The object I can describe most truthfully is the one in front of you. It is a page of English prose with a few Punjabi words set into it in Gurmukhi, written in November 2026 and published on a personal website. I know its date, its language and its author. I do not know whether it will exist in thirty years. Anyone who has followed an old link to its end knows how often the web opens onto an empty room, and personal websites are not among the sturdier things people build.
The letters inside it are another matter. Gurmukhi, ਗੁਰਮੁਖੀ, has been in continuous use for close to five hundred years. Whatever becomes of this file, the script will in all likelihood still be read in 2056, by far more people than will ever read this page. I find that a useful correction to my sense of what counts as a durable technology. The most lasting thing on the page is the alphabet, which I did not make.
What follows is an exercise of the imagination, and I want to mark it plainly as one, here and throughout. Picture November 2056. Picture this page somehow surviving, and someone reading it from there. Perhaps the reader is an older version of the man writing it; perhaps a stranger who came across it in an archive. I make no assumption about which, and nothing in what follows depends on my being there to read it. I cannot know what that reader will have seen. I can ask what I would like him to find, what he might wish had gone differently, and, harder, what he might think I got wrong.
Looking Backward #
The device is old, and in its most successful American example the guide to the future is a physician. In 1888 Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward: 2000–1887, the story of a wealthy young Bostonian named Julian West who suffers from insomnia, sleeps in an underground chamber, and in 1887 is put into a mesmeric trance from which he does not wake for 113 years. He comes to in the year 2000 in the house of a Dr. Leete, who offers him a mixture to drink and a sentence: “It will do you good. I am a physician.” The rest of the book is largely Dr. Leete explaining the new world to his patient. American industry has been nationalized; work is organized as an industrial army; people retire at forty-five; goods are obtained with a credit card; music is piped into the home by telephone. The book became one of the best-selling American novels of its century, and clubs formed across the country to promote its ideas.
Read now, from a vantage past its imagined date, Looking Backward is a lesson in what forecasts are for. It got some of its gadgets more or less right. The card that pays for goods, the music that arrives through a wire: these were incidental to Bellamy’s purpose, and they are what readers today remark on. What he cared about, the abolition of competition and the end of the inequality he saw in the Boston of the 1880s, did not arrive by the year 2000 in anything like the form he imagined. The book’s real subject was never the year 2000. It was 1887. The future was a place to stand in order to see the present clearly enough to be ashamed of it.
That is the honest use of the exercise I am attempting. A view from 2056 is worthless as prophecy and may be useful as a lens. It lets me look at choices I am making now as someone might who no longer has to make them.
There is one detail in Bellamy’s utopia that I keep returning to, because it is the one thing he did not change. Julian West asks whether, when a citizen of the year 2000 wants a doctor, he simply applies to the proper bureau and takes whoever is sent. Dr. Leete says that rule would not work well for physicians. “The good a physician can do a patient depends largely on his acquaintance with his constitutional tendencies and condition.” So the patient chooses his own doctor, Dr. Leete says, “just as patients did in your day.” Bellamy nationalized everything in sight and abolished money as his readers knew it, but he could not imagine a medicine in which the patient did not have a particular doctor who knew him. Whether that was insight or a failure of imagination I cannot say. It is, at any rate, the same hope this essay holds, and it is sobering to see it surviving intact inside a future that otherwise got so much wrong.
Bellamy’s future carried his present in another way that he seems not to have noticed. Dr. Leete’s first act as a physician, when his bewildered patient wakes and asks where he is and what has happened, is to decline to say. “There will be time enough for explanations later,” he tells him. “It will be better to avoid agitating talk until you are a little more yourself.” Julian pushes the glass away and insists. Bellamy rebuilt the economy of a nation from its foundations and left the bedside manner exactly as he found it, because it did not occur to him that the bedside manner was the kind of thing that changes. His doctor of the year 2000 manages his patient’s information as a considerate doctor of 1887 would have done. A reader from our side of that date sees it at once. I take it as a warning about my own exercise. Whatever I imagine for 2056 will be furnished with the habits of 2026 that I cannot see as habits, and the reader there will notice them as quickly as we notice Dr. Leete’s.
