I SAW THE FUTURE.

November 13, 2006

I wrote “I Saw the Future” after a long day that left me feeling less like a medic and more like a piece of outdated equipment someone forgot to upgrade. That particular call had been ridiculous—something about the system trying to chart us in real time while we were still on scene. And the software? It froze. Because of course it did.

That’s what kicked it off.

I remember standing in the back of the rig, sweating under fluorescent lights, trying to remember if the patient’s name was “Steven” or “Stephan” while the computer kept blinking some god-awful error message at me. I thought: This is it. This is the future. Not jetpacks or trauma drones—just paperwork that fills itself out and still gets it wrong.

When I got off shift, I sat down and wrote that post fast, almost like a rant disguised as a joke. I leaned into the sci-fi angle—imagined a world where we weren’t just charting vitals, but being watched while we did it. Reviewed. Graded. Assigned a performance score based on whether we smiled enough while the patient vomited on our boots.

It was sarcasm, sure. But it was real, too. Deep down I think I knew where things were going: more surveillance, less autonomy. More systems that looked good in board meetings but failed in the field. I’d seen the glitchy beginnings of “optimization” and I didn’t like where it was heading.

The funny part? What I wrote as satire back then—half dystopian, half joke—feels a lot like the world we’re living in now. Predictive dispatch. Real-time analytics. AI triage. Fewer medics making more decisions with less support. Somewhere in that moment, I caught a glimpse of the machine taking shape.

And I wrote it down.

At the time, I just thought I was being clever. Looking back, I was writing from the front lines of a system about to outgrow the humans who built it.