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How is future technology affecting us today?

Here and there you’ll read science fiction or speculative articles that wonder aloud about time travel and other technological advances that might come about one day. You can think yourself into dizzying loops over this stuff.

For instance, it’s conceivable, if you believe time travel will become possible in the future, that our present world -- the only one we have access to -- is being manipulated by time travelers. That would explain a lot, when you think about it (George Bush? President? Two terms?). Everyone knows, given our state of understanding, that you don’t go back in time and start changing things, because you can’t control the ripple effect that will carry forward to your own time. It’s the Law of Unintended Consequences at work, like nuclear fallout. But who’s to say that future engineers haven’t found a way around that trap? Maybe they’ve discovered how to isolate particular changes, like taking one puzzle piece out of a jigsaw and replacing it with another. The rest of the puzzle remains the same, with only the single element altered.

If this is the case and some of the weird wild stuff going on in the world today is caused by “chrononauts” (for want of a better term), all we can do is hope that their interests coincide with ours at some point, since there’s no way to engage them or negotiate if they don’t want to be detected. (Colbert and Michio Kaku went into this the other night. Invisibility cloaks!) Even if someone stood up and identified herself as a time traveler (let’s say women are the the dominant gender in the year 2525), we’d quickly have her certified and locked up in a mental hospital, no? One day, word of her escape would hit the news, but the truth is she’ll have vanished from a locked cell without a trace...

Another possibility I heard of a while back is that computing might become so advanced in the next thousand years or so that we can’t trust that we are “actual” human beings but rather avatars in a virtual reality constructed to test some theory or complex algorithm. Our behavior is being analyzed by a programmer (this would be God, one way of looking at it), who is trying to solve an existential problem in her own era.

Or we could be figures in some goofy teenager’s video game. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.

I wish we could have faith that the people of the future will have their priorities straight, but if human nature doesn’t evolve much over the next millennium, I’m afraid these chrononauts and software engineers will be as blind and self-destructive as we are.