We sat in the waiting room, basking in our joyous mood after having just received the “It’s a Boy!!” text from my little brother in the delivery room down the hall, announcing the entrance of his and Jenn’s new son into the world.  We were now waiting for the “all clear” sign that we could get up from our seats, throw away our soggy McDonald’s cups, and go meet the little feller.  To make the time go by faster, Jamie offered up a topic of conversation.

“What do you think little Cameron is going to be when he grows up?”

The gang threw out a few suggestions.

He’ll do something with computers…

He’ll be a podiatrist…

We paused.  A podiatrist?  An oddly exacting profession to toss out there.   Maybe not the first thing one might come up with when thinking about a 10 minute-old boy, but yet, who knows, right?

Half-sitting, half-lying in my seat, I offered up my opinion.

“He’ll drive a Ronthanton.”

The gang turned to look at the guy who suggested something even more random than “Podiatrist.”  So random, in fact, that the term didn’t actually exist.

“A Ronthanton,”  I repeated.   “A flying machine.”

And then I got excited.  I sat up in my chair and leaned towards my cohorts, my eyes growing wider.

“Think about it.  When we were newborns, who would have foreseen the technology that awaited us?  Who among us would have imagined this wild amazing society-transforming entity that we call the internet?”

The group nodded.  A fair point.  Sure.

“So who knows just what fantastic inventions will exist when Cameron is our age?   What fabulous tools will be his to wield?  Surely, there will be flying machines!  And they’ll be called Ronthantons!  Of course!”

They won’t be called Ronthantons.

It’s a stupid word, born from the lips of a tired older brother who half-sat, half-lay in his waiting room chair, who lazily just opened up his mouth and let whatever random group of syllables escape that desired to do so.   Ronthanton.

Flying Machines will very likely not be called Ronthantons.

Flying Machines will very likely not be flying.

Not in the manner in which I was envisioning, anyway.  Flying cars, for instance. Or jet packs maybe.  Nah, probably not.  Not in the way I had imagined – a way to get us to and from work.  To and from the stores, schools, bars.  Groundless parking lots.  Floating traffic lights.  Sky rage.   Sure, technology will probably have advanced to the point where a Ronthanton could quite easily be prototyped, tested, and marketed.  But the infrastructure that we would need to develop in order to safely support thousands upon thousands of distracted, self-centered humans in an airborne rush hour is a much bigger challenge, indeed.

No, I imagine that this human factor – a bunch of fragile bodies individually speeding through the air, next to each other, above each other, below each other, hundreds of feet above the ground – makes the whole thing seem an impractical pipe dream.

And while I REALLY want an automated flying machine that can pick me up from the roof of my house and zip me to the bars, the sad unlikelihood of this reality doesn’t bother me too much, because I foresee a much different future for my brothers’ children.

A much more Google-esque future.  More data, more virtuality, less physicality.  A “Matrix” future in a way.  Minus that silly nihilistic robots-harvesting-babies thing.

Instead of a Ronthanton bringing me to the bar, I will be bringing the bar to me.  The Ronthanton will just sit in my front yard, its non-wheels on blocks.

Here’s how I expect the future to unfurl for my young family members….

As more and more of our lives continue to become digitized, as our reliance on and acceptance of tangible, physical items continues to decrease, our naivety towards our own personal hardware solutions will also decrease.  While today I may diligently back up my immense collection of music, photos, financial information, etc onto an external hard drive, I will be able to recover from a burly computer crash.  But as long as that backup system is stored within close proximity to my primary machine, I’m still very much at risk.  An external hard drive won’t withstand a house fire or an asshole burglar.  No, to be truly backed up, I’ll need to store my information somewhere else.  On someone else’s hard drive, located on the other side of the world.  A hard drive with backups that are backed up by backups that are backed up, miles away.  This solution, of course, already exists, but will very soon be the norm -  as soon as we cross that final hurdle of entrusting that our most private information will remain private in someone else’s system.   And we’re pretty much there already.  Anyone used google lately?   That thing knows you, man.

Once all our information is safely tucked away in third party systems, we’ll become much less reliant on our own personal computers.  We’ll just need a dumb terminal, a simple piece of hardware that can wirelessly access our information, and our applications, at any time, from any place. Again, this is the direction we’re already going.  It will be the norm any day now.

