The world has passed through some harrowing experiences, like the Brentwood Quake and the war in Iran, but in 2030 things look pretty bright. The world is more interconnected than ever before, thanks to high-resolution holographic projections beamed across the fiberoptic net and scramjets that make weekend trips to other continents commonplace. The wealthy can even visit the lunar colonies on vacation.

In Los Angeles, a maglev monorail connects areas of high population density, and cars powered by emission-free fuel cells whiz along double-decked smart freeways, rarely getting into accidents now that their GPS devices are linked to the traffic grid. Buildings with reactive surfaces flash past, their roofs clad in solar energy panels and overflowing with lush gardens. Paper has almost entirely disappeared from the workplace, and Personal Digital Assistants have subsumed the roles of identification, money, phone, universal remote, and personal computer. Virtual Assistants with low level artificial intelligence are gradually replacing human secretaries.

Though life is better for most people, the advance of technology hasn’t solved all our problems; it has simply provided us with a new set. Despite robotic kitchens that effortlessly prepare sanitary food tailored to individual dietary requirements, people still drink sugary Melocola and PheraSlam. Though alcoholism is rare, people have moved on to abusing “new & improved” drugs like synthetic opioids and dopa.

Genetic screening has made the population as a whole more content, well adjusted, personally fulfilled, and healthier; indeed, many of the syndromes and diseases that afflicted people in the twentieth century have been eliminated. However, many people voice concerns that humanity is in danger of losing something essential by this trend toward normative homogeneity. They worry that the richness of human experience will be compromised if we diminish our ability to experience boredom, suffering, alienation, and even despair.

Medical techniques have advanced so quickly that it remains to be seen what unintended consequences they may have, socially as well as physically. The discovery of a “gay gene” has led even unbigoted parents to choose heterosexual children rather than risk the chance of their being persecuted for their sexual orientation. As a result, the nation is in danger of losing a vibrant subculture.

Going further than mere screening, a government program called the Genetic Prototype Project has succeeded in actively engineering people to be stronger, faster, smarter, happier, more resistant to disease, and less susceptible to fatigue, but they have also made them sterile lest their untested new genes escape into the population at large.

Most people are leery of human enhancement when it goes beyond counteracting physical or mental impairment. Augmenting the brains of retarded people with biomechanical devices is one thing, but pumping up athletes with lab-grown muscles, epo receptor mutations, and MGF injections so they can run 45 mph is unpopular with the general public, and enhanced athletes are banned from most sporting events.

The law–always a conservative institution–has some difficulty keeping up with the increasing rate of change in technology, which requires constant redefinitions of old concepts, such as privacy, rape, gender, consciousness, and identity. These redefinitions frequently occur in courtrooms before being addressed by the more cumbrous proceedings of the legislature. Children have more autonomy to sue their parents as a means of getting their way; people make legal contracts with their mistresses, defining availability, exclusivity, and payment schedules. Three people can get married, all at once, in Nevada, and the expanded nuclear family has been popularized by the hit sitcom “Mom, Dad, and Jerry.”

Law firms function in essentially the same way as ever, though some large companies have begun outsourcing their legal work to firms in India. Lawyers now benefit from the assistance of virtual jurors programmed to react like members of actual jurors’ demographic groups, and they no longer have to do much legal grunt work, such as hunting down evidence and legal precedents, because the tasks are done by virtual assistants that do not need food, sleep, office space, emotional support, or extra pay for overtime, and never sue for harassment, sexual or otherwise.

A lawyer’s suit remains a visual analog of his function in society; it has not changed radically in cut since the end of the nineteenth century. Though clothes in 2030 can be programmed to change shape, texture, color, and transparency–with some kids earning pocket money by renting out their clothes as advertising space–such new-fangled fripperies are not deemed appropriate for lawyers, politicians, and businessmen. Not to say that they have not advanced in more subtle ways: fabrics contain pores that close when the weather is cool; they are woven with fibers that serve as heaters and antenna webs for their PDAs; they are cleaned by internal cultures of bacteria; and, in the event of an injury, they constrict to apply pressure to the wound, administer drugs such as painkillers, and notify the nearest hospital of bleeding and vital functions.

Many of the crimes that have troubled human societies for millennia are becoming obsolete, thanks to near-omnipresent surveillance, made possible by the proliferation of small, cheap cameras with high resolution, coupled with sophisticated search algorithms and cheap digital storage. Criminals find it almost impossible to get away with crude offenses like shoplifting, burglary, and murder, but new technology has made entirely new crimes possible, like virtual rape. In an age when every aspect of our lives is monitored, recorded, and managed by computers, hackers have the ability to break the rules and get away with it.

A more negative consequence of omnipresent surveillance is that privacy is in short supply. Not only do professional “snurfers” surf the web and snuff reputations with the public footage they collect and edit, but people are monitored constantly by their smart homes and even their smart clothes. Sound systems record music selections and develop taste profiles, air conditioners monitor body temperature to maximize personal comfort, retinal scanners detect drunkenness by the dilation of blood vessels in the eye, toilets analyze urine and feces and forward diagnostic information to their users’ physicians, and clothes remember when they were worn and what was spilled on them. Pets and some children are chipped with GPS devices so owners and parents can locate them.

Some things stay the same: Mick Jagger is still touring, thanks to regular doses of telomerase activator. In the end, though technology has changed a great deal, people haven’t. They still want to live forever, take things that don’t belong to them, fall in love with people they shouldn’t, do stupid things in the heat of passion, try to protect their loved ones from themselves, and take difficult stands when they know they’re right.