Can you imagine what we will be downloading in another twenty years? I mean who would have ever thought that you could record sound with digital quality fifty years ago? Now we routinely download whole albums worth of music in a couple of minutes to ipods that hold thousands of songs in the space the size of a zippo lighter!

What I wonder is what will we download in the future? We can get degrees on line now, which means that we are actually downloading our future doesn't it. Sounds kind of funny, but true to say that in the future we will be downloading our future. Will we download our jobs? I mean more and more people are working at home aren't they? I could see the next wave of employment being over the internet where you never actually see your boss or maybe you will see him in downloaded form. That would be kind of weird wouldn't it? It would be cool in the sense that you could be dressed however you want and you could be making funny faces at the boss and you wouldn't even have to be behind his back… …that is unless you were being downloaded by your boss simultaneously. Weird!

Seriously though we download our airline tickets and our boarding passes. Will we be able to download our passports in the future too? That would be pretty convenient wouldn't it? Or would it? Would it open up all sorts of doors to identity theft that are currently closed in the non-digital system. We are all starting to learn about how dangerous it is to talk with people that we don't see. For instance all of the men who stalk young children on the internet, that would never have a chance if the children could see them. Makes a case for the utility of judging by the outward appearance doesn't it? I mean we all do it every day with each encounter that we have. We are simply playing the numbers really because we have to. Sure there are exceptions, but a terrorist is more likely to look Arab than another ethnicity isn't he (oops, it would have been more correct to say he or she wouldn't it?).

Probably the coolest thing that I have heard about recently that you can download is your TV. No more need for TIVOS right? Well sort of. If you download the program you are forced to watch the commercials, albeit less of them and from only one company per show. Do the benefits outweigh the costs? I sure think they do in this case but as we have seen, not always – do they?