“The Year Is…”

The year is 2011, and the headline reads, “Steve Jobs is dead.” Half the world cries, and the other, apathetic. Eventually, the first half stops crying, realizing that the world has lost an innovator, and not an inventor.

The year is 2050, and the world is a fantastic place to live in.  Inventions are difficult to come by because almost everything has been done. People then decide to innovate and improve on the existing ideas. It is a fantastic place to live in because everyone’s motives are good; they want to make life easier for themselves and for others.

It is a utopia. Well, sort of.

After the death of Jobs, the people decided to drop the “i”. They found that putting the letter “i” at the beginning of the name of a gadget was tacky and decided to go with the classic, “the.” When they invented a spoon that could automatically scoop food and feed a controller, they called it “The spoon”. A fork followed after, and they called it, “The fork.”

Initially, people made these inventions to benefit the disabled, but eventually everyone had access to them. This developed laziness among the users, but the people said it was not much of a big deal. These innovators just wanted to make life easier, after all.

The world continued to be a utopia as someone invented a cure for blindness. It had something to do with nanotechnology. People did not care much about the details of the technology; they cared about the discovery.

The discovery led other people to aspire for an even better society. If they could make the blind see, could they also make the deaf hear? Could they make the mute speak?

It was also around this time that the people sought inspiration from sci-fi works, especially the ones that dealt with predictions of the advancement of technology in society. One particular work they gave much importance to was Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt. “ The piece was about a breakthrough in technology called “Happylife Home”, and it did everything people could imagine. Happylife Home cooked their meals, put clothes on their backs, rocked them to sleep, played with them and sang for them. Unfortunately, not many people knew how the story ended. All they cared about was the technology, and the ease it brought.

The year is 2100, and the world is not much of a utopia. Some disagreed, because the world could not have been any better. People could now become superhuman. They realized that if they could make the disabled people enabled, then they could do so much more.

People are like superheroes now. They could fly, run at lightning speed, solve a ridiculously hard math problem just by looking at it, and the list goes on. The naïve ones believed that this was all part of evolution, but scientists concurred to the fact that people were responsible for breeding the superhuman.

In this year, it is perfectly normal to date robots. You are probably thinking of a robot similar to the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, but of course, by this time, people already developed robots that look exactly like human beings. Society accepted this relationship; the population dwindled down because a human and a robot could not bear children together—yet.

To make up for the decrease in population, people decided to revive the dead. They equipped the corpse’s heart with nanotechnology to start beating again. The process was too difficult, and did not bear fruitful results, so people encouraged more human to human relationships.

People, however, found human to robot relationships more appealing because robots are programmed to suit the likings of a human partner. Hence, it was decided that people should just make better robots. They developed the minds of the robots to be just like a human’s brain, such that when the time came that robots would comprise a majority of the population, nothing would have changed.

The year is 2150, and the headline reads: “Too much technology.” The writer was a human. Ah, no wonder, the robots thought. The humans wrote that to intimidate others from developing new technology so that less would be taken from the Earth’s resources, because soon, the Earth will be too overwhelmed with the poisons technology brought. The thought, however, of saving the environment, was easily dismissed by the robots. A couple of days later, there was a blinding white flash.

The year is 2050, and the people just finished making a time machine. They set to visit 100 years in the future, and they did, expecting to see a chic, modern world of advanced gadgets and gizmos, but when they stepped out of their time machine, they saw a bleak, gray world. There were a few humans, but they kept their hair unkempt and barely wore any clothes. They looked just like cavemen. They were just roaming about, looking lost.

There was a scrap of paper on the floor. One time traveler picked it up. “Too much technology,” he read aloud.

This is how the world became a dystopia. Too much technology destroyed it.