Entry #5: The Future We Dream Of

In 2008, a very popular animated Pixar movie was released and was one of the top ten grossing films. This film was Wall-E. Wall-E, set in a futuristic time, was about a robot that was left to clean up the mess on earth and was the last surviving robot. He falls in love with a robot, who is sent to Earth by the humans in space to look for signs of growth or life, and spends the movie trying to find and save her.

Although I did not watch the movie until two years after it was released, my friends always made comments about how much they enjoyed it. When I watched it for the first time, I was amazed by how it portrayed the future. With all of the cool new technology we have, I always imagined our future in a prosperous way. 

Watching the following clip from the movie reminded me of some of the shocking, but somewhat believable portrayals of or future that are included within.

Although this video is set in the 22nd century, it shares many aspects of today's society with technology, but it amplifies it to an extreme. As technology has advanced, the number of users have advanced as well, and in this video, it affects how the entire population functions.

The clip starts off with two men having a conversation, through a screen instead of looking at each other face-to-face. This is something that I believe is also happening in today's society. We rarely take the time to see people that we know, since they are so easily accessible via our technology and as we use our technology more frequently, we become blind to the things that are happening around us. With that said, it's also highly possible that the two men are so involved with their technology that they don't realize that they are right next to each other. 

Another way that technology has advanced, is by producing ways for us to complete tasks in less time. Because we are able to do so much with our gadgets, we are becoming lazier than ever before. You can see that this has affected the humans in this clip because they use their chairs and screens for everything. Instead of getting up to get something to drink or to pull an umbrella over for shade, they can simply summon a robot to assist them. The people seem to be unaware of how to walk or support their weight because they have instead been taught how to use their hover chairs to get them wherever they need to go.

Toward the middle of the clip, you'll see that all of the jobs have been taken over by the robots, so that the humans no longer need to work. In today's society, you can already find grocery stores with self-checkout lanes or fast food restaurants with self-ordering systems. Because of these advancements in technologies, we have already started taking away the jobs from the individuals, but in this future, the human worker is extinct.

So what can we do to prevent this from being our future? We can limit our technology usage and increase our face-to-face meetings. We can rely on our own abilities more than technology's to become more active and less lazy. We can avoid self-checkout lanes and self-ordering systems to show the investors that we are interested in keeping our fellow humans in the workplace. All of these things are easy to accomplish with a little retraining of how we complete tasks in our day to day lives. 

If we limit our technology usage, and manage it appropriately, we can establish the future of our dreams. I make the pledge to use my technology less, become more active for my own health, and avoid the roboticized options whenever possible. Can you make the pledge? Will you?