Technology

''Technology. What new innovations have been invented in communications? In transportation? In war? In medicine? In entertainment? In space exploration? In genetics? In forensics and CSI? In the market and purchases? How long does it take people to get from one place to another? Can new species be engineered? Uplifted? Has an apocalypse destroyed the civilization we know and reduced technology to a primitive state? Has time travel to the past been perfected? How advanced are robots? Have we reached the Singularity yet? How many bytes can a computer hold? Is the job market taken over by AI’s? Does technology allow us to speed growing up in children? Have we unlocked the secret to expand the human lifespan (to, say, 150 years)? Have we discovered how to reverse death? What are the big Internet sites (like Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, etc.)?''

Cellphones have “today’s date and a little notation in black for answering machine messages”. Some people still use landlines. Videograms play music videos on large screens. Videocameras have retractable tripods that fold up right into the box under them. The telepaper is a television/newspaper hybrid that comes with a remote control. The remote control has the numbers 0 through F, in hexadecimal, on it. A telepaper shows 16 different photos, each for a new story. Jeff King’s King TV is the main telepaper-driven news corporation. The website espeak.com allows people to give ecomments that run on the screen as the King TV stories play.

Many stores use automated employees (a.k.a. autoids), who can speak and understand English fluently.

The AALL card is a card that contains a credit card, one’s ID and car insurance, health insurance, and passport, and requires one to hold his or her fingers over certain points to verify who it is.

Inner-body travel is a cutting-edge technology, and it is being experimented with to fight Diamond-Zuckerman disease (DZD), a disease caused by prions first reported in 2024. Life-o-suction can take years off one person’s life expectancy and add them to another’s. One prosthesis is the prosthetic eye, which unlike a glass eye can actually see. It looks like an eye socket,  but inside the functions of parts of a real eye are all linked to an optic nerve. Enamel shots fix cavities without the need for fillings or implants. Genetic selection technology (GST) allows you to choose the gender, height, coloring, etc. of your children.

A household invention is the water transportation system: you grab a tube off one of the many hooks located around the house, you get in a one-foot-wide stream that runs all around the house, and motion-sensored jets immediately push you to the room of your choice. Another gadget is an umbrella that shrinks to a thirtieth of its size. Cats play with electronic mouse toys.