During the Steele County Fair, I had the chance to work the booth for Darrin Helget, who’s running for Steele County Sheriff. He had an actual DeLorean car there, which was a big draw to bring people in to chat. For those who don’t recall, the DeLorean was featured in the Back to the Future movies; it was a car that was used to travel through time.
That got me thinking about the future. During our teacher inservice we watched a video about what the world might look like in ten years, things such as driverless cars manning the roads. I decided to take that idea and go with it, my own prognostications about things that might be different a decade from now.
The Vikings will make more Super Bowls than the Twins do World Series. I give the Vikings a good chance to make it to the big show at least once, if not more in the coming years. In fact, I’d guess that the Vikings will make the playoffs more than the foundering Twins in that time span. There’s a big difference in how these organizations are run, and we’ve hashed that over recently in this space.
More students will take classes online. This has as much to do with advancing technology as it does with a dearth of teachers. Fewer and fewer young people are entering the profession, and the shortage is already showing. What happens when the demand is significantly greater than the supply? The kids have to learn somehow, and I think that some areas where there is a great need might have more online opportunities. You might walk into a school that can’t find a science teacher, and the kids will be in a room, all learning from the same online source. Remember the stories we used to read when we were young where schools didn’t exist and kids learned from computers at home? If more teachers don’t appear, this could be closer to reality.
High school sports will look radically different. This is starting to frighten sports diehards already. Club teams and organizations like JO volleyball and AAU basketball are convincing kids that they need to play that sport year-round, at the expense of other sports. Already, numbers are declining in many sports as kids are either focusing on one sport or finding that they’d rather work or watch Netflix than put in the time to be part of a team. Plus, the injury concerns in sports like football mean that smaller schools might have to merge, or else you might see a lot more 9-man football teams.
Nobody will write checks anymore. How many do you write in a month? For most of us, the answer is probably five or fewer. Debit and credit cards are ubiquitous. Ideas like Venmo, where you share expenses and money with others are becoming more popular. In a decade, if I owe my buddy ten bucks because I lost a bet about the Super Bowl, I will likely go on a website that will transfer the money from my account to his rather than reach for my wallet. I almost assuredly won’t write a check.
Amazon and Google will control your life. For many of us, this might already be close to the truth. I joked to my students, as they were accessing content online for class and just used Google to sign in, giving Google access to their information, that Amazon and Google will get married and have a baby called Amagoog or Googazon and eventually just take over the world. You can order just about anything and get information on anything you wanted to know (or maybe even didn’t want to know) from those two sources already.
New Richland will have damaging floods three or more times. They’ve been on about a six-year cycle recently, but with climate change and all the variety in severe weather we see, it wouldn’t be surprising to see flooding more often. I sincerely hope I’m wrong on this one, but we haven’t had what might be considered normal weather in years. More tornados might also be part of this nightmare. Batton down the hatches!
You won’t read this column in this space. Will that be because I’ll have finally run out of things to write about? Possibly, but even more likely is that newspapers will be a thing of the past. More and more, people are getting their content online. And newspapers and magazines are figuring out how to make their money there rather than through the print sources. I’m pretty sure the yearly subscription fee I pay to Sports Illustrated or Reader’s Digest barely covers the printing and shipping costs. I would guess that if there are print versions available for periodicals in a decade, they will cost much more than getting the material online.
Will these bear out? Who knows, but you’re welcome to clip this column out and check it in 2028 to see how accurate I was. Or maybe you’re already ahead of the game and don’t read this in the actual newspaper, but are looking at it online. Bookmark it, save it to the cloud (which will also be replaced by something else by then), and let’s look back in a decade to see how close to Nostradamus I was!
Word of the Week: This week’s word is alazon, which means a person characterized by arrogance, as in, “The columnist turned into an alazon when his strange prediction came true, even though everybody knew what was coming.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!