Current me, bringing news of the future to myself in say, the mid ’90s: I have terrible news for you, When you get older, you’ll lose some detail vision.
Past me, a sweet summer child: Oh no! Am I going to be blind? Am I going to need huge glasses?
Future news: Nah, it’s fine, they’re making thinner lenses all the time. Plus progressives will come out so by the time you need bifocals, you won’t even have a line across your eyes. They can correct almost everything. You’ll be able to read just fine, but you won’t be able to count the fingers in a group photo.
Past me: That’s fine. Why would anyone want–
Future news: As you get older, there will be more and more self-checkouts where you swipe your card yourself to pay.
Past me: That doesn’t sound so bad…
Future news: They’re all just slightly different and they’re always a solid, dark color so none of your tricks will work, and it’ll be hard to see exactly where and which angle to swipe your card, so every time you try to pay, it takes you just a little bit longer than everyone else, and a cashier sighs at you.
Past me: Well, that’s definitely annoying, but I can still see the total and the OK button so I can still pay, right?
Future news: In the future, there’s a default tip for things that don’t require tipping yes, and the OK to leave tip button is in the same color and placement as the OK to charge the card button, and also the default tip is now 20% on a plain coffee you pick up yourself and pour your own milk into, so you can either pay that, or you can hold everyone up while you look for the tiny No Tip button.
Past me: Getting really annoying…
Future news: Also, lots of restaurant menus are QR codes now but half of them were thrown together in 2020 — oh yeah, a plague is coming, Past Self, but that’s not the bad part here — and they’re PDFs with weird fonts and color schemes, instead of responsive webpages that keep your default font and contrast options. So you never know when a restaurant is gonna be pinch-zooming dark blue text on light blue background and waiting for the next page of the menu to load.
Past me: This seems really inconvenient.
Future news: And in the future, AI art exists so whenever you see literally any image, you can never tell if the details are a bit hard to make out, just like the details on literally every thing in the real world, or if the entire thing’s fake. The entire internet is AI fakeout images now, and there’s no way to tell. Ever.
