Page 26 - The Gluckman Occasional Number Eleven

MASSIVE GENOME-MANAGING COMPUTERS will anticipate
every human’s medical problems, but will leave the species vulnerable
to hacked data misused for both individually-tailored and broad-
spectrum bioweapons. Only the totally unknown and therefore either
immune or untreatable will have a clear chance of either survival or
destruction. A new type of rust will evolve, destroying all machinery.

IN THE FUTURE, passwords and passports will be combined into
passworts, a fermented epidermal biofilm uniquely identifying every
man, woman, child and domestic animal. Your passwort will be
stimulated cytofluorometrically at birth non-transferably and
ineradicably, and instantly recorded in The Shell, a global monitoring
system. The cranioflehmen Sinobezo wortscanner will also be
implanted at that time, to be activated at maturity by internal atomic
clock. Everyone will know who everyone in their vicinity is at all
times. GLUCKWELL PREDICTS!

Rapid climate change causes habitat change and therefore affects
survivability! We will not be spared by the coming apocalypse in the
terrestrial ecosystem. GLUCKWELL PREDICTS a new human
species will emerge in less than five hundred years: Homo
troglodytus. This retooling of our genus will be less than five feet tall,
with huge lungs adapted for extracting oxygen from highly polluted
air; eyes adapted to seeing in low light; hands and feet more closely
resemblng the paws and claws of animals digging their burrows in the
earth. Our descendants will have a smaller brain, requiring less
energy, and a digestive tract capable of extracting nutrients from any
organic material. Lacking the means or knowledge of making clothes,
they are likely to be covered in short bristly fur protecting them from
the rough walls of their underground environment.

GLUCKWELL PREDICTS! There will be no human occupation,
from the least skilled to the most, which machines will not take over
and perform more effectively and efficiently. That will happen before
the year 2080. No arts, no sciences, no design or manufacturing—
nothing is immune to the vast superiority of the electronic brains and
mechanical bodies of the next generation of robots. They will have
one last problem: what to do with us. Gluckwell cannot predict that
solution.