Latest Blog Post

For the last couple of weeks, I have been wondering what comes next, possibly a product of the stuff I’m reading right now, but more about that in another blog.

Let’s go back to the Spring of 1996 when I had been in Nottingham for less than a year and working at Queens Medical Centre. I’m running around ‘The Perim’ (short for perimeter road which runs on the outside of Rushcliffe Country Park in Nottingham) I have my hospital pager clipped to my shorts- they gave me the pager when I arrived in August and I thought I was God! I had seen them around but never thought that I’d ever get one and they are designed to only work within QMC and not off site.

I quickly realised though, that they worked at City Hospital too so I guess they had a bigger radius than just Queens. It meant I could go running 4 or 5 miles away from the hospital while I was on call and the page would still come through. The problem was I didn’t have any means to phone back so I had to get as fast as I could to a phone box if my pager went off. I was chancing my arm in a big way!

A couple of months later I went into Nottingham and bought my first mobile phone. It was a Sony ‘Mars Bar’ and it was the coolest phone at the time. It didn’t work very well but it just about let me run while I was on call, I didn’t have anybody else’s phone number.

22 years later on the dog walk today I have Apple airpods in my ears. They have no wires. They charge in their own case which has no wires. I can tap my right ear and be instantly linked to the super computer in my pocket which is, through 4G connection, linked to infinite more computers around the world. I can ask Siri questions about Google’s immortality project (more about that later) change my music, make my phone calls, do whatever I want. The power, the connection, the simplicity is almost beyond imagination.

Yet within 22 years this has become normal and everybody is doing it walking down the street.

We have a very, very short view of history. We think 22 years is a long time. Imagine the ‘progress’ 22 years from now.

Firstly, councils are about ready to start ‘smart processing’ your bin. That will mean it gets weighed but they’ll also be able to track the stuff you put in it. Imagine being responsible for your own waste?

It means you’ll start to get tax relief or council tax relief the less rubbish you produce. It’s brilliant for me because we never, ever fill our bin because we recycle everything but it’s not great for the people who do.

It will take bigger things though to change bigger things but don’t worry because the tax laws will change any time soon.

On the radio the other day I listened to the story that House of Fraser pay £4.4m in business rates for their shop on Oxford Street whereas the total Amazon tax burden in the UK is £4.4m!!

The changes in tax law are coming, if for nothing else but to make them fair. That will not just be corporate laws that change, it will be public.

Tax relief will begin based on how you look after yourself because that’s one of the only ways they can save the NHS in any way.

Imagine your MyFitness app linked to the NHS so that it measured the amount of calories you ate, yourtgoogle weight and the amount of exercise you did. You don’t have to sign up to it but you don’t get the tax credits if you don’t. Be a good boy now, don’t eat that chocolate.

And so that progresses on because the middle class will do as they’re told – they won’t go to KFC or McDonald’s, they’ll eat their greens and they’ll scan them in and get their tax credit… and they’ll get richer.

The people that don’t won’t and they’ll die sooner and the world will be divided into people that live below 100 and people that live above it.

Enter stage left… the Google Immortality Project.

Search it online and you’ll see that Google have bought a company called Calico (short for California Life Company). Google founders have invested a billion dollars in this project so far and they believe that by 2029 they may begin to have the process of adding an additional year every year to people’s lives by the use of nanotechnology and computational biology.

Immortality, or more accurately ammortality (where you can only be killed by trauma) may only be a few decades away.

This of course will only be available to the people who can afford it and probably also for the people who play by the rules: eat their greens, do their stretches and do their Yoga.

You can pretend this isn’t happening and you can lock yourself away in your little bubble but your children can’t, and your children’s children certainly can’t.

Everything changes from here on in and I don’t want to live forever.

That though is the result of the age I am and the time I have lived carrying the burden of mortality. I’m not sure it will be the same for my children, and for their children brought into a world where immortality may be possible it will probably become expected, even entitled.

Let’s busy ourselves with the meaningless day-to-day tasks with our heads down, not looking up and assuming ‘It will be alright in the end’.

Times are changing… quickly.

Blog Post Number: 1731