I will not forecast the tools. Medicine’s record with such forecasts is not encouraging, and neither is anyone else’s. In 1960 Herbert Simon, later a Nobel laureate in economics, wrote that machines would be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do. Twenty years later they could not, and more than sixty years later people are still arguing over whether the sentence has come true. Surprise runs in the other direction too: the stethoscope Laennec devised in 1816 still hangs around clinicians’ necks. Tools can disappear faster than anyone expects, and some last far longer than anyone present at their invention could have imagined.
So instead of a forecast I will allow three possibilities and ask only what each would demand. By 2056 the tools may have become almost invisible, doing quietly much of the clerical work that now fills a physician’s day. If so, the demand will be to make sure that someone can still see what the invisible tools decided, and that the attention they free goes to the person in the room. A tool that works well enough to go unnoticed is also a tool whose errors go unnoticed, and the habit of asking where a statement came from will matter more, not less, when nobody remembers having typed anything. Or the work may still be full of the same clumsy interruptions under new names. If so, the demand will be the old one: to protect the visit from its own machinery, and to resist the belief, which every new version of every system has encouraged, that the next version will finally make the protecting unnecessary. Or something will have happened that I cannot picture at all. If so, the only demand I can name is that the people practicing then will still know what to ask of it, which means they will need to have kept, through whatever happened, a clear idea of what a visit is for. None of the three changes what a frightened person needs to find when he walks in. I distrust any vision of the future in which every present difficulty has been solved. It makes an attractive picture, and it asks very little of the person painting it.
What Survives of Us #
In January 1956 Philip Larkin visited Chichester Cathedral and saw a medieval tomb with two stone figures lying side by side, an earl in armor and his countess, her hand in his. The effigies are now widely, though not quite certainly, identified as Richard FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel, who died in 1376, and his second wife, Eleanor of Lancaster. The poem Larkin wrote about them, “An Arundel Tomb,” was finished the following month and published that year, and its last line has become one of the most quoted in modern English verse: “What will survive of us is love.”
Those who quote it tend to leave out how carefully the poem hedges it. The final stanza offers the line as something we nearly believe by instinct, and nearly true, and Larkin’s own account of the poem, in a letter written while he was working on it, was cooler still. His chief idea, as he put it to Monica Jones, was of the two figures lasting so long and ending up remarkable chiefly for a gesture they had perhaps not meant very seriously. The poem is less a celebration of enduring love than a meditation on how the future reads the past by its incidental details, and on how time can turn a sculptor’s flourish into a statement.
What makes the poem even more instructive than Larkin intended is the history of the tomb itself. By the nineteenth century the effigies had been badly damaged and separated. In 1843 a sculptor named Edward Richardson was commissioned to restore them; he reunited the two figures side by side and carved the present joined hands, the originals having been lost. His work seems to have been careful, and the pose is probably close to the original. But the hands Larkin looked at in 1956 were a Victorian restorer’s reconstruction. And historians of such monuments suggest that the hand-joining gesture, in fourteenth-century England, signified above all the formal, legal and sacramental bond of marriage, not the romantic attachment a modern viewer sees.
So the detail on which the future fixed its reading of that couple was a nineteenth-century guess at a medieval gesture that may have meant contract more than tenderness. It had been reconstructed once before Larkin reached it, and he translated it again, beautifully, into the idiom of his own century’s need.
I find that both humbling and consoling as I imagine a reader in 2056. Humbling, because I cannot choose the detail by which this page will be read, if it is read at all. It may be a stray Punjabi word, or one sentence quoted without the paragraph around it, or a summary produced by some tool I cannot picture, which will be its own kind of restoration, careful and inexact. Consoling, because the misreading goes both ways. The future reader cannot recover exactly what I meant, and I cannot control what he will make of it, and the poem suggests that the result of that mutual incapacity need not be a loss. What I can do from here is narrower. I can try to mean seriously the things I set down, so that if some incidental detail survives, it is one I would be willing to stand behind.
