When people think about the future or imagine what the futuristic world will be like, we usually have a totally different picture than how we live right now. Some of us might imagine a world full of AI-triggered robots telling us how to live and what to do.
The future — in our minds — looks and feels totally different and esoteric. We’ll do things that we think we can’t do right now. In ways, the future is strongly rooted in our present.
What many of us don’t realize is that we already have started living the future — in our heads.
One strong proponent of the future is Sci-Fi. And Sci-Fi is mad about aesthetics. But underlying these sophisticated futuristic representations, the psychological underpinnings that enable futuristic human behavior are already in flux.
Let’s take an example of the black mirror series that frightened the hell out of a lot of us. There is an episode where individuals put chips in their heads that lets them record memory and relive it. Another one is where a person tries to recreate a dead partner through a digital equivalent.
Aren’t some of us already living these realities? How many of us capture memories on phones and keep revisiting them! How many of us go through the Facebook page or WhatsApp messages of the person that we can no longer talk to!
Future scares us sometimes because it’s supposed to look very different from today. We don’t know how we are going to live in it. But we are already, at least some of us, as we speak.
Like someone wise said, the future is here, just that we don’t know it yet.
