How much of yourself do you leave on the internet? An incredible amount of information is collected as you float around the web – sending email, leaving comments, upvoting and downvoting, posting pictures, creating and watching videos, and generally sharing yourself around. You are leaving a trail of digital crumbs, each a tiny clue about who you are. These crumbs capture simple things like what you look or sound like, but also more ephemeral things like how you think. By the very nature interaction with the internet, you cannot help but leave some of yourself behind.

Even more significant than the data you consciously leave behind, is the vast amount of data that companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are also collecting about you. These companies remember every search query, every purchase, every click and even your cursor movements. Every digital action is fair game for big data. Companies feed all of this information into growing character profiles that they then use to predict what and how to sell to you. They are building a model with which they can predict your decisions…. essentially, they are trying to emulate you.

But what would it take to truly recreate you? At this point nobody knows, but we can speculate on the ingredients such a being would require.

The first thing needed is a set of general memories from which to reconstruct your past. While we are more comfortable thinking of our memories as an infallible record of the past, the reality seems to be quite different. In fact, our memory seems to be better thought of as a retrospective and continually adapting narrative of who you are. Many people on the internet have already populated their personal timelines with the type of information that might be necessary to generate such a narrative. While an emulation might not generate a past exactly as it transpired in reality, maybe such a narrative wouldn’t really be any less plausible than the one that you think you lived.

The second ingredient would be a more general construction of how you think. There is a fascinating range of ways which people can view the world. In order to be a convincing emulation, it would have to have to have knowledge of your political leanings, personal beliefs, modes of reasoning, etc… Luckily, all of the discussions, in which you internet denizens are apt to participate generate a great deal of information about how you see the world.

A stew of geo-tagged date, vast archives of historical documents, and the day to day minutia captured by tweets, emails, messages and status updates might be just the digital stock needed to recreate your thought patterns. Combine this with the staggering volume of similar information collected from billions of users around the world and I think a computer could one day be able to accurately assess that special mix of personality traits which makes you.

But even a perfect model of how you think would not be enough to breathe life into your emulation. The final and most vital ingredient needed will be the hardware necessary to run your emulation. This hardware would need to be a powerful general artificial intelligence. Only a computer which can consistently pass a Turing test as a general intelligence could be adapted to convincingly emulate the specific character traits of a specific person. But, once we can convincingly replicate one human mind, it will quickly become possible to replicate any human mind.

So, if in 20, 30 or 50 years time we finally create a computer which can faithfully replicate  human thinking patters, would we be able to recreate you? And I am not just saying you, of 20 years down the road, with the impossible to imagine amounts of information you will add to your profile in the intervening years, I am saying you – right now – the you who is at this very moment reading this blog post. Could we resurrect you?

I think that the hard part will be creating a mind, not recreating your mind. If we know how to generally recreate a human mind, it will be but a matter of shuffling a few inputs and outputs to make the mind like yours, or mine, or anyone. Even a thin thread of personal information which exists today might very well be enough to convincingly recreate you. 

The question we are really asking is this – how special are we? We have run into this question many times before, and we have never liked the answer. We are not the centre of the Universe and we are not the purpose of creation – maybe we are are not so special as individuals either? People are utterly predictable, and even at our most unique we are still only a hairs width apart compared to the infinity of possibility. So if we were to become so adept at recreating individuals, would we really be so interested in re-instantiating boring old human minds?

So, we have come to the irony: If realizing digital resurrection leads us to abandon the mysticism of individuality, what reason will we have to bring anyone back?

Given the popularity of discussion about the problem of growing wealth inequality, you are probably already well aware that a certain segment of the population has done much better over the last few decades then the rest of us. This video lays out the insane level that the problem has reached, and if you haven’t seen it I would really recommend checking it out.

