When you think about the future of language, you might worry that we’ll all walk around speaking in weird code. Or perhaps that we won’t speak at all, instead just texting each other all day. But fear not! In this episode of Futuropolis, we discover that the spoken word (and words in general) aren’t going anywhere. They’re just morphing in cool and crazy ways.

To figure out technology’s role in the future of language, we talk to Fred Benenson, the author of How to Speak Emoji and Emoji Dick, as well as Jerome Pesenti, who’s working with IBM Watson to improve the language abilities of artificial intelligence. 

And to discover how the past informs the future, we dug into some particularly entertaining archival musings about universal languages and whether slang can really ruin English as we know it. 

For a glimpse at which languages will survive the test of time, and what the world will be speaking in the future, we talk to renowned linguist and political commentator John McWhorter (who you may know from his discussion on the racially charged meaning of the word “thug” following the Baltimore riots). 

Plus: Don’t miss our conversation with David J. Peterson, the man who creates fictitious languages for Hollywood movies and shows like Game of Thrones. 


Talk Emoji to Me

Money is one of those things you’re not supposed to talk about. It’s politically incorrect and often uncomfortable. But your favorite podcast hosts are bucking social conventions in this episode of Futuropolis to discuss how we’ll pay for things in the future.

Futurist and IEEE member Heather Schlegel helps us understand why we have money in the first place,so we can see how that might change in our increasingly connected world. To take that threat further, Marla Blow, a partner at a finance investment company called Fenway Summer, envisions a world kids today might not even need to know how to swipe a credit card. And maybe paying for things will go away altogether. Virginia Heyburn, vice president of insights and advocacy at online banking tech company Fiserv gives us her predictions on that topic.  

Of course, in typical retro style, our archives describe new-fangled ways to pay—some that have come to pass, and some that we would rather not experience firsthand.

And finally, as digital wallets and Apple Pay become mainstream, the good old fashioned dollar is seeming less and less relevant. But it’s not going to go away completely. At least not according to Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. These investors/entrepreneurs say the dollar will go digital and start to look and act more like their cryptocurrency of choice: bitcoin. 

Show me the digital money!

Being sick is no fun. There's nothing worse than a queasy tummy, or that pesky sniffle that just won’t go away. But what will illness look like in the future? 

Will we be dealing with the same old diseases? Or will we have engineered solutions to be super-human healthy? That’s what we’ll try to figure out in this episode of Futuropolis—the prognosis for future illnesses. 

Unfortunately, cancer isn’t going away anytime soon. But oncologist Jennie Crews tells us how our bodies can be persuaded to kill these out-of-control cells. On the other end of the life cycle, geneticist Santiago Munne describes a bizarre but not implausible vision of what baby-making might look like in just 20 years. And if we zoom out, David Morens, an NIH epidemiologist, talks about how humans and microbes have evolved together—sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. 

The archives are pretty optimistic about what modern medicine will be able to achieve. Whether or not they are realistic, though, is another story. 

Plus we hear from the CDC’s deputy director Anne Schuchat, who describes what it’s like to be a disease detective working with microbial behavior she says is “stranger than fiction.” 

The Prognosis is Good

Basketball season is now in full swing. But here at Popular Science, we’re ahead of the game. We’re looking beyond 2015 to see what sports will look like 10, 20, or even 30 years down the road. 

In this episode of the podcast, we talk to Marcus Elliott, founder of the Peak Performance Project. The company uses a slew of data to build better athletes. And we hear from Ryan Warkins, who works at Catapult Sports, a company that tracks athletes with all kinds of sensors. We discuss how to keep star players injury-free and playing at their best. 

To figure out how to put together a team that works like a well-oiled machine, we talk to Dean Oliver, vice president of data science at TruMedia Networks. He says that numbers have a huge amount of power in sports but that it all comes down to how they’re analyzed. 

Looking back into the PopSci archives brings up some painful (if hilarious) memories about how we used to train elite players back in the day. Take, for example, the basketball “bumpers” from April 1941, designed to protect your fragile eyeglasses. Or how about a high-tech training exercise using action figures from March, 1940? 

The ways we play (and watch) sports have come a long way in the past 75 years, and they’ll be changing even more going forward. Tune in to find out how.

Winning the Numbers Game

For those of you who don’t enjoy waiting in line overnight to get Black Friday deals, wandering the aisles of the grocery store in search of soy sauce, or mailing back endless pairs of ill-fitting shoes bought online, we have good news for you: Shopping in the future is going to be so much easier than it is today. 

Between smartphones and tracking technologies, every trip to the store will be quick, efficient, and a heck of a lot smarter than it is today. Some retailers will even be able to anticipate your needs and take care of them for you.

To get the inside scoop, we talk to Indiana University’s Ray Burke, who studies how customers think and behave. And we hear from Scott Emmons, who heads up innovation for Neiman Marcus, about the high-tech mirrors and tablets they’re bringing to their stores. 

And looking further into the future, we talked to the people who are actually making it happen: Devora Rogers and David Mounts at a tech company called Inmar. They are pretty excited about what technology could do for stores and the people who frequent them. 

And don’t forget our ever-entertaining Popular Science archives! The futuristic delivery methods we envisioned back in 1939 look a little different from the drones of today. That said, stores aren’t going away. They’re just going to appear in some really interesting new forms. 


Clicks to Bricks

Between traffic-clogged commutes, high-stress jobs, and crappy coffee in the break room, the daily grind can be painful. 

Luckily, technology is paving the way for jobs you’ll actually be excited to do. Menial tasks like email can be automated. Decision-making can be done with artificial intelligence. And “deep learning” can teach robots to be creative and even generate ideas. 

Granted, automation is something Popular Science has been excited (and worried) about for decades, so we turn to our ever-entertaining archives for some historical guidance. 

The goal today is to integrate these technologies into the workplace in ways that make our jobs easier, safer, or more efficient (without making us humans obsolete). To find out how, we talk to Fumiya Iida, an engineer at the University of Cambridge who builds biologically inspired soft robots to work alongside people. Roboticist Hod Lipson of Columbia University talks up the promise of A.I doctors and lawyers. Judy Wajcman, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, tells us about how these shiny new technologies will soon become so integral to our lives that we’ll no longer notice they’re there. 

In the coming decades, our jobs, our offices, and even our commutes will likely become unrecognizable. To give us a behind-the-scenes view, Popular Science’s own futuristic information editor Katie Peek takes us on a tour of her ten second commute (via telepresence robot) from Baltimore to New York. And futurist Glen Hiemstra paints a verbal picture of what your next office might look like. (Spoiler alert: It could be on Mars!)

Thinking Outside the Cubicle

Vacations are supposed to be about relaxation and rejuvenation, but anyone who has stood in the crowded lines at an amusement park or waded through the hordes of people at Disneyland knows that this is not always the case. In this episode of Futuropolis, we set out to see how technology might help shape better vacations in the future. 
