MISTAKE
News from tomorrow
Headlines that haven't happened. Yet.
13 stories
By 2040
13- Work
Your resignation may need approval from your replacement
A proposed offboarding workflow would route the leaver's final knowledge transfer through the system inheriting the work. The system would be permitted to ask follow-up questions. It would have many.
5 min read - AI
Your therapist may come with an uptime guarantee
A draft service standard for automated mental health support would promise availability to three decimal places. It would also define, for the first time, what counts as an outage in a conversation about your childhood.
5 min read - Tech
Your body may soon get a patch Tuesday
A proposed update schedule for implanted medical devices would standardise when your hardware restarts. The working title of the document is said to be deliberately boring, for reasons its authors consider obvious.
6 min read - Lifestyle
Your second flight of the year may need a reason
A consultation paper would give every adult one untaxed return flight a year. The second would still be available — at a surcharge, and with a dropdown menu in which a funeral, a wedding and a fortnight in the sun would have to be told apart.
5 min read - Culture
Returned artefacts may come home without their scans
A European museum could complete a restitution and keep the 3D scan it made the week before shipping. The object would travel. The file would stay, licensed by the institution that gave the object back.
4 min read - Culture
Dead performers may soon have a touring schedule
An estate management firm's three-year operating plan would put an artist who died in the 2020s into four residencies, three hundred and twelve dates and a scheduled August break. The rehearsal blocks would be real. The rest-day clause would be inherited from his own contracts.
5 min read - Science
A thermometer may end your shift
A model site agreement under discussion would end the outdoor working day at a number rather than at a time. The number would be read off a mast by the gate, and nobody has yet agreed who pays for the hours it removes.
4 min read - Science
Surgery may come with an infection budget
A draft hospital protocol would schedule planned operations against an institutional allowance of working antibiotics. When the allowance ran out, a hip replacement would slip a year for reasons that are not medical.
5 min read - Science
Low Earth orbit may start issuing queue numbers
A discussion draft circulating among orbital coordination bodies would hand out launch windows by numbered slot. The number itself would be free. The right to stand in the queue would be priced by an underwriter.
5 min read - Society
Small claims may be settled without a courtroom
A justice ministry draft would move low-value civil claims entirely into a document-handling system. The projected median decision time is forty-one minutes, there would be no hearing, and there would be exactly one ground of appeal.
4 min read - Society
You may soon need to opt out of your own resurrection
A draft inside a national registry office would make posthumous avatars a matter of recorded consent. Anyone who never filed a declaration would count as available, and families could apply for "silent" status — renewable once a year.
5 min read - World
A peacekeeping mission may deploy without peacekeepers
A planning scenario for a monitoring mandate with no troops would replace patrols with sensor masts, drones and analysts several time zones away. The village in the mandate area would keep the protection and lose the gate.
4 min read - Business
A company with no employees at all may go public
A listing scenario circulating among market advisers imagines a prospectus with a headcount of zero. The awkward part is not the staffing. It is the section on key person risk.
5 min read
MISTAKE
TOMORROW, DELIVERED TODAY.
One email a week. The future, before it files a press release.
Worst case: you laugh. Best case: we predicted the future.