The key issue that I think a lot of the 1%’ers talk is missing, is something I alluded to in my last post. When we are talking about how much money the mega-wealthy are acquiring we are not really talking about people, rather we are talking about capital. These people are not standing in line at the bank to cash oversize $1M paycheques, rather, the majority of income for the wealthy comes from investments. Even if we are talking about big CEO salaries, their pay is directly determined by how much money they have made for stockholders, and thus how much capital growth they are producing. While it is divisive to talk about how much money certain people are making, talk about increasing concentration of capital is much more productive. Thus, if we want to have an honest discussion about wealth inequality we must talk about the rise of the financial sector.

In my post We Are Not Programmed for Abundance, I ask whether the increasing polarization of society is occurring for the same reason that our waistlines keep expanding. Just as we lack the biological programming to push the plate away when we have eaten the right number of calories, do we also lack the cultural programming to deal with the age of plenty provided by the modern economy? I think it’s an interesting idea and deserves another thought infection – to see what insights can be gleaned by thinking about the parallels of obesity and the growth of the financial sector.

Is the economy obese?

What does it mean to be obese? Based on a ratio of your height and weight, your BMI is the standard measurement by which a doctor will decide where you fall on a scale running from underweight to obese. Obesity is defined by a BMI greater than 30.

A better metric than BMI is a body density measurement. By dunking your entire body in a tank of water and seeing how much water your displace, you can get an exact measure of your body density. Because fat weighs less than muscle, a reading of the overall density of your body translates into a % fat you have on your body. Ultimately, it is the amount of fat that someone carries which is the most relevant metric in considering obesity. Whereas a healthy person’s body fat might range from 15% to as high as 30%, an obese person can have 40% body fat or higher.

Because fat is the method by which the body is able to store highly concentrated energy for later use, essentially someone who is obese is just storing up to much energy. Think of a bear that fattens up over the summer and fall, and then lives completely off of this energy store as it hibernates through the winter.

Fat stores have evolved as a safety net for lean times. What happens if there are no more lean times? Or lean times simply don’t occur with adequate regularity to counteract surpluses of energy input during times of plenty? In the modern world, we have essentially unlimited access to delicious calorie rich food, so our caveman bodies take the surplus of energy we are shovelling into them, and storing it away for later.

As your body adds layer after layer of fat, it eventually reaches a point where biological prudence turns to pathology. All of this fat that we are accumulating becomes a serious detriment to our body. The fat starts to drag us down, keeping us from interacting with the world in a normal way. The fat also starts to build up in places where it shouldn’t, leading to things like clogged arteries and heart problems. In a sense, obese people become ensnared in their own biological safety net.

So now the crux; what does this have to do with the economy? In some ways capital investment acts as a form of high energy storage for the economy at large. Whereas fat can be converted into things like muscles or bones, capital can be converted into things like factories and goods. As our economy gets better at serving the basic human needs as well as the expanded consumerist needs of today, the natural response is to store away more and more energy as capital.

It is important that we are not necessarily talking about all money, or even all capital here, what I specifically see as the fat would be the growth in financial sector investements (such as banks, derivatives, etc…) that are increasingly disconnected from the “real” economy. Just as there are many forms of energy in the human body, there are many forms of capital.

Another interesting thing about fat, is that all this fatty tissue itself has metabolic demands. Thus the more fat you have, the more you are driven to eat, leading to a vicious cycle of weight gain. Similarly, as the financial sector grows, it demands to be fed by economic resources. More capital growth demands more resources dedicated to maintaining and growing that capital, and the cycle continues.

While it might look great on paper to have a GDP driven by record profits in investments, this does not necessarily reflect the betterment of people’s lives. Yes, this vast wealth represents potential businesses and factories, but it does so in the exact same way that fat represents potential muscle.  If we don’t put it to use, then it will just continue to grow of its own volition.

Having a certain amount of this high density storage is absolutely essential to normal function whether we are talking about the economy or your body. But what constitutes a healthy amount of capital for an efficient economy? At what point does the growth of capital move from economic prudence to pathology? You may not agree that we have reached such a point yet, but if you at least accept that there exists a point where our overzealous nature to squirrel away profits starts to do more harm then good for the economy, then perhaps we should talk about how we might short-circuit this vicious feedback.

