I wish we were there already...

...in that future with flying cars, mining of the asteroids, artificial intelligences, jet packs, and all other sorts of stuff that you'd find in a Brin novel. Heck, even the talking dolphins would be cool, so long as they didn't sound like Darwin from Seaquest.

It'd be different, I'm sure there'd be new issues to deal with, new problems to replace the old problems, but it'd a wondrous time, too. I'm sure it'd be a bit more bleak, not the Utopia of Demolition Man, probably somewhere closer to Minority Report than Blade Runner, but it'd be change. It'd be progress, for good or bad, as the World the way it is today ain't the future, it's more the past 2.0 with some updates that change ths surface, but the insides are all the same.

Imagine a world where prototypers are common to every home, where people make their own tools, pieces of equipment, and common needed items from public domain templates, their own work, or purchased templates with specific replication allotments. We're not too far off from that, if you get a chance go searching for protoypers, they're this cool devices that you can built things from ceramic, aluminum, and plastics, potentially even carbon filament, at very low costs right in your home.

We're on the cusp, potentially, of a sudden paradigm shift where the middle-class groups, be it the low end or the high, are going to have this shift where the economics of the world balance out a lot better than they do now. It'll be a move away from the neo-feudalism that we have today, where the wage slave is the serf, the middle management is the local lord, and the various Boards and stockholders are the upper nobility that are starting to devore their own via incest.

While I'm all for capitalism, I'm more for the person, or as they're referred to in the United States, the People. I'm very much a "Needs of the Many, Outweigh the Needs of the Few", to remember the words of my favorite Vulcan. Too often, I think, does the cheerleaders of the big corporations drone on about capitalism versus communism when what they really mean is their ideal of capitalism.

Big Money, mind you, doesn't want the little guy getting his licks in, making his fair share, or coming up with his idea that they have to pay him for. Goodness knows that the little guy, or lady, shouldn't have a chance to do something that the big companies can't just take. The only difference between the Robber Barons of the turn of the century before this most recent turn is that they're not individuals like J.P Morgan and crew, they're groups of them. 

Funny how that works, huh? When it was big, rich, powerful individuals we had issue with it, but when a slightly more numerous group of the same sorts of folk, even some descendants in there, do it we've less issue. We vilify the individual, yet allow the group to just slip under the radar. If a single person runs around killing people, we're outrage that it could happen, yet when a large grop does it, we turn a blind eye.

Anyhow, obviously I got all sidetracky - the place is called Rambling Nights, ain't it?

Hence why I want the future, even with its troubles, as it's gotta be better than this, the now and here.