“We started working on it 130 years ago…”
Our agile team has 600 scrum meetings an hour.
I hate that sentence so much 😄
gotta keep the scrumlord happy
Clearly AI is building it.
Given it’s trained on our attention-shortening data, when will AI start suffering from short attention spans?
He’s probably a few minutes away from finding out that not all of him made the trip.
[looks down, then back up]
Gulp
Why is my skin turning yellow?
he is liverless 😨
You know, it makes sense they call it a liver because you’re gonna have a tough time livering without it.
May we all receive de-liverance from such a fate.
I’m putting a curse on your entire bloodline that they keep finding loose change inside things. Fuck off with my upvote.
The bigger shock is that by 2155 they’re still using the smartphone form factor.
My 20th century brain is too limited to conceive of what might exist by then but that seems like an anachronism in waiting.
Brain implants might seem a likely avenue, but body modification and/or surgery isn’t going to be cheap.
And if it’s enforced by the state, well then, we’ll be Borg by 2155.
Yeah, yeah, Shen didn’t have time to invent and introduce new tech for the sake of a four panel comic. I get it. And yet…
10 or 20 years ago I might have excitedly speculated about what will replace the smart phone in 2155. Could it be some kind of glasses or smart contacts that give you private AR-style access to your digital life? Maybe even an implant!
Me now: Still love my technology, do not trust the megacorps that are evil on their own, never mind the fact that the line is blurring between trillion dollar tech companies and the government. Oh and I live in the US, so it’s the raw uncut shit.
With any luck, the closer I personally get to 2155 the less I will continue to use my old-fashioned smart phone. I already lose it in my own house for hours on end. Feels good man.
You say brain implants might be expensive, but as technology, and time, progresses the price will drop significantly.
Unless it’s a Sony gaming device, in that case the price will go up after time.
I don’t know if it’s that crazy. The form factor of laptops, and computers for that matter, has pretty much stayed the same for many decades and still going strong. It’s entirely possible that this slab phone form factor will stick around forever.
Off the top of my head, random list of older things that haven’t significantly changed form factor in forever:
- Writing tools (pens, pencils)
- Notebooks
- Chairs, sofas
- Cars (pedals, steering wheel, gear stick)
- Cookware (pans, pots, etc.)
- Utensils (knives, spoons, forks)
- Clothes (for men: trousers, shirt, underwear, socks, shoes, jacket/coat)
- Drawers
- Doors and door knobs/handles
Maybe some of those I’m wrong about, but certainly not all. Sometimes, a form factor just sticks around.
They started building the machine in 2055 and didn’t have time to invent anything else. Turns out focus is pretty important for fast R&D…
The beauty of a time machine though is even if you take a really long time to build it, you can just go back and build it faster.
That’s gotta be a good sci fi novel. Society invents time travel, and continuously goes back in time to accelerate their progress by uplifting their ancestors.
I’ve thought about ubiquitous time travel resulting in humans being able to choose not just where to live, but when, bringing their technology with them. What a mess that would make with the timeline!
You would actually physically be rolling back the entire universe, reverse-entropy style. So, only one person could do it, and they would basically be god.
Or you just create a new timeline each time so you can’t actually mess up your original timeline.
Or every time society invents a time machine, the world ends and somebody has to come back and sabotage the effort. So humanity hits a wall in progress that it can only pass by not focusing on time-physics.
That kinda sounds like the plot of the cancelled Netflix show Travelers, to be honest.
It was a good show, and the main characters were always going against other people from the future trying to foil their purpose for going back in time in the first place.
The scientist is a hipster who uses the 2155-equivalent of a flip phone. Through a lifetime of grit and determination, he’s extended his attention span to 6 entire seconds (the global average is 4) so he could complete the time machine and save the world (by asking someone else to do it)
Maybe they were unable to iterate past smartphones due to a six second —
Baby shark doo doo doo doo doo
Honestly, I don’t think the smart phone form factor is going anywhere anytime soon. I think that the 20th century set a lot of people up for an assumption that technology would continue to increase at the same rate for the next several hundred years but that’s just not correct. Look at how much changed in the 500 years before the 20th century and look at the current state of capitalism and global politics. We’ve gone basically nowhere culturally in over 100 years. Certainly more technology will be able to fit in the same amount of space. But that’s the dirty secret of the 21st-century, miniaturization is our biggest technological achievement. I definitely think that even 500 years from now will be a lot closer to now than most people think.
Genetic engineering is quietly making headway, but has the potential for massive changes to our way of life. If we can start reliably programming living material, nothing will look the same, hopefully avoiding Cronenbergian results.
Smart glasses with audio(or finger smart glove) control can be near future
Knowing us, it’ll be a projector you implant in your eye that projects a picture in front of itself that your eye still has to look at, because that’s exactly the kind of half ass thing we’re best at.
Eventually someone is going to create an input system that will make the glasses form factor work.
I’m sure by 2050 they’ll start restricting airplane travel or crossing the border to people who are chipped. Given historical precedence, I’m sure 5% of the populace will resist for a few months before giving in.
Probably most people will have gotten chipped already for a discount on energy drinks or something, and won’t see the problem.
150 years will do that.
75 years ago computers barely existed.
They told Claude code to build it.
I’m really glad I thought of that first, and then I used the machine to go back in time and invent intellectual property law and secured the first patent.
I mean, I’m actually not the first, but I’m the first who thought to tell Claude “no changes or take backs”
Edit: I also had to tell it to make it unhackable, of course. Obviously.
