7 Normal Things You Do That Will Horrify Your Grandkids

Sometime today, you're going to do something completely normal. Drive a car, eat a hamburger, maybe both at once. And I have some bad news for you. Your grandchildren may be horrified because we do this to our ancestors all the time. For example, in 1847, doctors at one of the best hospitals in Vienna would perform autopsies, then walk straight into the maternity ward and deliver babies without washing their hands. One doctor suggested politely that maybe they should wash them. His colleagues ridiculed him. Today we hear that story and wonder, what the hell were you thinking? Well, someday people are going to ask that about us. In this video, I'm going to borrow the eyes of someone living in 2126 and use them to look at us today. Here are my 7 bets, 7 completely normal things that we do today that might look insane 100 years from now. I'll probably be wrong about some of them, and I'm personally guilty of at least 3 of these things. So this isn't a lecture, it's a provocation. I'm trying to get you to think about this question: What are we doing right now that someday will make people ask, what the hell were they thinking? Number 1: We let human beings drive cars. Think about what that will sound like in 2126. We routinely climbed inside a 2-ton metal machine aimed at another 2-ton metal machine going in the opposite direction, separating the two of you with a painted line. And then we each operated the whole thing with distracted, sleepy, occasionally furious human brains. In the United States, more than 39,000 people die in vehicle crashes every single year. That's more than murders, plane crashes, and natural disasters combined. Worldwide, it's about 1.2 million deaths a year. And driving is the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 5 and 29. Not disease, driving. And we think of that as the ordinary price of getting around. But here's why this one could change. Autonomous vehicles. Waymo's autonomous vehicles, for instance, have logged more than 220 million miles. without drivers. And compared to human drivers in the same cities, they show 94% fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injuries and 93% fewer pedestrian injury crashes. That's massive. The move from human drivers to autonomous vehicles is not just a technological advance; it's a massive step forward for public health. Now, self-driving cars aren't perfect. No way. But they don't have to be perfect They just have to be better than us. And this is the kind of shift we've seen before. A century and a half ago, cities depended on horses. Horses pulled people, hauled goods, clogged streets, crashed into things, and produced truly heroic quantities of manure. Then the automobile hit, and the horse— and the horse shit— was gone from the streets in about 20 years. 100 years from now, human driving may look the same way. Not evil, exactly. Just bizarrely primitive. So, picture your great-granddaughter in 2126. She says, wait, you drove cars yourself? Yeah. With your hands? Yeah. While drinking coffee? Go outside and play, young lady. Number 2: We routinely ate animals. This is one where I'm most guilty. Every year, human beings kill and eat about 85 billion land animals. Chickens, Cows, pigs. And I am fully complicit here because I am not a vegetarian. I have been at various points in my life, but I never stuck with it for more than a few years. So I will eat a hamburger, I will eat a hot dog, I will eat a chicken enchilada. But the research keeps telling us something inconvenient. Many animals are sentient. They communicate, they form relationships, they solve problems, they experience pain They experience fear. And deep down, part of me knows my great-grandchildren might look at me and say, you knew all that and you ate them anyway? Now, this prediction isn't even new. Back in the 1880s, a reformer named Henry Salt wrote that future generations would see eating meat as a strange relic of ignorance and barbarism. Now, the ground is already moving. In 2013, the first lab-grown hamburger cost $330,000 to make. Sergey Brin, the Google guy, paid for it. Today, cultivated meat— real meat grown without the animal— is approved for sale in Singapore and the United States, and the cost has collapsed. If someday the alternative tastes the same, the costs are the same, and it doesn't require killing a living being, the old way may become very hard to explain. Now, am I telling you what to eat? No. I can't even tell me what to eat. I'm just saying our great-grandkids might look at a chicken nugget the same way we look at those doktors in Vienna and ask us, What the hell were you thinking? Number 3: We treated disease by slicing people open. We treated disease by cutting into human beings and carving out the parts that weren't working. Now, to be clear, surgery is one of the great achievements of