> she is able to stroll through immigration without stopping because her P-Comm is dealing with the ID checks as she walks.
We're getting closer to digital ID. But outside of a few experiments, there's no international consensus. However, every modern passport has an NFC chip which can be read by most airports. You still need to hold your passport on the reader, but it's usually quicker than queuing for a human.
As far as immigration to the US is concerned (and I guess it is, because I haven't heard of the term "immigration" applied to business travelers or tourists anywhere else in the world), expecting to be able to "stroll through" it sounds increasingly naive after reports of various unsuspecting travelers being detained for weeks and then deported (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton...), and the current to-and-fro around TSA PreCheck and Global Entry (https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/22/politics/shutdonw-tsa-pre...).
Ok, thanks for setting the record straight, I stand corrected. Interestingly enough, while I have been to the UK several times, I don't remember coming across the term "immigration" (probably because most of those times were pre-Brexit, so immigration was much less of a hassle for a EU citizen than it would have been when visiting the US).
> but no one wants to use a pay-phone when they have their own mobile!
I have a hobby-level interest in avoiding pervasive surveillance, and have been thinking about ditching my phone more often. Something like no-cell Tuesdays.
What if I have a family emergency? I don't have a desk phone, but I could pay more attention to my work email.
What if my car breaks down? I could use a payphone, except those don't really exist these days. I could walk to the nearest gas station and ask to use their phone, but they would probably think I was crazy.
The other thing payphones used to have (at least here and there) was an attached phone book with Yellow Pages where I could find a tow company. Lets say I do manage to beg access to a phone, how do I know who to call?
Now that everyone carries all these things in their pocket, other systems for handling these problems have atrophied.
If the car breaks down maybe ask a stranger to look up the number for a truck and hit dial, then hand the phone to you. In a public place, of course. If I were in a gas station and someone who was dressed normally asked me that I probably wouldn’t refuse.
Your family memebers should be able to send you encrypted text messages using the MeshCore network only, with no dependence on cellular network or the Internet.
They just need to be in range of your repeater or in areas covered by other nodes that can transitively reach yours. If you are too far from other repeaters to connect, you might need to arrange for some intermediate repeaters being installed. But due to their solar nature (with solar charged battery for night operation), only a secure mounting is needed - this makes gaining permission of their installation a lot easier. With good placement a repeater has a range in dozens of kilometers.
Some example hardware currently recommended for use:
I use a TCL Flip for this purpose. Phone calls and texting work well enough, the web browser is painful on the small non-touch screen but works in a pinch, and the phone can create an LTE hotspot.
Sometimes I also carry my smartphone but I don't /need/ to. I've told my family and trusted contacts that any emergency should be a phone call.
This was really fun - it's interesting how many of the scenarios involve public internet terminals. I can see how at the turn of the millennium it would have sounded absurd that we'd be able to hold in our hand a mobile terminal that would allow any serious business to be accomplished, what with text entry being painfully slow, mobile screens being low-resolution, and mobile data being incredibly slow and just rolling out in most places. Indeed, "logging on" from someone else's computer out of necessity was quite common, even in the mid 00s. Of course, the login processes of some websites are still operating on the same assumptions. Gotta love the whole "Keep me logged in? Don't check this on public or shared devices." Like I'm doing my banking at an Internet cafe or something.
Internet Cafes are still a thing in Asia outside of the big cities. People have feature/sub-smart phones that they can do chat and banking with but use the cafes for anything else.
I would love to read a writeup on how gaming cafes / PC Bangs handle cybersecurity for their patrons, given that they're using shared computers. Would be a tremendous target for ID theft, including from the store owner or employees.
At least in India all your banking is done by phone (I don't even know if the banks here even offer web portals) so it's less of a concern because all your identity is tied to your SIM card. The cafes I've seen just have standard kiosk mode desktops that reset (you hope) with each new login.
> Do you want an always-on Alexa in your hotel room?
I encountered literally this for the first time a couple weeks ago. At one point we noticed it was doing the "listening for command" thing during an unrelated conversation, and my wife said, "Alexa, stop listening!", whereupon it told us to use the physical switch for the mic on the device if we didn't want it listening.
It's interesting to see, a happy, albeit a naive hope for the future. Things we wished for maybe, but in some cases what we have now is the monkey paw version; automatic synchronization of everything with personal data is in reality a privacy nightmare full of sensitive data that's about to leak or already has been used against you by the advertisers.
Reducing mental load and reliance on other people or more primitive technology also skips losing interpersonal relationships, making us more susceptible for even more technological dependence...
