What might the future look like for an aged millennial?

How are digital, political, environmental and social advances impacting the world around us and how we live our lives?

Picture this…You were born in 1989 and we’re now in 2098, making you 109. You’ve had several ‘body upgrading’ appointments with your doctor over the years and have stem cell grown liver, kidneys and one lung. You feel pretty good.

You wake up in your pod room and pop on your VR headset. The chip implanted in your retina opens up your ‘digital world’. Traditional jobs no longer exist & in this 6d world, you can check your gig economy options & pick something to work on for the day. Some are easy like data mining but this doesn’t earn you much cryptocurrency. You prefer the nicer things so you pick something more complex and get to it.

Three hours later, you’re all done with work, time to find out your vital statistics “Hey Roberta, what should I do today”...

“11.30am - you have an appointment in the city, 3pm you have a call with your sister”

Roberta notices you didn’t go for your run yesterday so lets you know she won’t be starting your autonomous vehicle as you need to walk.

Using your retina scan by the front door, you lock up and head for your 30 minute walk into the city for your appointment. The digital pacemaker on your heart lets you know that you’re doing well and you’ve added 40 minutes onto your total life expectancy. Great!

You call your sister at 3pm as planned, this is done via your implanted retina microchip that also links to your hearing and speech. Your sister was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis back in 2050, but thanks to modern medicine, AI & autonomous doctors - she leads a totally normal life at the age of 121. In fact, diseases no longer exist and the only way for a human to cease is by accident or suicide.

Using modern medical techniques like SENS and CRISPR humans could essentially be regenerated from the inside out indefinitely. Rather than treating the inevitable diseases that are caused by old age, they suggest that humans are maintained.

Now, think back to that episode of Black Mirror you watched in 2013 called “Be Right Back”. A young woman named Martha loses her boyfriend in a car accident. As she’s mourning him, she discovers that technology now allows her to communicate with an artificial intelligence version of him. A physical, walking, talking, identical version of him.

Well, this is now a reality and humanity has blurred the lines completely between biological humans and robots living harmoniously, together. Not quite the ‘terminator’ we thought of in the 80s.

But you don’t have to worry, because your retina scan now has a handy ‘block function’, just like that old site Facebook, except you can physically block out people who don’t agree with your views, share the same values or the same social & financial status as you.

Great, right? Not so much.

But this is a potential reality. It seems absurd now, but we’ve been constantly evolving over hundreds of thousands of years. If the Ancient Egyptians saw how the Victorians live, they would believe we are a completely different species. A more recent example is the use of smartphones. What do we think our grandparents or their parents would have responded with if we told them that everyone would be walking around with miniature computers that can give you access to any person or service, anywhere in the world? When you put it like that...

It’s the age-old question, just because we can, does it mean we should?