And soon after that, I’ll have no need to carry around my music on a 30/80 gig iPod.  I’ll no longer need to plug my iPod into my car stereo so I can listen to my tunes on the way to work.   I’ll just power on my car stereo that is already configured to wirelessly access my music collection from my distant, protected, data storage area.  When I get out of my car, I’ll slap on my headphones, press ‘play’ on my phone that is also configured to access my collection, and I’ll continue on my way.  Jammin out the whole time, safely oblivious to the popular music of the less-pretentious out there.

In this same vein, there will soon be no reason to pirate music, movies, and whatnot.   For no one will really need to own their own copy of the tunes.   If I want to share music with my brothers, I’ll just wirelessly move this particular stockpile of tunes from my protected data storage into my public data storage.  My brothers will point their phones to my public drive, and they will then be rocking just as I rock .

This is all just around the corner, I think.

But while we’re all busily rocking out and sharing data via our wireless connection to our personal data storage, some of the badasses at Google will be working on their latest paradigm shift – Organic google searches.

You know how you can install a Google app to allow you to search the contents of your hard drive, just as if you were searching the contents of the internet?   One day they’ll allow you to search the contents of your mind.

With a tiny application surgically attached to your brain, your memories will be wirelessly transmitted to your distant data storage unit as you make them.   Every thought, feeling, epiphany that you experience will be beamed to your databank and stored.   Perhaps Google, or whatever company eventually surpasses them, will even come up with a way to parse through all the past memories in your brain, and categorize and store these as well.   A brain back-up system, if you will.

No longer will we be crippled by “Um… what was that movie we watched the other night?” or “Crap, what was her name?  She was a babe..”    No, when we need to remember something we’ll just google our memories.  Maybe we’ll first try to come up with the answer the old fashioned way – remembering it.  But when that inevitably fails, we’ll just mentally google it.  Within a few years, we’ll not even know the difference.  Remembering and googling will be pretty much the same thing.

Once we’ve grown comfortable with the fact that we’re no longer thinking on our own, but rather we’re mentally controlling a tool to access our memories, we’ll soon began to expect more from our tools.  As we humans always do.   We’ll reflect on our old days of music sharing, when we’d wirelessly move our music from our private drives to our public drives to allow others to access our tunes.    Our friends at Google, or whoever it is at this point, will capitalize on this archaic way of doing things, and modernize it a bit.   And soon, with a simple upgrade to the wireless devices attached to our brains, we will be able to move our thoughts, feelings, and epiphanies from our private databanks into our public databanks.  Instantaneously.  In about the same amount of time that it actually took to create the original thought.  So then, if I  (or the modern equivalent of I) see a pretty girl at the bar, I’ll be able to formulate a superficial opinion of her, allow the thought to be carried through my brain via electronic impulses, pumped wirelessly from the tool implanted in my cortex to my private databank a million miles away, filtered and enhanced and then moved to my public databank, all within milliseconds, to be accessed by the wireless tool in my buddy’s brain, who can then follow the same procedure, pushing his response from his brain to his private storage to his public storage, which I will then access and process… To receive the following:  “Don’t bother, dude.  She’s got a boyfriend.”

We will have achieved telepathy.  The reading of another’s mind.  Not through magic.  Not through physic prowess.   But through software.

And the great thing about this telepathy is that we’ll have full control of what thoughts we want to be read (our public storage) and those which we want to keep hidden away (our private storage).

Years will pass.  The technology will grow faster, more powerful, more pervasive in our lives.  Eventually we will be so comfortable with our new method of communication that we’ll subconsciously realize that our old way of speaking – with our mouths – is outdated and inefficient.  We’ll no longer see the need in jacking our jaws to get our points across.  We’ll just think.  And process the thoughts of others.  And soon communicating with the person sitting next to me at the bar will be no different than communicating with my brother on the other side of the country.  Much like we take our cell phones for granted these days – dialing up our cross-continental cohorts for some brief small talk on the drive home from work.   Communication will be completely universal.  And then when the Interpreter upgrade is introduced – the add-on software that will filter the thoughts as they stream from our private databanks to our public databanks and convert them to any desired language – I’ll be able to chit chat with a person in a distant country who knows not a lick of English, and I’ll never know the difference.

