It’s a common complaint that “the future isn’t what it used to be”, and I don’t disagree: I demand cheap flying cars, a personal robot staff, convenient interplanetary travel, an end to world hunger, and total immunity to disease.

But as I stand here balancing health and work via a treadmill desk, isolated from the noise around me using deep, binaural atmospherics playing directly into my ears, adjusting the brightness of the display in front of me to its ideal comfort level with the swipe of a finger, and using just one of my several personal computing devices to send out this message that in the blink of an eye will be immediately available to any of the billions of people with an internet connection anywhere in the world — it feels pretty futuristic.