Just as there are countless solutions to lose excess weight, there are many solutions for the economy:

We can go on a diet. In a way, this is what happens in a depression. Disruptions in various sectors start to have a ripple effect across the economy, and things go off the rails for a while. People’s lives are suddenly worse off, and real demand grows in its wake. This drives investment into real economic output and a leaner and more efficient economy. While I think this would work, it is not really an ideal option given the need for things to get shitty in order for things to get better. This would not be the choice of a self-aware and well managed modern society, and in the end it would only perpetuate the cycles of boom and bust.

We can count calories. Some people seem to think that moving to a planned economy is the only solution to the problems of capitalism. I am not one of those people. While I do not blindly view socialism as some sort of super evil, I also think there is a disrespect for freedom built into a purely planned economy. I personally would not want to lose weight by counting every calorie I eat, similarly I do not want to restrict the economy to exactly fulfilling only what is decided to be appropriate needs or wants.

We can eat healthier food. If we were to demand that the economy start producing things with radically lowered environmental footprints, it would demand retooling by industry, and significant investment across every sector of the economy. It is a heinous lie that we cannot grow the economy and improve the environmental footprint of society at the same time. It is only through a sickening lack of creative vision that anyone could think that we are incapable of lowering our impact on the environment. The market could be the best friend of the environment if we devise systems that reward innovation to improve sustainability and punish inefficiency. This is absolutely something that we should do. Why are we not doing this?

We can find a new reason to lose weight. To me this is the single most important step for anyone to accomplish anything. People will not lose weight until they have a reason to do so. In the same way, the economy is not going to shed excess capital until it has a drive to do it. This is why the outbreak of war normally leads to such great economic stimulus. As a society, we are suddenly shifted to accomplishing a goal, which is so desperately necessary any and all means should be employed. At the most extreme, we become convinced that the very existence of our society depends on this, and every level of our society follows suit. Industry invests and we all go to work. It is a sickening fact that killing each other has so often lead to great advances in human society, but purpose does not have to be derived only from war. The space race of the 50’s and 60’s is another example of how a societal level challenge can lead to great economic growth and great accomplishments. I think the world of today thirsts for new grand challenges. 

In the end, the solution to income disparity will likely come from dealing with other problems in our society. No problem is ever an island unto itself. Societal change has in the past emerged from processes that we did not understand. We faced environmental collapse because we did not see our collective impact on the natural world, we saw depressions when we failed to see our collective impact on the economic world. But it does not have to be this way. Just as new understanding of our biology will allow us to remake our bodies as we would want them to be, a consciousness of the forces the make our society will allow us to remake our society as we would want it to be. How do you want the world to be?

UPDATE: A great article here on the state of excess capital in the world today.

Disclaimer: There are many different ideas touched on in this post, and there are many intelligent people who have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about these things. This post is not meant to be exhaustive in any way, and is simply meant to infect you with some new thoughts. I would suggest reading more about monetary policy, growth of the financial sector, derivatives, obesity, economics and whatever else might strike your interest. Just keep thinking, and don’t be afraid to be wrong, it’s the discussion that matters!

The moment that Watson became the Jeopardy champion will be remembered as a watershed moment in human history. It is the Gutenburg Bible of our time.

Media interest in Watson seems to have reawakened this month, with IBM now talking about how exactly Watson is being implemented to help make difficult medical diagnoses. In this area where humans just can’t process the amount of data necessary to make the best decision possible, Watson could be truly revolutionary. For now, Watson’s work will still need to be checked by meatspace doctors to make sure he doesn’t send some poor soul off to have a limb amputated unnecessarily, but this does not take away from the awesome power of data processing this will be putting into the hands of doctors.