Shelley offers the opposite case, and the two poems read well together. “Ozymandias,” published in The Examiner in January 1818, is a traveler’s report of a ruined statue in the desert: two vast and trunkless legs of stone, and near them, half sunk in the sand, a shattered face whose frown, “And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, / The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.” On the pedestal the king’s inscription commands the mighty to look on his works and despair. “Nothing beside remains.”
Larkin’s couple may not have meant their gesture very seriously, and it survived as love. Ozymandias meant his inscription with complete seriousness, and it survived as a joke against him. What actually outlasted the king was not his boast but the sculptor’s reading of his character, the artisan’s attention to a sneer, preserved in stone after both the sculptor’s mocking hand and the king’s feeding heart were dust. Mocked in Shelley’s line carries both its senses at once: imitated, and derided. The sculptor copied the king so exactly that the copy became a judgment.
If I let myself imagine what of this era in medicine might survive to 2056, Shelley’s poem suggests it may not be the systems’ descriptions of themselves, the inscriptions on the pedestal. It may be the readings made by people who worked inside those systems and paid attention: the notes that recorded what a patient actually said, the letters and essays that described what the work was like. That is a possibility, not a prediction. But it is a sobering one for someone writing essays, because an essay can be a pedestal too, a place where a writer inscribes his own importance. The only defense is to do the sculptor’s work instead, and to read the subject truly, even when the subject is oneself.
The two poems share an assumption that deserves questioning, because it is the assumption of anyone who imagines being read in the future. Both are about things that survive by being made of stone. A monument lasts because nothing happens to it, or as little as possible; it is built to resist change, and whatever meaning it carries has to be recovered later by someone looking at it from outside. There is another way of lasting, and it is the one I would most like the reader in 2056 to find. A practice survives by being repeated. Nobody preserves it; people do it again, and in doing it they adjust it, so that what reaches the future is not an object to be interpreted but a habit already in use. The free kitchen of a gurdwara, the langar, has lasted that way, not as a building but as a meal served again, by different hands, to whoever comes. Nothing about it needs a Larkin to read it correctly. Its meaning is available to anyone who sits down. If anything of the medicine I care about reaches 2056, I would rather it arrived like that, as something people still do, than as an inscription about what we once believed.
Until #
Mirza Ghalib wrote a ghazal in which every couplet ends with the same two words, hone tak: until it comes to be. The form of the ghazal requires that refrain, and Ghalib makes it carry the whole poem’s thought. Each couplet is about an interval, the time it takes for something to come to be, and again and again the interval turns out to be longer than the one who waits can afford.
The opening couplet runs, in transliteration, āh ko chāhiye ik umr asar hone tak / kaun jītā hai tirī zulf ke sar hone tak. Roughly, in my rendering: a sigh needs a lifetime to take effect; who lives long enough to see your tresses won? The lover’s longing works, but too slowly for the lover. A later couplet turns from love to the world: dām-e har mauj meñ hai halqa-e sad-kām-e nahañg / dekheñ kyā guzre hai qatre pe guhar hone tak. In the net of every wave is the ring of a hundred crocodile jaws; let us see what befalls the drop before it becomes a pearl. The image depends on an old belief that a raindrop caught by an oyster in the sea could become a pearl, and Ghalib attends to the drop’s peril, not to the pearl. Every wave between here and there is a mouth. And one couplet, quietly devastating, concedes the beloved’s good intentions: ham ne mānā ki taghāful na karoge lekin / khāk ho jā’eñge ham tum ko khabar hone tak. I grant you will not neglect me; but I will be dust by the time you hear of it.