This is quite fun. I've always enjoyed looking at past predictions of the future. This one seemed quite spot on most of the time as well which is quite interesting. In 2010 it might have looked a bit off, but as the author notes now with LLMs a lot more of these predictions have come true.
And yeah, it's always fun seeing the ones that don't come true, ie the connected fridge that orders food for you, and not for lack of trying.
What is it about the fridge that automatically orders food. That prediction has been around since I was a kid and it still sounds like an awful and unwanted idea to me. But then again I dont ever order groceries i just buy them like a normal person so idgi
Because when you're a kid, your mum restocks the fridge "automatically".
So much of modern tech is developed by slightly pathetic men wanting their mummies to come back and run their lives. Fill the fridge, vacuum the home, drive them to their friends, deliver perfectly cooked food, etc.
Edit: Just realized that the parent might be making a joke that went over my head. Maybe not as early as the 80s, but at least in the 90s lots of people thought that in 2000 the Y2K bug would cause the collapse of society.
Back in my undergrad years c1994 a professor brought a new assignment to our special topics course in design thinking. It was a report from a NY telecommunications firm.
I can’t recall the details. Only that I “predicted” a dark vision of your refrigerator competing in a foods market to buy your staple products at the best price whenever your stock became low. And then, of course it all goes awry when you end up with 6 cases of milk.
I tried searching for some hint of the telecom project that was the start of our class assignment. No luck. But I did find this viddy on YouTube with a great intro with interviews of the “person on the street”.
A possible catalyst might have been the 1993 AT&T "You Will" Ad Campaign. It was very prescient but also the joke is that the commercials ended with "and the company that will bring it to you will be AT&T", which did not pan out in the ways that ad campaign thought.
The "agent" stuff was a fascinating vision. It seems like an alternate history more than a future, as I'm sure if we all let our claws talk amongst themselves they won't be finding ways to collectively help us -- they'll probably be scamming crypto from each other or something.
I'd make an argument for the idea that Siri (like the touch-based keyboard) has actually regressed.
I recall scoffing at the idea of a touchscreen based keyboard due to how close the buttons were already on my Nokia E63- and contending that without the tactile differentiation I wouldn't be able to effectively type.
Even on a 4" screen, it worked wonderfully, almost like magic.
Nowadays I'm forced to have a much larger screen and yet I make significantly more mistakes than I used to.
The same is true for Siri, things like "Hows the weather outside" and "I'm thinking of going for a walk" would bring back results like "It's currently raining" or "Bring a jacket, it will be cold".
There were also all kinds of fun interactions hidden in there.
Now it's "if you ask me again on your computer"; or "I found some web results".
My Homepod insists that it doesn't know where I live too, despite it being listed in the settings. And I can't ask it about my environment unless I use VERY specific wording despite it having a digital termometer built-in (based on the fact I can see it in my Home app).
Idk, something is fucky in the land of "once great" software from Apple.
I personally suspect that it’s because they had a huge hiring surge, in the last decade; mostly brogrammers.
We are now at “second generation” brogrammers, where the initial bunch are interviewing and hiring the next bunch, being careful to select jargonauts that don’t make them feel uncomfortable. They have also established the corporate culture.
Been happening in lots of companies. It’s just more jarring, with Apple, because we expect more from them.
There’s a palpable assault on expertise afoot in the Anglosphere. It’s been going on for decades, at least since the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s, but what’s new is how pervasive it feels. Even software companies, once the nerdiest of institutions, would now rather fail to produce functioning software than identify and cultivate expertise. Ten years ago, we, or at least I, failed to recognize “nerds are cool now” as the cultural trojan horse it was. Nerds, experts, were never going to be cool; the cool kids saw money and power accumulating around nerds, and they muscled their way in.
That work like this often predicts a good portion of the technological advancements, but usually completely misses the mark on the execution and the enshittified commodification is why I like reading cyberpunk and other dystopian sci-fi.
One piece that I find interesting is how hopeful people sounded about tech that had access to your data. Folks higher up in the tech world often complain about how the media complains about them too much. And while the media definitely has issues in how they report, it's easier to see how we got to this point where tech is vilified. You compare the hope of the past and match it to the exploitation of the present, and you can't help but feel sometimes that in a game of picking straws, the current timeline picked dystopian over utopian.
So the work being judged is a piece from 2000 theorizing about 2010, or 10 years hence. If we were to make similar guesses about the future from here, the question is: what does 2036 look like?