As we grow more and more reliant on this new technology that frees us from the unfortunate realities of being solid, ground-based beings, this technology that makes us unconfined by space and distance in our communication, the smart folks at Google (or whatever company has managed to out-Google Google) will realize that communication need not be the only human feature that is enhanced by this wireless science.

If ole’ Bones (or his modern equivalent) can have a simple chat with a pretty girl at the bar while he sits alone on his couch in his house, they’ll think, well then, why can’t he have a drink at that same bar while he sits on his couch?  The communication, while entirely real and happening, is still nothing more than a bunch of 1s and 0s.  Digital blips and bleeps.  Why can’t the bar be the same?

Taking a cue from those simple “online worlds” of the early 2000s – World of Warcraft, Second Life, etc  – the brainiacs at Google will begin to fashion an entirely new virtual world.  And years later, with the latest upgrade to the device in our craniums, we’ll no longer be limited to connecting to the public databanks of our friends and loved ones, but rather, we’ll connect to a massive server farm that hosts a new virtual version of reality so realistic that we’ll not even know the difference between it and the one in which we physically reside. The device will not only connect to the server farm, but it will download all the relevant sensations of this reality and beam them through our mind – stowaways on our brains’ traditional neurons – so that our eyes will see this world, our ears will hear this world, our fingers will feel this world.

I’ll connect to the server farm and, instantaneously, I’ll be at the bar.  I’ll see the patrons on their stools, sipping on their beers, I’ll hear their laughter, I’ll feel the pint glass in my hand.

No longer will I need to crawl out of bed, shower, and then drive to work.   I’ll merely wake up, and when I’m ready, I’ll just be at work.  Connected to the same part of the server farm as my co-workers, where we’ll go about our daily tasks, our small talk around the coffee machine, our silly corporate politics, all while our physical selves remain at home in our underwear, scratching our collective asses.

We will be living the world dreamed up by William Gibson in “Neuromancer”, or by those weird Wachowski brothers in “The Matrix” (again, minus the baby-harvesting robots).  We’ll eventually grow so comfortable in our new virtual communities that we’ll find less and less reason to ever disconnect, and the physical reality that imprisons our human bodies will seem less and less relevant, or interesting.  We’ll spend the majority of our lives in this virtual world that we’ll no longer refer to as “virtual”,  disconnecting only long enough to give birth and have the device implanted into our offspring’s heads – “Welcome to the other world, son!”  A software baptism, really.

Eventually the corporations will try to take control of this new reality, likely battling for power with the government, and will eventually find a way to exact a payment from the citizens, charging more for the better realities.   And within time we’ll be back to the ways of the past, the societal separation of the haves and have-nots .  Because, let’s face it, no matter how awesome the technology, we’ll still always be human.  But, no worries, because when the pressures of modern/virtual life become too great, we can always disconnect for a short time to explore the quiet, empty passages of physical reality.  Our now version of “returning to nature”.   I imagine that we won’t find this physical reality all that exciting anymore, and it won’t take long before we’re ready to re-connect, to log back onto the massive server farm, where we can spend time talking, dancing, and laughing together with the people we love the most, whose physical bodies just so happen to be located halfway across the world.  The old world, that is.  The one that seems much less relevant these days.

So…   that’s a pretty exciting future, I’d say.  I think I like it.  Will all this actually happen by the time my nephew is my age, around the time of life where he might have been driving a Ronthantan in a much different world?   Oh, I doubt it.   But technology moves fast, and technology kicks ass, and so wherever we happen to be on the technological scheme of things when my niece and my nephews have grown up, I’m sure it’s going to be pretty awesome.  I’m confident that technology will continue to improve our lives, and the lives of the next generations, and all the wonderful possibilities that technology opens up for these youngsters very much excites me.

Maybe the world that I imagined as I sat in that chair in the waiting room, as my nephew entered this world kicking and screaming and wondering, “Where in the hell am I?  What is this new reality?!” … maybe it isn’t right on the horizon.  Maybe there’s a ways to go.  But there will always be an exciting technological progression for the little guy to hop onto and ride into the new age.   There will always be something new for the little guy to be engage in.  Should he choose to.   And should he not… well… there will always be a need for podiatry.

For the time being, anyway.