Time Travel Invented 2075

BT, or as we know them, The Grand Incorporation of Britannical Telecommunicationalists, have made the following predictions:

• 2012: personal 'black boxes' record everything you do every day


• 2015: images beamed directly into your eyeballs


• 2017: first hotel in orbit


• 2020: artificial intelligence elected to parliament


• 2040: robots become mentally and physically superior to humans


• 2075 (at the earliest): time travel invented

I have some points to raise:

• 2012: if people have as much success in setting the 'black box' as they do in setting their video or TiVo, then we can expect long detailed recordings of everything we haven't done all day. We'll just get the pauses between actions, the coughs, ums, and ahs in speech, the nervous tics, the hours of waiting for the spouse to return from shopping whilst channel hopping. Etc. Or else, you'll accidentally record everything somebody else did all day and wonder why you now have a dog called Rover and a wife called Susan/husband called Bob and live in Surbiton


• 2015: images ARE ALREADY beamed directly to your eyeballs, via this amazing stuff called LIGHT. See how the screen delivers these words into your mind?


• 2017: it will be a Chinese hotel full of Japanese space tourists, so we can re-title this, First Space Brothel. It will be sold as weightless shagging and make millions


• 2020: artificial intelligence is already in parliament. It comes from having attended public school, Oxford/Cambridge Universities, and joined a political party


• 2040: robots are already mentally and physically superior to humans. They do not experience greed, lust, hatred, envy, drunkenness, or any of the malevolent negativity which consumes humanity; they beat us at chess; it's only a matter of time before we prefer them as sexual partners and parents.


• 2075: someone, probably a sexy Chinese robot, must have travelled back from 2075 and told them all this. Would you believe the words of a pheremone-transmitting robot with ultra-smooth synthetic skin and a guaranteed line in chat up, as it circled you in a weightless environment whispering huskily into your ear? And would you be able to justify this activity when either Susan, Bob or Rover scanned your 'black box' ?

Of course you would. You're human.