2020: Jumanji Or Dystopia

“There’s No Going Back to ‘Normal’”, crudely proclaims the headline of a June piece from The Atlantic. “The Terrible Consequences of Australia’s Uber-Bushfires” reads a recent Wired article. One of our own April articles was titled “Will Medical Workers Deal With PTSD After COVID-19?”. If it wasn’t clear, an article published earlier this year in The Conversation rightly asks: “Are we living in a dystopia?”.  Indeed, what was once relegated to the fertile minds of fiction novelists has become daily occurrences. Many are drawing similarities to “prophetic” works of fiction such as the civil unrest in anime Akira; or our over-reliance on deliveries and need to self-isolate as depicted in the Death Stranding video game. From bushfires through riots to the pestering COVID-19, 2020 feels like a fever dream we must experience lucidly. Source: http://robotconsumer.com/ Even though only a little more than half of the year has elapsed, our global experience of it so far can be summarized in one word: dystopian. However, even this term might need some revision. The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘dystopia’ as “a very bad or unfair society in which there is a lot of suffering, especially an imaginary society in the future after something terrible has happened.” Merriam Webster’s definition of the same word is that of “an imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanised, fearful lives.” These definitions use t...
Source: The Medical Futurist - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Artificial Intelligence Future of Medicine Future of Pharma Science Fiction Security & Privacy Telemedicine & Smartphones Virtual Reality black mirror dystopia coronavirus covid19 jumanji Death Stranding video games bushfires Source Type: blogs