Make a New Year’s resolution for 2025?
Reciting resolutions has become a favorite ritual when ringing in the New Year. Yet the reality is over 90 percent of New Year’s resolutions are abandoned in short order, mainly because people aren’t ready or willing to change.
Which explains my aversion to vows. But I digress.
Another popular tradition of New Year’s is making predictions. Being a round and futuristic number, 2025 has long been a target date for ancient prophesiers like Nostradamus and contemporary prognosticators when predicting near-future trends.
The World Economic Forum, for example, projects artificial intelligence and related robotics will have displaced 85 million jobs by the close of 2025. Fortunately there’s a caveat in the otherwise dismal prognosis: 97 million new positions will simultaneously be created within the fields of AI since it takes people (for now) to develop the myriad programs.
Ten years ago, meanwhile, a scholar of psychology predicted (quite accurately) that 2025 would see to the near-extinction of TV and computer cords, landline phones, digital cameras, personal checks, numeric credit cards, movie theaters, yellow pages, and last but not least printed newspapers (readers of the Flathead Beacon, thank you, have already tapped into the future).
What one soothsayer didn’t get right a decade ago was that leading parcel delivery companies—namely USPS, FedEx and UPS—would be forced to reorganize by 2025. The thinking was that the million-plus package delivery drivers in this country required “food and sleep” and therefore couldn’t keep pace with the increasing buying demands of the public.
Imagine instead 100,000-plus “Pullman Brown” trucks—and drivers—being replaced by a vast fleet of versatile drones, pilotless aircraft needing no sustenance (just ask the people of New Jersey) as they touch down on our doorsteps carrying baskets of bread, vitamins, cosmetics and clothing.
I’m relieved a drone didn’t deliver the pricey Hermes silk scarf I gifted my daughter this Christmas. Instead of eagerly awaiting the arrival of the brown truck, I’d be staring nervously into a dark sky afraid the French kerchief had been shot down over Somers.
Fortunately my Bigfork neighborhood has Chris, arguably the friendliest and most reliable of UPS’s package delivery drivers. No way a thermoplastic carbon fiber drone could ever replace Chris.
Case in point: during this same holiday season a year ago my visiting daughter frantically sent for the passport she’d accidentally left at home, hoping in doing so that we could salvage a much-anticipated father-daughter-dog trip to the nearby slopes of Fernie.
Granted the weather outside was frightful, but given all of the pre-trip planning, deposit on the hotel, dining reservations—and amassing the necessary paperwork for Luna to cross the border into Canada—it was worth the shot.
Twenty-four hours later I held my breath as the brown truck whisked around my corner with one of the last holiday deliveries on my street—wouldn’t you know addressed to my next-door neighbor. Chris could see the disappointment on my face.
Knowing he was anxious to get home to his own family, I only briefly explained my predicament. Before I knew it a supervisor at the UPS warehouse in Kalispell had initiated a search for the passport, tucked though it was within a mountain of identical envelopes and boxes.
Christmas miracles do indeed happen.
Not only was the passport located, it was dispatched through the settling darkness to Bigfork and conveyed by Chris himself in time for our family holiday. Talk about a special delivery.
I’d like to see a drone accomplish that.
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.