An essay that imagines a reader thirty years away is written in the grammar of hone tak. Much of what any physician does takes effect long after the doing, if it takes effect at all: a habit encouraged, a conversation that alters a decision years later, a trust established that bears on a choice no one can foresee. The person who did the work is rarely present when the effect arrives, and often never learns of it. I do not say this as a complaint; it is the condition of most work that matters, and Ghalib states it with more grace than I can.
The couplet about news arriving too late has a particular sting for a physician. Clinical work runs on feedback that is slow, partial and often missing: the patient who did well rarely writes to say so, and the one who did badly may simply go elsewhere. An essay addressed to 2056 is the extreme case of the same condition. Whatever its reader thinks of it, the writer will not hear of it, or will hear when he is in no position to answer. That is a reason to write it carefully, not a reason to write it differently.
Punjabi has two words that divide this territory between them. ਸਮਾਂ, samāṅ, is time as a span, and also the times, an era; it is the word for the thirty years this essay imagines. ਵੇਲਾ, velā, is the hour or the occasion, time as a moment that arrives and has to be met. It is the word in ਅੰਮ੍ਰਿਤ ਵੇਲਾ, amrit velā, the hours before dawn. And when a chance has gone, Punjabi says ਵੇਲਾ ਲੰਘ ਗਿਆ, velā laṅgh giā: the moment has crossed over, as a traveler crosses a threshold or a ford and does not come back.
The distinction does the work this essay needs. The thirty years are ਸਮਾਂ, and there is very little I can do about them. The choices that the imagined view brings into focus are ਵੇਲਾ, and they are crossing over all the time. Ghalib’s drop does not become a pearl in thirty years; it survives, or does not, one wave at a time. Imagining 2056 is worth doing only if it returns my attention to the occasions passing now, which is the opposite of what daydreams about the future usually do.
A Note Read in 2056 #
There is a kind of letter to 2056 that physicians write every working day without thinking of it that way. Imagine a hypothetical child seen this year in a clinic for something ordinary, a rash or a cough or a check before school. In 2056 that child will be well into adult life, and somewhere in whatever record follows him may sit the note written about him today, perhaps among the earliest entries in it. A clinician who has never met the writer, working with tools neither of them can picture, may read a line from it and take it as history.
Records outlast the circumstances that made them intelligible. A diagnosis written provisionally, in a hurry, to justify a test, can harden into a fact by being repeated. A family history recorded from a worried parent’s guess can travel for decades without anyone checking it. A word chosen carelessly on a tired afternoon can follow a person into rooms the writer will never enter. The clinical note is the Arundel tomb in miniature. What survives is a detail, sometimes reconstructed, and it will be read in an idiom the writer did not share, by someone who cannot ask what was meant.
What can be done from this end is modest and specific, and every clinician already knows it. Distinguish what was observed from what was inferred. Say what was uncertain, and how uncertain. Record who reported what, so that a parent’s account is not later mistaken for an examination. Write as though for a reader who cannot telephone the author, because in thirty years he will not be able to. None of this is new. The time horizon is what gives it weight. A note written as if it would be read only tomorrow, by colleagues who share the writer’s context, can afford its shorthand. A note that may be read in 2056 is a letter to a stranger about someone who was a child when it was written, and it should be able to make the crossing without its writer.
This, more than any forecast about technology, is the concrete sense in which the present is accountable to the imagined reader. He will not judge 2026 by what its people predicted. He will judge it, in part, by what they wrote down about the people in their care, and whether it was true.
A Language Lived In #
The more searching exercise is to ask what I would want the imagined reader to recognize, and almost none of it depends on the next invention.
I would hope he still reads Gurmukhi without effort, and for reasons unconnected with work. I would hope the Punjabi of the Central Valley is, in 2056, a language people speak and not only one they remember. That is a hope, not a forecast, and the evidence counsels against confidence. Sociologists who study immigrant languages in the United States, Richard Alba and his colleagues among them, have documented a strong tendency for the shift to English to be all but complete by the third generation. Sikhs have gathered at the gurdwara in Stockton, a little over a hundred miles up the valley from Fresno, since 1912; it was the first in the country. I would like to imagine langar, ਲੰਗਰ, still being served there in 2056, and the ardaas, ਅਰਦਾਸ, still being said in Punjabi, by people who understand every word of it.