modern medicine. It has saved millions of lives. But try explaining the basic procedure to someone in 2126. So the organ wasn't working, right? So how'd you fix it? Well, first we knocked the person unconscious, then we took a very large knife and cut the body open. It begins to sound the way leeches and bloodletting sound to us, somewhere on the spectrum between barbaric and idiotic. But medicine always moves forward. We went from amputations without anesthesia to anesthesia and antiseptics to laparoscopic surgery through tiny incisions to robotic surgery, targeted therapies, gene editing, and treatments that can attack disease at the molecular level. So imagine where that trajectory could take us over the next 100 years. Maybe we'll repair damaged organs with regenerated tissue. Maybe we'll correct diseases genetically before they cause symptoms. Maybe technologies we can barely imagine will fix problems without ever breaking the skin. And if that happens, our descendants may look back at the operating room the way we look at those older medical practices today— not as idiotic or barbaric, just a little aggressive. Wait, they cut you open? Yes, sweetheart. On purpose? Yes, and we paid extra for it. Number 4: We made babies largely by chance. Number 4, this one's slightly awkward. For almost all of history, human reproduction worked like this. Now pay attention and take notes if you need to. 2 people had sex, then biology took over. Which sperm met which egg? Chance. Which genes got passed along? Chance. Whether a pregnancy happened at all, often chance. Whether a baby inherited a serious genetic disease, again, chance. But that's beginning to change right now in real time. IVF, which originated nearly 50 years ago, has become mainstream medicine. Since the first test tube baby in 1978, more than 13 million human beings have been born thanks to IVF, an amazing achievement. Meantime, egg freezing, which seemed far out even a couple of decades ago, has become an employee benefit. Egg freezing and a 401 have become similar, which means something major is happening. We are slowly disentangling reproduction from sex. Here's my bet: in the future, sex will be for fun. Reproduction will be a different enterprise altogether. It'll be more like, say, Renovating a house. A process that involves features of a market economy: stating preferences, reviewing options, making choices. Hey, it's happening already. Lots of prospective parents are using IVF and surrogacy. They're screening embryos to avoid serious genetic diseases. And some companies are even beginning to offer screenings that claim to estimate complex traits like intelligence and height, supposedly giving parents a chance to create a kid who's not just healthy, but who's good at calculus and can play power forward. 100 years from now, that will become the norm. Which raises a welter of ethical questions, of course, and could produce a blizzard of unintended consequences. But the broad trend seems clear and maybe unstoppable. Imagine someone in 2126 hearing how we did it in the olden days. So, you knew almost nothing about the embryo beforehand? Nope. You just, what, Rolled the genetic dice? Yeah, basically. And some babies were created by accident? Yep. One day, my great-grandchildren will be astonished— maybe grossed out— to learn how my wife and I created their grandparents. Sorry, future Pinks. You're just going to have to live with that image. Number 5: We let 12 strangers decide who was guilty. We let random collections of strangers, following an arcane set of rules, Decide who was guilty. Juries. I have a conversion story here. In law school, I was a big defender of the jury system. Whenever the subject came up in my criminal procedure class, the professor knew he could call on me for an impassioned defense of this glorious democratic institution. Ordinary citizens weighing evidence, delivering justice. God bless America. Then I served on 2 juries at the courthouse in downtown Washington, D.C. Are you kidding me? These people who weren't even paying attention to the testimony or listening to the judge got to decide whether to take away somebody's liberty? It terrified me. But that's the pattern over history. For centuries, Europe determined guilt by ordeal— binding people and throwing them in the water to see if they floated— or trial by combat, where whoever won the fight was apparently innocent. We look at that And shake our heads. But check out what we replaced it with: 12 untrained people, some of whom would rather be anywhere else, weighing evidence like eyewitness testimony, to cite just one example. Eyewitness testimony is spectacularly unreliable. Human memory is not a video camera. The American Psychological Association estimates 1 in every 3 eyewitnesses gets the identification wrong. Mistaken eyewitnesses show up in roughly 7 out of 10 DNA exonerations— those