At the cost of looking dumb in 10 years, and also today, here are some vague notions of mine. The big one of course is where will AI be in 10 years. My prediction is we're still going to be arguing about AGI, except no one cares anymore because it's good enough, just like the Turing test isn't as interesting either. There will be several AI religions/cults. Expect to see insular communes/communities of high-trust that are xenophobic and only interact with outsiders as necessary.
Robotics will have advanced to a point where some level of society has a robot maid to "go get me a beer" that also folds and puts away clothes.
Biology will have advanced so men are no longer necessary to provide DNA for offspring (this already works in mice). Artificial wombs will mean women aren't necessary for offspring either. This will reshape society even more than AI did.
Capitalism won't have fallen. UBI will be tried in some places and result in a tide of depression and suicide, but linking the two won't be politically viable.
Anyway, I'm sure I'm way off the mark, but my time machine's just as good as yours, so :p
> she is able to stroll through immigration without stopping because her P-Comm is dealing with the ID checks as she walks.
We're getting closer to digital ID. But outside of a few experiments, there's no international consensus. However, every modern passport has an NFC chip which can be read by most airports. You still need to hold your passport on the reader, but it's usually quicker than queuing for a human.
As far as immigration to the US is concerned (and I guess it is, because I haven't heard of the term "immigration" applied to business travelers or tourists anywhere else in the world), expecting to be able to "stroll through" it sounds increasingly naive after reports of various unsuspecting travelers being detained for weeks and then deported (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton...), and the current to-and-fro around TSA PreCheck and Global Entry (https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/22/politics/shutdonw-tsa-pre...).
OP here. As the meme goes, I am one of literally dozens of people who live outside the USA.
"Immigration" is the commonly used term in the UK. See https://www.parallelparliament.co.uk/question/99775/eurostar... and https://www.heathrow.com/arrivals/immigration-and-passports
Similarly, Australia uses the term if you want to apply for a visitor's visa - https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/
You'll also notice that the original report was written by an EU group.
Ok, thanks for setting the record straight, I stand corrected. Interestingly enough, while I have been to the UK several times, I don't remember coming across the term "immigration" (probably because most of those times were pre-Brexit, so immigration was much less of a hassle for a EU citizen than it would have been when visiting the US).
Seems like a political rather than technical problem ?
Going from EU to Japan is very close the presented scenario. Like you know, threat people with dignity and things work fine ?
For a similar fun set of reviews of past predictions of future tech, I recommend looking through Youtube channel "KnowledgeHusk"
Selected videos:
"People in the 80s Making Fun of Predictions From the 60s" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-B6zeAKAEQ
"2002 Tried To Predict 2025" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMZ9odjhOnU
"Terrible Predictions About The Future From 2005" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH9kf9KLVVQ
(and many more can be found in their Retrofuturism playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZkkImzuw5q9Kk5KIq1yw... )
> but no one wants to use a pay-phone when they have their own mobile!
I have a hobby-level interest in avoiding pervasive surveillance, and have been thinking about ditching my phone more often. Something like no-cell Tuesdays.
What if I have a family emergency? I don't have a desk phone, but I could pay more attention to my work email.
What if my car breaks down? I could use a payphone, except those don't really exist these days. I could walk to the nearest gas station and ask to use their phone, but they would probably think I was crazy.
The other thing payphones used to have (at least here and there) was an attached phone book with Yellow Pages where I could find a tow company. Lets say I do manage to beg access to a phone, how do I know who to call?
Now that everyone carries all these things in their pocket, other systems for handling these problems have atrophied.
If the car breaks down maybe ask a stranger to look up the number for a truck and hit dial, then hand the phone to you. In a public place, of course. If I were in a gas station and someone who was dressed normally asked me that I probably wouldn’t refuse.
Put a solar powered MeshCore repeater on top of your house & give a MeshCore companions/clients to your family members.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeshCore
https://meshcore.co.uk/
https://meshcore.co.uk/map.html
Your family memebers should be able to send you encrypted text messages using the MeshCore network only, with no dependence on cellular network or the Internet.
They just need to be in range of your repeater or in areas covered by other nodes that can transitively reach yours. If you are too far from other repeaters to connect, you might need to arrange for some intermediate repeaters being installed. But due to their solar nature (with solar charged battery for night operation), only a secure mounting is needed - this makes gaining permission of their installation a lot easier. With good placement a repeater has a range in dozens of kilometers.
