Medium. Experience
Client. Desktop Magazine
Title. Futureproof
"By 2018 Moore’s Law was completely superseded, as quantum processing achieved unprecedented gains in speed and memory alongside the development of the first practical artificial intelligence software. By 2020, post-industrial society was spending most of their waking hours online in the memory cloud experiencing vivid recreations of everyday life in sim-apps that were managed by sophisticated AI hosts. This was a new kind of publishing that relied on highly personalised content delivery across an integrated hyper-media platform. This technology allowed people to live the kind of digital lives they had always aspired to in “reality”. By 2025, with the arrival of nerve-to-wire interfaces, the idea of physical interaction with the real world was nothing but a memory. The great majority of human experience was now digital, in phantasmagoric games that were individually modulated to the needs and desires of each personality. The outside world of earth, sea and sky, was deserted. By 2030 China’s vast economy, which created and maintained this virtual world, required the development of a series of open-cut mines along Australia's Eastern Seaboard to supply the coal and raw materials needed to support this infrastructure. This image depicts open-cut mine 731B, a robotic operation begun in 2028 after the construction of a sea wall from Middle Head to Vaucluse. There were no protests about its construction, as there were no people offline long enough to see it."
Words by Ian Shadwell