This got me thinking about how life is going to change when we all have access to our own Watson. This raises important questions about how much control over our lives these intelligent agents will have. If you could have a hyper-connected computer intelligence which could monitor everything you say and do to check for errors and help you to consistently come to the best decisions, wouldn’t you want it? It is not only the high level decisions of doctors that could benefit from more data integration, but every decision we make as individuals could really benefit from a little more intelligence.

Lets take a simple example – the run of the mill job search in 2025

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Instead of writing a resume, you task your artificially intelligent agent (AIA) to investigate job opportunities. Under your direction, AIA will explore the internet for available job opportunities which might mesh well with your specific skills and knowledge. The stored knowledge base of your AIA might also play into the decision, as you two are really a team at this point and that should be taken into account. Other factors your AIA might take into account, are your interests or willingness to move, where your family and friends live, how much time you have available, how much money you want to make etc…

The beauty of getting your AIA to do all of this work is that it can make a decision which balances all of the many factors involved with a finesse that a lone human would never hope to achieve. So in just under an hour, AIA brings up 7 draft emails to companies she proposes she proposes would be a good fit for you.

You see that one job is in Sydney, Australia. Your ex-wife lives in Sydney. Do you really want to open that can of worms again? Does AIA have an eye on your romantic life with that option? Maybe AIA just wanted you to consider whether you are interested in rekindling some connection there… maybe if you decide against this it will lower AIAs ranking of putting you in a situation possibility of reconnecting you with youjr ex-wife… You have been down this road before, there is no point spending time trying to figure out what AIA is thinking… Scratch Sydney.

So of the remaining 6 emails: 4 are applying to open job postings that might be interesting to you, 1 is an email reaching out to an old friend at a company you used to work for to see if they are looking for anyone, and the last email is to a company that doesn’t have an open posting but that AIA inferred from public financial data that it could improve its profitability by 112% by hiring you. In short order, you look over all the emails with the attached optimized resumes and send them off.

The companies all have much more powerful AIA helping their decisions, so within a day or two you have heard back from all of those places you applied. Two of the applications were turned down flat, including the hail mary AIA sent to the company with no official posting. AIA is aware of the emotional impact that such a rejection might have on you, so she softens the blow by pointing out that there is no way to know what crazy strategy their corporate AIA has come up with.

AIA prioritizes what she thinks is the best offer and shows it to you. Its a short contract in San Francisco, the pay is good, and they only need 3 hours a day (under the normal 4-5 expected in many offices these days). AIA also shows you the better salary and work agreement she thinks she can negotiate for you.

“People used to do all this themselves, what a headache that must have been” you think to yourself, shaking your head in nostalgic disbelief. You go ahead and tell AIA that you’ll accept the job in San Francisco.

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Having an intelligence like Watson in your pocket will change every facet of your life; from something as mundane as submitting tax forms or figuring out what to have for dinner, to the highest level social and medical decisions. You cannot overestimate how significant of a change it will be to have a powerful artificial intelligence agent looking over your interests. Ultimately, the power of decision will still rest in your hands, but an AIA lets you better see the map of where those decisions lead. 

In the end, with the emergence of AIAs we will address something we hate to admit to ourselves. We are shitty decision makers.  We do our best to weigh the relevant factors and come up with what we think will be the best plan, but we can really only take into account a fraction of what we should. How many ills of the world come about from bad decision making compounded upon mistakes? Some people might fear the loss of control associated with having an AIA help in your decision making, but at the end of the day the AIAs will make us smarter, and a smarter world is a better world.

I had a great dream last night. It was one of those long winded dreams where I was traversing the globe doing amazing things that I might never get the chance to do, or might even be impossible in real life. As soon as I woke up, I knew I had experienced something amazing, and I needed to tell others about it.

There is one problem… I can’t remember any of it.

No doubt you have had dreams like this, in one moment you are part of a complete and amazing story with all the depth of a classic novel and all the action of a hollywood blockbuster, and in the next moment it all shatters away as you smash into consciousness. Everything, lost in a moment. A whole universe just flushed down the drain.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In the future, we will connect our dreams directly to the world wide web. If you have heard of the blog, sleep talkin’ man then you’ll know that the internet has already made some hilarious forays into the world of dreams. But the ability to capture your dreams and communicate them to the world need not be restricted to those few blessed with sleep cinema disorder.

