Future Tech: Tools that will change our work and our homes

Imagine this: It's the day before Christmas 2025 as you dash into the Amazon Mall for a last-minute gift and Pepper is there to greet you. Pepper immediately knows you are anxious. Pepper patiently and calmly answers your questions, directing you to the right place for that perfect gift. Pepper is a lifesaver and made you feel great. Pepper is also a robot from Softbank that can read and respond to human emotion.

Now, the Amazon Mall may be fiction—although Amazon has started to open brick-and-mortar stores—but Pepper is not. Pepper just went to work at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Las Vegas recently.

In this article, we explore how the future is now, because many of the tech tools that will change our work and our homes tomorrow are already in production today. They're just not widely available yet.

Let's look at some Future Tech that's ready today: From self-driving cars and household robots, to drones that deliver our packages, to smart tech that monitor the health and safety of our homes and can even predict a fire in an office building before it happens.

Self-driving cars

This is a dream solution for agents. Imagine no more schlepping customers around in your car showing them houses. Just give them the keys to your self-driving car. Program their trip and send them on their way. Waymo, a division of Alphabet, Google's parent company, already has driverless minivans on public roads in Arizona (see video here). And Volvo just announced it is selling 24,000 SUVs to Uber between 2019 and 2021 for its network of self-driving cars.

Drone delivery

It's called Amazon Prime Air and it's designed to deliver packages up to 5 pounds in 30 minutes or less using a drone. The service is being tested around the globe, with drone testing centers in the US, the UK, Austria, France and Israel.

Wireless sensor networks

This technology can be so small that it is sometimes referred to as "smart dust." These sensors are being used in research to detect forest fires, monitor air pollution conditions, detect landslides, monitor commercial office buildings and sense a fire starting in a garbage can before it catches other buildings on fire. Inside homes, sophisticated sensors are likely to replace smoke detectors and carbon monoxide alarms as they can monitor the "health" of a home.

Augmented reality

The latest innovation in delivering an augmented reality experience is getting rid of the headset! The new tech from Lightform is in the form of a computer that, when paired with any projector, superimposes images directly over real-world objects. This process eliminates the need for a headset. Can you imagine meeting a client into an open house and projecting their furniture into the layout of each room?

Entertainment by AI

This is certain to be a controversial area, but one where machine learning is already producing examples by creating art, music and literature. Artificial intelligence has recently written a Halloween tale, a science fiction short-film, created a music album, and even produced some amazing paintings that people preferred over those created by human artists.

Looking ahead

While you may not be ready for the future, it's getting ready for you. Remember, we are all living longer, too. The average lifespan is nearly 80 years today, eight years longer than it was in 1970. So we are going to be around to see a lot more changes at our work and in our homes than we can even imagine!

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