Some example hardware currently recommended for use:
client/companion: Meshtastic Nordic nRF52840 SX1262 LoRaWAN LoRa Arduino Positioning Devboard Low Power TFT Display BLE WiFi Mesh node T114 V2.0" - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007593391057.html
solar repeater: SenseCAP Solar Node P1-Pro for Meshtastic - https://www.seeedstudio.com/SenseCAP-Solar-Node-P1-Pro-for-M...
I use a TCL Flip for this purpose. Phone calls and texting work well enough, the web browser is painful on the small non-touch screen but works in a pinch, and the phone can create an LTE hotspot.
Sometimes I also carry my smartphone but I don't /need/ to. I've told my family and trusted contacts that any emergency should be a phone call.
Just tell the gas station clerk you just got mugged or that your cellphone was stolen and you need to look up a number and make a call.
This was really fun - it's interesting how many of the scenarios involve public internet terminals. I can see how at the turn of the millennium it would have sounded absurd that we'd be able to hold in our hand a mobile terminal that would allow any serious business to be accomplished, what with text entry being painfully slow, mobile screens being low-resolution, and mobile data being incredibly slow and just rolling out in most places. Indeed, "logging on" from someone else's computer out of necessity was quite common, even in the mid 00s. Of course, the login processes of some websites are still operating on the same assumptions. Gotta love the whole "Keep me logged in? Don't check this on public or shared devices." Like I'm doing my banking at an Internet cafe or something.
Internet Cafes are still a thing in Asia outside of the big cities. People have feature/sub-smart phones that they can do chat and banking with but use the cafes for anything else.
I would love to read a writeup on how gaming cafes / PC Bangs handle cybersecurity for their patrons, given that they're using shared computers. Would be a tremendous target for ID theft, including from the store owner or employees.
At least in India all your banking is done by phone (I don't even know if the banks here even offer web portals) so it's less of a concern because all your identity is tied to your SIM card. The cafes I've seen just have standard kiosk mode desktops that reset (you hope) with each new login.
> Do you want an always-on Alexa in your hotel room?
I encountered literally this for the first time a couple weeks ago. At one point we noticed it was doing the "listening for command" thing during an unrelated conversation, and my wife said, "Alexa, stop listening!", whereupon it told us to use the physical switch for the mic on the device if we didn't want it listening.
It's interesting to see, a happy, albeit a naive hope for the future. Things we wished for maybe, but in some cases what we have now is the monkey paw version; automatic synchronization of everything with personal data is in reality a privacy nightmare full of sensitive data that's about to leak or already has been used against you by the advertisers.
Reducing mental load and reliance on other people or more primitive technology also skips losing interpersonal relationships, making us more susceptible for even more technological dependence...
This is quite fun. I've always enjoyed looking at past predictions of the future. This one seemed quite spot on most of the time as well which is quite interesting. In 2010 it might have looked a bit off, but as the author notes now with LLMs a lot more of these predictions have come true.
And yeah, it's always fun seeing the ones that don't come true, ie the connected fridge that orders food for you, and not for lack of trying.
What is it about the fridge that automatically orders food. That prediction has been around since I was a kid and it still sounds like an awful and unwanted idea to me. But then again I dont ever order groceries i just buy them like a normal person so idgi
Because when you're a kid, your mum restocks the fridge "automatically".
So much of modern tech is developed by slightly pathetic men wanting their mummies to come back and run their lives. Fill the fridge, vacuum the home, drive them to their friends, deliver perfectly cooked food, etc.
With current AI computers are finally starting to do what people in the 1980s thought computers would be doing in 2000.
That's what scares me.
Edit: Just realized that the parent might be making a joke that went over my head. Maybe not as early as the 80s, but at least in the 90s lots of people thought that in 2000 the Y2K bug would cause the collapse of society.
destroying humanity? I think you're being overly anxious there but sure, I guess I can see it if I squint a bit.
Back in my undergrad years c1994 a professor brought a new assignment to our special topics course in design thinking. It was a report from a NY telecommunications firm.
I can’t recall the details. Only that I “predicted” a dark vision of your refrigerator competing in a foods market to buy your staple products at the best price whenever your stock became low. And then, of course it all goes awry when you end up with 6 cases of milk.