In this video of the reconstructed brain activity of someone watching another video you can see that science has also come close to being able to visualize the activity of someone’s brain. Yes, it was a fairly limited experiment, using a restricted subset of input  that the researchers were drawing on, but it still represents a window into the world of the mind (albeit a blurry one).

What will this technology look like in a decade or two? It may never be an exact high-fidelity movie of your dreams, but even if computers can tap into this vein of creativity in a somewhat fuzzy way, it could be very interesting. Imagine for instance, a movie or a video game wherein a computer uses the creative impetus of a dream to reconstruct a living story. Even if it is not perfect, it still might provide an fascinating conduit for us to finally be able to re-experience our own dreams or maybe experience the dreams of others.

This might also open up new avenues for artificial intelligence. Much as distributed computing projects like SETI at home make use of wasted computing cycles available on the computers around the globe, computers could capitalize on the wasted cycles of creativity used in dreaming. Just as teams of humans and computers working together make the best chess players, combining the ability of computers to distil vast amounts of information with the raw creative power of a dreaming brain might make for a powerful storyteller.

Now what if in addition to connecting our dreams to the world, we could connect the world to our dreams? The Remee lucid dreaming mask is a programmable sleep mask that allows you to program a light pattern that will be activated during your REM sleep. Apparently, you can train yourself to recognize the lights and take control of your dreams from within (a process known as lucid dreaming). Now, what if you were to add some level of connectivity to the sleep mask? Maybe you could play sounds from the internet  during your dream.

Combining this technology with the dream conduit, you could envision a person, experiencing your dream and actually interacting with you in real time. As brain computer interfaces advance, in the future we may spend more time in a dreamy internet existence, then we spend truly awake.

The inevitable intrusion of technology into our dreams, has long been predicted in science fiction. As you can see from what I have described, this possibility may not remain science fiction for long. It seems that some level of interaction with dreams might be actually (almost) feasible with today’s technology. The idea that we would connect our dreams to the internet might be shocking to someone of today (Is no space sacred?). But, the total inundation of media that we live with today probably would have been equally shocking to someone of the past.

Interacting directly with each other’s dreams could actually be healthy for our acceptance of ourselves. We can’t always control the way we think, sometimes we all have thoughts and desires that might be socially unacceptable. In waking life we feel that our thoughts must be acceptable because we are somehow responsible for what we think. But, putting our dreams out there is a way to be totally honest with the world in such a way that we don’t have to feel responsible for what we think. We aren’t expected to control our dreams.

By connecting the totally free creative space that is the dream-world to the world, maybe we will finally know each other, and know ourselves.

Insurance is an absolutely incredible technology which embodies the great civilizing achievements of modern society, and it is something that we will build into every facet of the future.

I know there is probably no more yawn inducing a topic then the topic of insurance. Insurance is something for people who wear suits and push papers across their desk. Insurance is something you need to have in order to go about your normal life, but its certainly not an interesting topic for a futurist, right?

The problem is that, as with most things of modernity, we have become used to the technology of insurance and are no longer impressed by it. Despite our blase attutides towards it, insurance is one of the great human innovations.

Think about it. Insurance is a completely abstract construction. When you pay someone for insurance, they are not actually giving you anything in return for your money, they simply promise to give you money in event that something unlikely happens. Fundamentally, insurance represents an ingenious coping mechanism to deal with the uncertain nature of the world.

All of the people who pay into an insurance plan are voluntarily working together to make sure that the resources are in place to cope when something goes wrong. Insurance allows us to share the risk inherent to life with people we don’t know and will never meet.

Insurance is a purely abstract financial mechanism, but its impact on your life when you need it are far from abstract. Think of the example of a tragic house fire. With insurance, your accommodation will be paid for, your house will be rebuilt and re-filled with the necessities of life. You are insured that your life will be made “whole”.