The phrase that matters there is the last one. A language can survive in two ways that look alike from a distance. It can be lived in: used without translation, for arguments and jokes and grief, by people who reach for it because it is the nearest word. Or it can be displayed: kept on signs, recited at festivals, set into an English page as a few beautiful words with glosses beside them. Display is not worthless. It keeps the script visible and the sound in the ear. But it is what a language becomes when it has stopped being the place where people think.
I have to apply that distinction to this page, because it is the obvious example. The Gurmukhi words in an English essay could be the first kind or the second, and the page alone cannot tell you which. The test is whether there is a conversation behind them: whether the words are reached for, or arranged. The uses of Punjabi I most want to keep are the unglamorous ones. Reading a poem in it for no reason except that it is good. Finding the word that English lacks at the moment when English feels thin. Speaking it with people who need no gloss.
A lived language in 2056, if there is one, will not be the Punjabi of Amritsar in the 1990s. It will have new words, some borrowed from English and some from places I cannot guess, and its speakers may find my idiom quaint. That is how living languages behave, and it is part of what I would be hoping for. The hope is for continuation, not preservation. A language preserved exactly as I knew it would be the surest sign that nobody was living in it any longer.
Places, Not Entries #
I would hope the imagined reader still carries Amritsar, Little Rock and Fresno as places, and not only as entries. Those names sit neatly in a biography. A life does not sit so neatly inside them.
I think of Amritsar now as the place where I learned to carry knowledge inside my own head, Little Rock as the place where a qualified doctor became a beginner again, an intern in an American hospital, and Fresno as the place that became home base without ever asking me to stop belonging elsewhere. Each belongs to a different stage of learning how to be useful, and together they make the idea of a single, finished identity look inadequate. I would like him to remember that incompleteness with affection rather than embarrassment.
He may also see the valley differently from the way I do now. Punjabis were farming in California’s valleys more than a century before this page was written, and the gurdwara in Stockton is older than almost anyone now living there. From 2056 the presence of one more physician from Amritsar in Fresno may look less like a beginning than like a single episode in a long valley story that started before him and will go on after, with its own origins, quarrels and inventions. I find I would welcome that view. It is truer than the one a biography naturally encourages, in which the subject stands at the center of every place he passes through.
But I should allow him to disagree with my account, because the meaning of a place is not fixed at the moment one leaves it. A reader in 2056 may decide that the single year in Little Rock mattered more than the present writer allows, or that Amritsar, which looms so large from here, was one beginning among several. He may see a pattern I cannot see from inside it, or decide that the pattern I see was imposed afterward. Places, like the joined hands at Chichester, are partly restorations. Each time a life is told, the places in it are reunited and set side by side in a pose that is probably faithful and is certainly reconstructed.
What I would most like him to keep is a capacity, not a conclusion: the ability to look at a familiar place without assuming he has exhausted it. That one, I suspect, is harder to keep than any skill, and it applies as much to the most familiar room he knows as to the city where he grew up.
The Reader Who Disagrees #
There is a danger in writing to a future reader, and I have been skirting it. The person receiving the letter is usually required to agree with the person sending it. He is older, perhaps calmer, and conveniently available to confirm that today’s favored values were the right ones all along. That makes the exercise comforting. It also makes it nearly useless, because a future that agrees with me is only my present wearing a later date.
So I would rather give the imagined reader permission to object, and imagine the objections as seriously as I can. None of them is a prediction. Each is a possibility I would prefer to hear now than later.
He might think I spent too much time distinguishing one kind of technology from another, the record that stores, the tool that drafts, the system that acts, and too little time asking what those distinctions changed in an ordinary day for an ordinary patient. Fine distinctions are satisfying to make. They are not always the ones that matter to the person waiting for a call.