I tried searching for some hint of the telecom project that was the start of our class assignment. No luck. But I did find this viddy on YouTube with a great intro with interviews of the “person on the street”.
https://youtu.be/waQy2WKHiwY
A possible catalyst might have been the 1993 AT&T "You Will" Ad Campaign. It was very prescient but also the joke is that the commercials ended with "and the company that will bring it to you will be AT&T", which did not pan out in the ways that ad campaign thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvZ-667CEdo
The "agent" stuff was a fascinating vision. It seems like an alternate history more than a future, as I'm sure if we all let our claws talk amongst themselves they won't be finding ways to collectively help us -- they'll probably be scamming crypto from each other or something.
Apple had a similar “agent” vision (I think I remember them talking about it last century).
So far, Siri is still pretty frustrating, and nowhere near their vision of a “digital PA.”
I'd make an argument for the idea that Siri (like the touch-based keyboard) has actually regressed.
I recall scoffing at the idea of a touchscreen based keyboard due to how close the buttons were already on my Nokia E63- and contending that without the tactile differentiation I wouldn't be able to effectively type.
Even on a 4" screen, it worked wonderfully, almost like magic.
Nowadays I'm forced to have a much larger screen and yet I make significantly more mistakes than I used to.
The same is true for Siri, things like "Hows the weather outside" and "I'm thinking of going for a walk" would bring back results like "It's currently raining" or "Bring a jacket, it will be cold".
There were also all kinds of fun interactions hidden in there.
Now it's "if you ask me again on your computer"; or "I found some web results".
My Homepod insists that it doesn't know where I live too, despite it being listed in the settings. And I can't ask it about my environment unless I use VERY specific wording despite it having a digital termometer built-in (based on the fact I can see it in my Home app).
Idk, something is fucky in the land of "once great" software from Apple.
I personally suspect that it’s because they had a huge hiring surge, in the last decade; mostly brogrammers.
We are now at “second generation” brogrammers, where the initial bunch are interviewing and hiring the next bunch, being careful to select jargonauts that don’t make them feel uncomfortable. They have also established the corporate culture.
Been happening in lots of companies. It’s just more jarring, with Apple, because we expect more from them.
There’s a palpable assault on expertise afoot in the Anglosphere. It’s been going on for decades, at least since the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s, but what’s new is how pervasive it feels. Even software companies, once the nerdiest of institutions, would now rather fail to produce functioning software than identify and cultivate expertise. Ten years ago, we, or at least I, failed to recognize “nerds are cool now” as the cultural trojan horse it was. Nerds, experts, were never going to be cool; the cool kids saw money and power accumulating around nerds, and they muscled their way in.
Do any long time apple insiders here know why apple's software has gotten so much worse over the last 5+ years
Siri is really just a speech-to-text command line. It's not an AI and certainly not an agent.
> Ah! The dream of personal agents. Not even close.
Not close in terms of ubiquity, but perhaps pretty close in terms of time.
I suspect the end of Dennard Scaling scuppered this sort of utopia.
That work like this often predicts a good portion of the technological advancements, but usually completely misses the mark on the execution and the enshittified commodification is why I like reading cyberpunk and other dystopian sci-fi.
One piece that I find interesting is how hopeful people sounded about tech that had access to your data. Folks higher up in the tech world often complain about how the media complains about them too much. And while the media definitely has issues in how they report, it's easier to see how we got to this point where tech is vilified. You compare the hope of the past and match it to the exploitation of the present, and you can't help but feel sometimes that in a game of picking straws, the current timeline picked dystopian over utopian.
Reminds me of the old adage: your most bitter employee is the person who was most full of hope.
> the current timeline picked dystopian over utopian.
If you structure your society around maximizing short-term profits, this is a utopia. We just picked the wrong way to structure society.
So the work being judged is a piece from 2000 theorizing about 2010, or 10 years hence. If we were to make similar guesses about the future from here, the question is: what does 2036 look like?
At the cost of looking dumb in 10 years, and also today, here are some vague notions of mine. The big one of course is where will AI be in 10 years. My prediction is we're still going to be arguing about AGI, except no one cares anymore because it's good enough, just like the Turing test isn't as interesting either. There will be several AI religions/cults. Expect to see insular communes/communities of high-trust that are xenophobic and only interact with outsiders as necessary.
Robotics will have advanced to a point where some level of society has a robot maid to "go get me a beer" that also folds and puts away clothes.
Biology will have advanced so men are no longer necessary to provide DNA for offspring (this already works in mice). Artificial wombs will mean women aren't necessary for offspring either. This will reshape society even more than AI did.
Capitalism won't have fallen. UBI will be tried in some places and result in a tide of depression and suicide, but linking the two won't be politically viable.
Anyway, I'm sure I'm way off the mark, but my time machine's just as good as yours, so :p