On-demand everything

Everything from entertainment to groceries will be available in an instant.
We will self-diagnose online instead of waiting for a doctor. Drones will deliver our purchase desires within the hour. The revolution will not be televised — it will be streamed and binge-watched on an iPhone. Frontier consumers will be able to 3D print everything from headphones to dresses using open-source code and, more commonly, businesses will 3D print to keep up with consumer demands for immediacy and personalization. As a result, our expectations for immediacy will increase even more. In an era of adaptive devices, prediction will be expected, and right now may already be late.

Repetitive tasks will be taken care of.
Today, for example, we can outsource work to TaskRabbit Taskers and Handy housekeepers. Tomorrow we may have in-home robots to streamline our lives even more. Grocery shopping, schedule management, writing, communication and much more may be taken care of by smart assistants that increasingly connect in traditionally human ways. Like an employee climbing up the corporate hierarchy, humanity is getting a promotion, rising above the level that produces the work and toward the level that manages it.

Dawn has less to do and more to oversee. Automated assistants and affordable outsourcing free her from menial responsibilities like grocery shopping, scheduling and writing thank-you notes. She could automate cleaning her apartment, but she finds the simple manual work cathartic, so she holds onto it.

All this automation could free up time, but she finds ways to fill it with her career and the responsibilities of overseeing all the automated agents working on her behalf.

When it comes to mundane tasks, Dawn chooses delegation over doing.

If she likes something, she watches it all. The most important thing to Dawn is right now. She attends concerts virtually, on her own schedule. She’d rather 3D print a good cabinet shelf than go shopping for the perfect one. She trades accuracy for immediacy, self-diagnosing online instead of waiting for the doctor.

She lives an on-demand life.

Dawn can 3D print what she wants, when she wants it.

Dawn gets everything faster, speeding up her hedonic treadmill, making her want more. Sometimes she’s nervous that things are happening too quickly or too invisibly. And there are three things she finds intolerable: Waiting, Boredom and Unnecessary Effort. 1) Waiting. She can’t stand buffering, so she’s certainly going to cut ties with any company or any experience that makes her wait. 2) Boredom. With the entirety of the universe’s entertainment collection available in an instant, her expectations for stimulation are astronomical. 3) Unnecessary Effort. She’s a hard worker, so she’s fine with effort — but it’s the unnecessary kind (like repeating information or going back and forth) that she absolutely cannot stand. Her thresholds for these nonstarters are getting lower by the minute.