Just as we will inevitably build really good robots if we survive long enough, they will inevitably enslave us. That's how time works, right there.
Ever since I learned to write the date as mm/dd/yy in elementary school, I have looked forward to November 11th, 2011. The possibility of writing the date simply by making a series of vertical slashes—11/11/11, with what I envisioned as mounting frenzy—thrilled me, and I looked forward to that distant day as the fulfillment of my particular historical privilege. That I would probably not be completing and dating several worksheets each day at age 34 did not occur to me. I have finally arrived at 11/11/11 with no checks to write or spelling tests to date, and the future seems oddly disappointing. Tomorrow, I will have been alive on November 11th, 2011. My millennial privilege will be behind me, and I will have to confront the classic existential tragedy: what I always thought of as the future is now the past. It’s Friday, prelude to a future weekend, and the present is not as we expected. It’s still pretty weird and crazy, though, if you consider what we expected at age 10.