But what is the future of insurance. Over the years, insurance companies have devised many products to insure everything from crop yields to pet health. It is estimated that in 2009 insurance premiums made up as much as 6.9% of world GDP, and that 12% of all financial assets in the world were held by insurers (source). That is a staggering 22.6 trillion dollars, more then double the value of the US gold reserve. By some estimates the insurance industry as a whole is about the same size as the agricultural industry.

The insurance industry is a case in point of the increasing level of abstraction in life today , and how this increasing abstraction serves to make life much much more tolerable. Insurance, like many of our other social constructions, allows us to boil a completely ethereal property of the universe like risk down into a concrete value. How much is this risk worth?

The proliferation of new types of insurance will continue into the future as we seek to further continue to level the playing field. Sure, the advancement of certain technologies such as the self driving cars, or home automation systems may make types of insurance commonplace today unnecessary, but as long as we look to push the limits of what is possible we will need insurance to deal with the inevitable consequences of risk.

One can envision new innovative forms of insurance being devised to cover those times when life just does not seem fair. One company for instance has devised a divorce insurance to cover couples when marriages (increasingly) come to an end. New types of insurance range from dismaying to bizarre. This trend of finding new ways to smooth the bumps of life will continue on into our distant future.

It is through insurance that we can break down and monetize something as abstract as risk. If we ever outrun the need for insurance, then we will have outrun risk in life, and as Mohammed Ali said “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.”

One of the biggest tech stories of 2013 won’t be a new gadget or a new milestone in space, but a seemingly minor regulatory change in the rules surrounding investment.

On April 5, 2012 Barrack Obama signed into law a piece of legislation may mark the beginning of a new age for capitalism. The Jumpstart Our Businesses Act (JOBS Act) allows companies seeking investment online to offer equity in exchange for investments. So essentially, instead of only being able to offer access to the product for sale or some sort of perk in exchange for your investment, people will actually be able to buy “shares” in the company seeking funds.

Think Kickstarter meets Wall Street.

If something like the Pebble Watch can raise over 10 million dollars by offering a chance to buy a product that was still in the prototype stage, how much money could they raise if they had instead offered equity in their company? Sometime soon, when someone with a good idea for a new gadget, or movie, or music album asks for money to finance their project, they won’t only offer you a chance at buying the final product, but they will also offer a percentage of the profits.

While today it is certainly easier then ever to buy stocks, there are still important barriers to entry, such as the high cost of share purchases or need to open an investment account. These barriers are many-fold higher for those with new ideas who are seeking funding to turn good ideas into reality. Just the cost of the paperwork necessary for a small company to go public is absolutely prohibitive, notwithstanding the time which is also necessary to do this.

By allowing internet portals to connect small investors with small enterprises needing investment, this smashes through barriers that prevent money from becoming investment. This democratization of the market will allow investment money to flow into new and exciting ideas almost instantly. This circumvents the types of regulatory barriers that allow large corporations to maintain such a stranglehold on the economy.

I am confident that the first big success of this type of funding venture will probably happen in 2013, and it will change the world.

As continual advances in computers and robotics drive up the profit of making and delivering goods and services to the consumer while simultaneously driving down the number of employees necessary to do this, we will enter an age when economic growth will become completely decoupled from job growth.

In a possible future of unprecedented economic boom but continually slumping job numbers, jobs and salaries as the primary mechanism of wealth distribution may become a thing of the past. By lowering the barriers that keep people from investing in new ideas, crowdsourced funding could simultaneously deliver much needed capital to the revolutionary ideas driving the next economic boom and allow a larger proportion of people to profit directly as well. If the techno-economic boom turns out to be as staggeringly huge as some have suggested, this new market could even become the dominant income stream for the majority of people.

