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Phillipp Lenssen von Blogoscoped hat einmal - nichts ganz ernst - in die Zukunft geschaut und sich gefragt, mit welchen technischen Errungenschaften wir 2049 rechnen dürfen. Ich würde sagen, uns steht eine glänzende Zukunft bevor:

Trademarks of 2049

InvisiGlove™
People in the future are more and more concerned about privacy. That’s why they don’t like to leave fingerprints, which (in many countries) will be routinely analyzed in every major city. So no matter where you went, the government has a chance to know. Unless, of course, you wear an InvisiGlove™. (…)

HyperDream™
50 years ago, humanity took things a little slower than today. Indeed, our busy modern times leave us little chance to take a rest. The trend continues, and in around 50 years, most people don’t even have the time to do unproductive things like sleeping. Yet, they know only too well how important sleep is for body and mind. (…)

One-Click TV™
In about 20 years from now, the internet and the TV have been completely merged. That means full interactivity for that innocent little box which years ago invaded humanity’s living rooms. A side-effect not even big media companies did foresee was that most people were actually quite happy with the ease-of-use of sitting on a couch and clicking through channels of mindless TV shows… without any need to manage bookmarks, configure your TiVo, personalize the advertisement, or zapping away pop-ups. (…)

NatuDirt™
In the near future, robots did such a perfect job in keeping the house clean that it would look almost too sterile to some. As cleaning robots weren’t programmed to do anything else but, well, clean, tables would always have an unnatural shine, floors were slippery, and homes started to look more like a hospital than a cozy shelter to hang around with your family.

When NatuDirt™ came on the scene, it was a perfect match to having a cleaning robot. Small micro-organisms would spread in the house and create a constant level of dust, crumbs, and random grayish fluff. People’s minds were instantly transported back to their grandma’s house of 2010, and once again they started to feel more at home at home.

Coca Pepsi Cola™
After the Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola companies figured it was more lucrative to just stop fighting each other and put together their production lines, the resulting drink was Coca Pepsi Cola™. Sales dropped shortly thereafter as everyone switched to Dr. Pepper.

PastMachine™
The basic technology to build time machines was created in 2040, to be perfected 9 years later by a Japanese company (a glitch in Einstein’s theory of relativitiy made it possible, it turned out). They called their first commercial release PastMachine™, as you could only travel into the past, and not the future. However, people in 2049 simply weren’t interested to go back in time, and the product bombed. The past was full of wars, poverty, hunger, lying politicians, and diseases you couldn’t cure – understandably, nobody wanted to see that again.

BotBot™
As so many different robots would invade the households of the future – cleaning robots, cooking robots, guard robots, and so on – the BotBot™ was invented to be “the one bot to rule them all”, as the manufacturer claimed. It did a good job at that, too, having both an understanding of the labile robot psyche (many robots even committed suicide because of bad working conditions, but they never complained, as complaining simply wasn’t part of their program) as well as acting as a repair men once robots needed some oil or spare parts.(…)

Bei Googles scheinbar unaufhaltsamen Siegeszug durch die I-Society, sind Warnungen vor dem immer mächtiger werdenden Unternehmen aus Mountain View oft rar. Die klassischen Medien avancieren lieber zur Yellow-Tech-Press: Als Paparazzi spüren sie jedem Pups der Google-Gründer Brin und Page nach. Investigativer Journalismus at its best? In der Minderheit sind dagegen die Journalisten, die zum Nachdenken kommen und sich einmal in journalistischer Reinform üben: Was passiert hier eigentlich?

Einen Schritt weiter mit seiner Kritik geht der Flash-Film EPIC 2014 von Robin Sloan und Matt Thompson. Die Macher geben eine mögliche Antwort, wie die Medienlandschaft der Zukunft wohl aussehen wird. Dass sie dabei um Google (und Amazon) kaum herum kommen, versteht sich von selbst. In einer Allianz namens Googlezon verfeinern die beiden Unternehmen ihre Suchalgorithmen stetig weiter. Am Ende steht EPIC, das Evolving Personalized Information Construct - und das Ende der klassischen Medien wie der N.Y. Times.

In Ihrem Weblog pflegen Sloan und Thompson eine eigene EPIC-Rubrik, in der Sie rund um mögliche Entwicklungen zu Google - nicht immer ganz ernst gemeint - und ihren Flash-Filmen berichten.

Filmen? Ja, denn mittlerweile gibt es Versionen mit altenativem Ende: EPIC 2015 ist ein Update ihrer Visionen ins Netz.

PCWorld schreibt dazu:

The first version of the short piece, called EPIC 2014, ends ominously: “At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world, deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at its worst and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow, sensational.

“But EPIC is what we wanted. It is what we chose, and its commercial success preempted any discussions of media and democracy or journalistic ethics,” the piece says before closing. An updated version of the movie–”EPIC 2015″–ends a bit more upbeat, with a former New York Times digital edition journalist finding work collecting broadcasts from citizens based on their locations using GPS (Global Positioning System).

(Zugegeben nicht ganz neu dieser Link, aber sozusagen Startbeitrag für die neue EPIC-Kategorie - in Anlehnung an 50hz).