are people convicted, imprisoned, and later proven innocent— under high stress, you know, the conditions of every actual crime scene, accuracy drops even further. And yet, when a confident eyewitness points across the courtroom and says, that's the person, jurors find it extremely persuasive. Now, I don't know what replaces the jury system. AI? No thanks. That scares me too. But people living under older systems of justice didn't know what would replace those either. Trial by combat once seemed normal. Trial by flotation? Totally cool. Maybe 100 years from now, 12 randos sitting in a room deciding someone's fate will seem just as strange. Number 6, we send human beings to fight our wars. Here's a prediction. War isn't going to disappear. We had wars 100 years ago. We had wars 1,000 years ago. We had wars 2,000 years ago. There may be something about human conflict that's simply inevitable, but how we fight might look completely different. Think about how we look at old battlefields, say, during the American Revolution or the US Civil War. 18-year-old kids with muskets running across an open field trying to kill the 18-year-olds running toward them. Yet at the time, that was simply how war worked. More and more, war today is being fought by proxy, conducted at a distance. With drones, autonomous systems, cyberattacks, and the machines doing things that once required soldiers physically standing in harm's way. So here's my bet: in 2126, people may not be astonished that we had wars. They'll be astonished that we fought them by putting human bodies within range of the enemy's weapons. Wait, we actually sent people onto the battlefield? Yeah, like actual people. Uh-huh. And a lot of them were barely adults? Yep. For thousands of years, when countries had a dispute they couldn't resolve, one of our answers was to send young people to kill other young people and risk being killed themselves. 100 years from now, that might be the part our descendants can't understand. And number 7, the sneaky one: We let other people pick our names. This isn't my idea. It comes from my friend Kevin Kelly. And once he pointed it out, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Just consider your name is the single most personal thing you own. The word that describes, labels, encapsulates you. It follows you everywhere. You hear it thousands and thousands of times over the course of your life, and you had absolutely no say in choosing it. None. I didn't choose the first name Daniel or the last name Pink. And believe me, I definitely didn't choose the middle name Howard. My parents handed those to me before I could object, and then I turned right around and did the same to my kids. They had zero input. But there's an interesting historical analogy here: marriage. For most of history in much of the world, people didn't choose their spouse. Families chose. Religions chose. Communities chose. Choosing for yourself is historically pretty new, but now it seems normal. Kevin's bet is that names go the same direction. At some point, people might say, this is my identity. Why does someone else get to decide what I'm called? Maybe parents will give children temporary names, or everyone will select a permanent name at age 16 or age 18. Or perhaps changing your name will become as ordinary as choosing your clothes, your career, or your spouse. Then people in 2126 will look back and say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Your parents picked your name? Yeah. And you just kept it your entire Life? Yeah. For the record, I think I'd stick with the name Daniel Pink. Then again, I've had a long time to get used to it. So, here they are. Driving our own cars. Eating animals. Slicing people open to heal them. Leaving reproduction to lust and chance. 12 strangers and a verdict. Human beings on battlefields. Names we never chose. Maybe I'm right about some of these. Maybe I'm spectacularly wrong. But that's not really the point. Because those doctors back in Vienna weren't monsters. They were normal people doing a normal thing in a world where that normal had become invisible. And that's the danger. Every what the hell were they thinking starts its life as that's just how it is. The hard part is seeing that's just how it is while you're living inside of it. And that leads me to a final question, something I'm dying to know. What's number 8? What are we doing right now, every single day, that seems completely ordinary, but that people in 2126 will find astonishing? Put your answer in the comments. I read every one of them. And while you're there, tell me if you'd pick a different name for yourself. Just please, please don't type your comment while you're driving or making a baby. If you like thinking about this stuff, my free newsletter, The Pink Report, is full of it. Ideas and research to help you work smarter and live better. The link is below.