As with any revolution, the democratization of the market will not be perfect. Yes, there will be an abundance of scams, but who is to say it will be worse then the darker walled-gardens of today’s market. The collective detective abilities of the internet can be surprisingly efficient at rooting out fraudsters. With efficient regulation and the vigilance of internet investors these problems can be solved.

Let this be the beginning of a new age where we can both support the change we want to see and share in the profits to be had.

The end of cash seems to be on the horizon these days. With innovations like Google wallet being incorporated into our cell phones, it seems likely that children born in the not too distant future may never touch paper money. In the future you’ll never need to carry a wallet. It already feels like wireless payment technology has been embedded in our credit cards for a long time. We simply tap away, 1’s and 0’s fly through the air, and somehow we get to take stuff home.

While dealing with paper money may already be on its way to becoming a thing of the past, the more important change may be somewhat more subtle. Today when we pay for something in meatspace, we are almost always looking into the eyes of the person we are exchanging with. But as our payment systems go electronic, it seems the direct exchange of money between people will become less and less common.

The loss of the personal nature of monetary exchange will have deep implications for every aspect of our society. On a personal level, how will we think about money if we are so disconnected from it? Will we be dangerously nonchalant about price in such a world? What would be the economic implications if we are less concerned with price for our goods? I would argue that just how cheap some goods are already works against us in some ways, driving us to disconnect from the true value of things.

Our growing electronic paper trail will also give companies more information about our buying and spending habits. This may also lead to new business models moving into new areas of the economy; for instance, we might see service contracts and bundling in surprising places in the future.

Imagine a simple grocery trip in the year 2025.

You just bought a brand new fridge with built-in RFID tracking so it knows precisely what items it has in it. With built-in weight sensors, it also knows exactly how much milk and sour cream you have left, and when they expire. Your fridge has already planned out possible meal ideas for the next week or two based on your calendar, cooking skill, and food preferences.

Your fridge could also potentially connect to your health records and monitoring devices so it could take into account your dietary needs as it plans your meals… but that was an expensive upgrade so you didn’t opt for it. Either way, it’s a top of the line Walmart brand fridge, and you got such a great deal – the only downside is that you’ll need to shop at Walmart to take advantage of its connective features – at least until your contract is up.

Oh well, the Google-mart is too far of a drive anyways, and you still can’t get comfortable with how your groceries come to you.

So as you wheel your cart into Walmart, the screen on the cart awakens. It asks you about what you might like to eat this week, if you are thinking of having company, and lets you know about the specials this week. The cart already has all of the data that your fridge had, so it gives you a nice list of the things you need to get. As you load the items into the cart RFID tags register the item so the store knows precisely what items you have in your cart. For fresh produce, the cart weighs the items as you add them.

Your monthly contract price might already include unlimited* groceries? (*Unlimited grocery plans are subject to certain restrictions and limitations outlined in the service contract). They know that you are locked into a contract, they know what is on your list, they know whether you have good credit, they probably even know your salary. So you march along merrily filling your cart, and adding whatever items you desire along the way. Maybe you pay a little more per month then you would using the old school shopping model, but the simplicity of a single bill has advantages for both you and the grocery store you are dealing with.

When you’ve finished with your shopping, you just walk out of the store; paying your monthly contract bill is all that you need ever worry about. Even if you are not on contract, the store simply connects directly to your credit card and subtracts your total as you walk out of the store.  You never have to look at a dollar sign throughout your whole journey.

And thats it, as easy as buying a gadget over the internet seems today, so could all purchases be in the future. Similarly, you could imagine a restaurant where the server takes your order and a digital assistant in her hand or pocket digitizes the order. Instantly, the restaurant has a tally for you sent to your cellphone, and when you are finished your meal you simply walk away – perhaps assigning a tip if necessary using your phone.

This is obviously only one version of a possible future. An alternative future might use the digitization of money to make it easier for us to better track our spending. But in a world that seems always busier, I think we would jump at the simplicity offered by such a system I described. In the end, our spending choices will shape what the future looks like, even if it means we choose to remove ourselves from our day to day spending choices.