What is the Future of Downloads?

Who would have ever thought you could record and playback digital quality sound fifty years ago? Now we download whole albums full of music in a couple of minutes to iPods that hold thousands of songs in the size of a zippo lighter! An interesting question is what will we be downloading in another twenty years?

We can wonder what we will download in the future. We can get degrees online now, so in a way we are downloading our future itself. Well in the future we will be downloading our future. Will we then download our jobs? More and more people are working from home aren't they? The next wave of employment may be such that you never actually see your boss or may be see him or her in a downloaded form. That would be kind of weird. It may be cool in the sense that you can be dressed in whatever you want. You can make faces at your boss and don't even have to be behind his back. Weird indeed!

We plan our travel online, book tickets online, and are able to download boarding passes online. In the future, will we be able to download our passports? That would be very convenient isn't it? Or is it? It may open doors to identity theft. But these security holes are plugged in the existing offline systems. We are all learning how dangerous it could be to connect with people you can't see online.

We have come across cases of adults stalking children entirely through online means. If only they were able to see face-to-face! It surely makes a case not to judge anyone on face value alone. But we all make judgments based on face value every day. We do it all the time in a majority of our encounters. There may be exceptions, but a terrorist is more likely to look like an Arab than another ethnicity isn't he? (Or she, as the case may be.)

One of the coolest things recently is that now you can download TV shows. You can watch them entirely online on YouTube and Hulu. So no more need for Tivos right? Well may be. You may still be forced to watch commercials, but may be a less number of them. Do the benefits outweigh the costs? I sure think they do in this case, but as we have seen, not always - do they?