Writing a letter from the future

2050 is not a bad place; I can provide a scientific perspective.

There is a whole theory in science about the lifecycle of innovations; see Thomas Kuhn and his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

The upshot is that typically it can take about 50 years from a discovery (or invention) of something new, to the widespread adoption and transformation of science and society because of that discovery (assuming it is of that magnitude). This applies to pretty much everything. The telephone, the TV, radio, antibiotics, the structure of DNA, aircraft and on and on. Obviously it may take decades longer than 50 years, but 50 is typical.

This provides a pretty good, if rough, guideline for fiction authors. In 2050, it is the things introduced pretty close to 2000 (maybe as early as 1980) that seemed like novelty stuff then, but will be fully exploited and pervasive in society, politics, etc. So the Internet was introduced around then: By 2050 we may have, for example, instantaneous universal voting. We had some basic robots, we may have autonomous robot servants. DNA editing and therapies may be so common your family doctor can provide for them.

The same goes for medicine, communications, transportation (self-driving everything including boats, planes, tractors, cars, trucks: Perhaps it will even be illegal to drive yourself). In shopping: Cashiers may no longer exist, if you want to buy something, walk into a store, pick it up, or a cart of it, and walk out. The store itself won't let you in without recognizing you; and you may have to walk into a man-trap to get in (a door that locks behind you, with another locked door in front of you that won't open unless the store's AI recognizes you: It calls the cops if it cannot).

Expand on what you know of technology in the world since 1980, and expand on it to the max.

I would avoid cultural innovations. Emojies will not be a thing forever. Any company worth less than billions may not be a thing anymore. There is a different cycle of abuse of technology that causes it to be replaced quickly. For example, voice mail may be something on the way out; it has been replaced by texting to phones. Cell phones have pretty much killed the old idea of land lines, and by 2050 I am not sure land lines will actually be a thing anymore. (most families I know don't have one, and one of my friends has a cell phone for every member of his family: Including his daughter when she was in kindergarten.)

Cash and checks and debit cards may be on the way out, because really only a credit card (most of them) can protect you from fraud and identity theft issues. Things like biometric identifications currently used only high security settings (banks, government intelligence) may be ubiquitous in 2050: You cannot get into that store without retinal and fingerprint identification, even for your kids and your baby if you carry one.

Do like that: Look at the problems we have today, especially those that have at least SOME solution in some context circa the year 2000. Maybe it was only for the very wealthy, or very important politicians, or used only by the military or intelligence services. Then presume those solutions become cheap and ubiquitous by 2050.

Culture and fashion are much less predictable, you can sort of make some of that up, but you might want to make your cultural innovations consistent with ongoing concerns of culture today.

Companies like Google, Microsoft, Intel, Proctor & Gamble, probably EXXON and many others will still be around. If they have billions. But exactly what they will be selling is unknown; EXXON may not be selling much oil, they may be selling green power solutions based on inventions and research they bought or funded.

Added: Cultural phenomena tend to last a much shorter time, even just a few years, but almost always less than a 'generation' (about 20 years). This is because of biological human nature: Around the age of puberty kids start to rebel against their masters: Parents, teachers, government, and they want to do things differently. When the kids of current Twitter and text and emoji enthusiasts reach puberty, those kids will want their own 'secret language' with some impenetrability to their parents. Because they want to keep their secrets from their parents too, they are developing a private life, and in some years a private intimate life with sex, irreverence, perhaps some law breaking and illicit substances, that they want to hide from Dad and Mom, no matter if Dad and Mom did the same.

The rebellion of the young against the old is constant and it constantly churns out cultural invention in art, in music, in fashion, in literature, in language and slang and even sexual practice ('hooking up' and 'friends with benfits' are cultural innovations). That is what makes culture difficult to predict even ten years in the future, because the young adult icons of the culture in ten years (entertainers, businessfolk, politics) are still in high school today or at least relatively unknown. Even they probably do not know what revolutionary talents, inventions and cultural contributions will make them celebrities in ten years, shaping the cultural landscape.

For writers, the lesson here is a large degree of freedom. To write about the cultural landscape in 2050, you only need a human-nature-plausible route to it, and widespread acceptance. For example, we see in some very polluted cities in China people wearing surgical masks to filter polluted air. It could easily be true in 2050 that stylish protective masks are worn by almost everybody, that head-to-toe clothing, including gloves, is very common, because you risk cancers if you expose any skin or eyes.

posted about 7 years ago

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Amadeus‭

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A letter is from the future so we are talking about science fiction. It makes us think about science, but letter is for current time and also readers are of the current time. So whatever will happen to language in 2050, whether new slangs introduce, new acronyms, new phrases or even total English has been changed the main thing which you need to remember is that readers need to read that in English of the current era.

Let's come to science, Natural Language Processing is an active research topic in the current computer science field. According to current research text summarization and machine translations are very popular. Also "Concept Search" is a popular term. So if we combine these technologies together (which is even valid for today, and hopefully will be at their fully functional form in 2050), we will get something like this

" Son will write Mail in his/her own language(Maybe he/she moved to some other place rather then English, even if it is more Modern English then nowadays) and the computer program understand the "Concept of the letter" and also know the "History of the Person" (Becuase software will hold trillions of data or even larger), and that software will translate that "Conceptual Email" into a normal 2019 readable Email."

But one more thing which will be fully Developed in 2050 is EEG communication, which is via thoughts, Researchers had found very useful results and hopefully they will be able to place a sensor on mind and computers will interact through thoughts of Person and maybe Idea comes to a Mind of the person in 2050 and no need to write a single word just by thinking the receiver of the Letter and "Concept of the Letter" will result into a 2019 readable Letter. (Depends on how much advance YOUR 2050 is :)

posted about 5 years ago

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Abdul Rehman‭

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