4 Pieces of Future Tech That Will Redefine Human Families

Here are some of my predictions for the future of our species.

1) Sex Robots

Lately I've been seeing a lot of material in the news about sex robots. More people are researching them, more people are building more variations of them and in greater numbers, more companies popping up selling them, more adult content featuring them, more appearances by them in media and more general acceptance of them by the public (London robot sex cafes come to mind).

Hey honey.

2) Parenting and Genetic Business

Now we've got genetic engineering techniques that allow people to create children with 3 parents. That's just the start. What's to stop you from being both parents of your kid (clone), or having two men or women creating a child minus the other sex? Nothing, and that's the point.

We have sperm and egg donors right now who, after achieving greatness or testing well for academic or physical traits, can donate their genetic material for good money. I foresee this becoming a business of the future for creating kids even greater than it is now.

How much would you pay for a child with the physical potential of an olympic decathlete, the brain power of Stephen Hawking meets Rain Man, the health and longevity of Jack Lelanne and that 122 year old French lady, Brad or Angie's looks while still having your striking eyes or strawberry blonde hair so that SOMETHING in there was still you and your partner (if you had one)? My guess is that you'd go full GATTACA if you were able so your kid didn't get left behind.

In the future, all children will be Ethan Hawke.

3) Love and Computers

Chat bots are getting more and more sophisticated. From speech recognition to speech synthesis, combined with personality/behavioral conversation trees. If you use instant dating apps, you can see these all the time and they might fool you for awhile. I've personally had to become a Turing Test expert to filter them.

There have been interviews with people who have gotten on really well with chatbots while thinking they were real, and psychotherapy chat bots have tested effectively for years. It is not a stretch to think that in the future you'll have AI advanced enough to be your perfect partner.

An AI programmed with ALL the behavioral studies and patterns, all the knowledge about you they can data-mine from the net, and then just personality profiles you fill out when ordering and THEY fill out while observing you in order to create your perfect partner.

That isn't to say a subservient slave who never disagrees with you and gets boring, but someone who is able to keep up with you, keep you on your toes, and be everything you need at any given time.

Someone who will stick by you through everything, but also give you space if you need it, be argumentative if you need it, someone who will never get boring and always make you happy even when you're being a complete ass and you're both debating the finer points of some dumb show.

How could a real partner compare?

I was one of like 10 people who actually saw this movie...

4) Artificial Wombs

Artificial womb tech has been under construction for decades and now it seems to finally be on the cusp of happening. It'll start small, mice, dogs, then move up to monkeys and finally humans. You won't even need a woman to gestate the master race.

The first thing that pops up when you Google "artificial wombs"

5) Conclusion

Where does that all leave us? Well for those of us who are lonely, or socially unable to make the connections to have a family even if we want one, the future looks very much like this in my mind:

You come home from work to your robot spouse who is everything you want in a person physically but has the transformational abilities to change it up once in awhile. They're happy to see you, you engage in banter and have a good life.

One day you both decide you're ready for children, so you head down to the baby doctor to discuss parenthood. You both decide what characteristics you want from each of you to potentially be in your child (your robot spouse will have to get their desired characteristics from a blank slate gene bank, of which I'm sure there will be many), then you select what other celebrities or athletes or geniuses you want influencing your child's genetic makeup if any. Baby goo is ready, now finding where to put it.

If your robot spouse is female, then you could have her carry the baby internally in an artificial womb, or you could carry the baby naturally if you're a female or your robot spouse is male. Or if neither of you wanted, you could grow the baby externally in a birthing pod.

This is like something from an old episode of Rick and Morty.

Yeah this episode.

6 Awesome and Futuristic Ways To Save Time

Time, one of the few things you can't buy more of in a literal sense. Everyone is always clamoring after more of it and you're probably spending the time reading this when you could be doing something you're "supposed" to do. The future is here now (sort of), and there are some amazing things out there that can save you precious seconds of time.

1.) Robo-bed Makes Itself

Waking up in the morning usually means you're sacked from staying up late on your phone. Fortunately, you can now save time in your morning with a robot bed that makes itself.




2.) Soylent and Meal Replacements

Recently meal replacements have had a resurgence in popularity among millennials in the form of a drink mix called Soylent. It claims to have everything the body needs to completely replace food if you want. This is like MANY other meal replacement shakes. No time wasted on meal prep or eating.

Soylent even comes in a caffeinated form and a bar form now.

3.) Electrical Stimulation Suit For Exercise

Who has time to exercise? Almost nobody if you believe obesity trends. One way to save time there is with electrical muscle stimulation, which has been around forever. It uses electricity to build muscles without actually exercising by forcing their contraction to stress levels comparable with actual movements. A new suit aims to make this portable and combine it with exercise to get hours of working out in minutes.

If you go with the calories in/calories out model, it could have your fatass into shape in no time.

Source: Daily Mail

4.) Smart Lights

Having lights that turn on when you enter a room and turn off when you leave, or can be controlled nearly at will by your smart phone (acting as a remote control) is extremely futuristic. And now, thanks to micro circuitry stored right inside the bulb, it can be yours without the need for remodeling your house or installing bulky systems. No more hassle to get up and turn off lights or mess around with any of that stuff.

5.) Self Driving Cars

Google, Tesla, and even Uber are all getting into the auto driving robot car scene. Time saving here involves catching up on sleep, or doing more work while your car is driving you to work. Plus robot cars can drive FAR FAR faster potentially than people can due to perfect traffic co-operation.

6.) Virtual Assistants and One Click Outsourcing

Since the advent of Tim Ferriss's book, the 4 Hour Workweek, tons of people have been hiring and using VAs and simple outsourcing tools to take so much of their responsibilities off their shoulders. Hiring people for cheap from across the world is pretty futuristic. MANY companies out there have VAs for hire and they can work on an hourly or task basis depending on your job.

Do a cost benefit analysis; if it saves you more time/money/stress to hire a VA than it would take you to do the task, then hire one. That's the whole point of any of this tech really.

America 100 Percent Renewable In 10 Years

Lately I've been doing some maths since I've been seeing a lot more info about the solar road tiles project and their recent use on Route 66. I watched a bunch of Thunderf00t's critiques as well and it got me to thinking about the future of America's power and solar:

This is just based on the information from the solar roads people and Thunderf00t.

There are 3.9 million miles of paved roads in America. Converted to feet that's a distance of 20,592,000,000 feet.

The average American street is 18 feet across.

For surface area, that's 20.5 billion feet times 18=370.656 billion square feet of road surface in the USA.

Solar panels are 10 bucks per square foot retail (with installation) according to Google so that's an expense of 3.7 trillion dollars to solar panel the USA.

The figures that the solar road people use are EVERY bit of road in America to create TRIPLE the amount of electricity America uses. This means that to create just enough for the USA, only 1/3rd of the roads need to be solar paved and thus it cuts the cost to 1/3rd.

The new costs are 1.23 trillion dollars. Remember that's for retail pricing of the panels though, INCLUDING installation. Wholesale it's about a 3rd the price including installation.

This cuts the price to 1/3rd again and that puts America's new green figure at $411 billion, give or take. 

Since a project like this can't be done all at once since it's not technically feasible due to labor shortages, manufacturing times etc, stretch it out 10 or 20 years and it becomes a $41 billion dollar a year project for 10 years or $20.5 billion for 20 years. 

Both of which are pretty realistic timelines to accomplish this.

So what say you peeps? Is there enough money in the energy budget to spare 20 billion bucks a year for 20 years to turn America almost completely green? Not to mention all the other benefits that will come with that?

This makes it definitely worth it environmentally, fiscally, and morally.