Robert Scribner is a senior majoring in marketing. He can be contacted at [email protected]. I read The Wall Street Journal sometimes. I am a marketing student, as you are already aware. It says it below my picture, so you know it’s true. As you also probably know, marketing men are businessmen by definition. We spend our days in McCool Hall, and we read The Wall Street Journal when our professors assign homework involving The Wall Street Journal. Not to mention the fact that all business students have an involuntary subscription to it, so we feel compelled.
I like to think of The Wall Street Journal as just some dude’s journal or diary, as if I’ve stumbled upon his most secret thoughts, but all of the thoughts are really boring and long-winded. I usually just skim it for the juiciest articles, and I read those.
The most provocative item of late was entitled “Thinking About Tomorrow.” In summation, the article is mostly about thinking about tomorrow, aka “the futurezone.”
It was about predicting technological change over the next 10 years, and it was a pretty solid read. There was also an article that reviewed predictions from 10 years ago, which was cool and fun. All in all, the articles were somewhat accurate, but I think at times they misrepresented the direction in which we are heading. Allow me to make a few predictions.
First of all, yes, there will be robots. I just wanted to get that out of the way, because I don’t want anyone here getting the wrong idea about my stance on robots. I think very highly of robots, and they will be programmed to think very highly of me.
Anyway, I noticed that the article seemed to imply that people will still be doing actual things in the future. I’m not sure that this follows the current trend. The fact that virtual things are much easier to do is the problem with this idea. I don’t expect that I will still even have a human body 10 years down the road.
I doubt I’ll even have a cyborg body by the year 2050. I imagine each of us will simply exist as a floating, formless consciousness, perhaps only manifested when accessed by robots via our MySpace pages. And if everything goes as planned, all humans will eventually share a collective consciousness on the Internet and the Internet alone.
In contrast, my consciousness currently only exists inside of myself, but it likes to think about how convenient everything is getting and all the cool new types of text messaging that the future will bring. This progress is very exciting for me. I hope that in the distant future, I come back and re-read this article that I am writing now. I’ll think back and laugh at how nave I was about the text messaging possibilities of the future. That will be the best day of my entire life.