Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Creativity Exercise: Time Traveling

Knowing what you know, if you were to travel back in time to the Forties, Fifties or Sixties, what knowledge - aside from which stocks to buy - would you be able to use?

Clearly there are opinions on major issues that could be conveyed, but just on a personal, day-to-day life level, what would you do differently that people back there might have done but did not?

Now leap ahead, then back. If you arrived here today from some point in the future, what changes might you make to your daily routine or personal life? What types of chores or tasks do we take for granted that people in the future will have greatly altered?

3 comments:

Dan Richwine said...

This post reminds me of when Marginal Revolution about a year ago, they posted the quote from Agatha Christie "I never thought I would be so rich as to have my own car, nor so poor as I would not have my own servants" and they posed the question that, 50 years from now, what would that quote be from us? What will everyone today assume can only be done by the rich but will be common, and what will be done in the future by the rich that is currently common?

I'm guessing that education will be cheap in the future, and today's equivalent of a Harvard level education will be almost free to anyone with the gumption to do it. This is virtually the case today, but no credentials hurts. I'm guessing that someone will think their way out of that, maybe some kind of testing or something (similar to the bar or the CPA exam).

As for something everyone does today and will only be done by the rich in the future, I can only assume travel will get more and more expensive, and regular travel will be virtual and only limited to the rich for the simple pleasure of it.

Michael Wade said...

Dan,

Interesting note. I think that certification of various specialties in place of requiring a degree may catch on. Charles Murray is big on that one.

As for travel, one idea that was surfaced by the head of RyanAir was that cities would eventually foot the airfare bill so people would visit and spend money in their communities. I think there is much less of a chance of that happening.

Michael

Sara@Best Treadmill said...

Time traveling would be such a cool topic to do some creative writing on. Wish I would've had topics like this is my college creative writing courses.