constant reduction of input costs due to backward integration accompanied with massive inorganic growth from its policy of one M/A per month. The ten year ban on hybrids as a knee jerk reaction to the energy balloon crisis by world government played right into their hands and there was no looking back after that.
Till SolarPeds, that is.

The group of new-tech entrepreneurs working on the enhanced version of hybrids to help alleviate the energy balloon crisis, were on the other hand, caught on the wrong foot. They saw their entire life's research and venture going down the drain due to ToMa's stubbornness in protecting its traditional revenue lines. The founders of SolarPeds were among these unfortunates.
However, the last five years has really seen them rise literally from the ashes and it is no coincidence that their 2050 model was named Phoenix 1.0.

Deservedly SolarPeds is now the leading case study in all B-schools, which no management student can do without. The lessons for the new generation of tech-entrpreneurs are tremendous. After the ban on even new research on any enhanced hybrids, these two bravehearts actually looked back into the pages of history and picked up another failed innovation - that of harnessing solar energy and turned it into a roaring success.

The initial forays into tapping solar energy had been a massive failure due to the very fact that nano-netcells were non existent at that point in time. While xonogranths had exploited the networking capabilities of nano-netcells, Parth and Abid (founders of SolarPeds) realised the energy store capabilities which could be unlocked. This technological breakthrough was brought about by spraying x-rays on nano-netcells changing the nth structure of their microtrons. This in effect turned the network-enabled cells into huge energy stores.

What this effectively means, for the not so techie-inclined, is that the more SolarPeds there are on the road, the less energy you need to tap and store. Remember the success of cloud computing from the twenties? Well, somewhat similar.

What is most interesting about the success of SolarPeds is that most of it is based on concepts which are now thought obsolete or failed. Just goes to show what a lot of gold mines we have discarded in the past without extracting due value.
Will this now lead to a retro-rush for scavenging old tech? Let's see...