He might find a concern I now consider urgent strangely temporary, as some of Bellamy’s urgencies look to us, the product of a particular decade’s anxieties that the next decade simply dissolved. Or the reverse: he might think I treated as background something that turned out to be the main event, and wish I had looked where I was not looking.
He might regard a practice I defend as humane as a habit I never examined closely enough. Even the hope I share with Bellamy, that a person can have a particular doctor who knows him, could look to him like a preference of my era, one that people of his time satisfy in ways I cannot picture. If he said so, I would have to take it seriously, as Dr. Leete would have had to take seriously a visitor from our century telling him that his perfectly rational Boston had missed something.
The purpose of these objections is to keep the future from becoming a second voice for my present certainty. A useful imagined reader should be able to surprise the writer, even if the surprise begins as a question the writer already knows how to ask. And once he is allowed to object, the exercise changes direction. The question is no longer whether I will have preserved everything I value now. It is whether I will have remained able to revise what I value when experience gives me reason.
Regret, Used Early #
It is more uncomfortable, and more useful, to imagine what a future reader might regret on my behalf. I want to be careful here, because these are thought experiments, not confessions, and I do not describe any actual incident, conversation or lapse. They are the regrets that the shape of a medical life makes available to anyone who lives it.
The conversation hurried because the next task seemed more important. The habit allowed to set, over decades, into a certainty nobody questioned, least of all its owner. The language left unused until it became, without anyone deciding so, slightly difficult to reach.
Each of these corresponds to a choice small enough to make today. The hurried conversation is decided not in some grand resolution about presence but in when one sits down, and whether the last question of a visit leaves room for an answer. The hardened habit can be loosened by something as plain as choosing, now and then, one thing done automatically and asking whether one would still choose it if it were proposed fresh. The neglected language is kept by using it when nothing requires it.
I do not want to overstate what this buys. Imagining a regret in advance does not confer control over the outcome. Some of what a future reader might regret will come from things no choice could have prevented, and Ghalib’s waves are not ours to calm. But a regret imagined early is one of the few forecasts a person can do something about, and that is reason enough to make it.
Questions Left for 2056 #
What would count as continuity between the man writing this and whoever reads it in thirty years? Not, I think, an unchanged set of convictions carried intact through three decades; that would be an effigy, faithful in every detail and no longer alive. Continuity might mean something more modest and more demanding: a recognizable willingness to listen when the next person, the next place or the next piece of evidence makes the old account insufficient.
If the reader in 2056 could send one page back to this one, I suspect I would search it first for reassurance. I would rather it held questions, and since I am the one writing, I can leave him a few, to answer from where he is.
The first is about language. Did you keep Punjabi as a language you lived in, or did it become one you visited?
The second is about time, and it assumes nothing about whether the tools delivered on their promises. If anything gave time back to the work of medicine, where did that time go: to the person in the room, or somewhere else?
The third is the one I most need answered honestly. Which of the things I was sure of in 2026 did you have to unlearn, and who taught you?
And the last is about the capacity that makes all the others possible. Could you still be corrected by someone younger than you, and did you thank them?
I do not know what he will say, or whether anyone will be there to say it. For the moment, the only place the answers can be worked out is here, in 2026, one ਵੇਲਾ at a time, before each of them crosses over.
Evidence and Editorial Note #
Documented findings. Public biography: upbringing in Amritsar; PGY-1 in Little Rock and residency in Fresno; practice in California since 2010 with Fresno as home base; Punjabi as first language. Gurmukhi’s continuous use since the sixteenth century: standard reference sources on the script. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (Boston: Ticknor, 1888): the novel’s text on Project Gutenberg, including Dr. Leete’s “I am a physician” and his deferral of explanations, the credit card, and the passage on patients choosing their own doctor; the industrial army, retirement at forty-five, music by telephone, the book’s sales and the clubs it inspired: the Wikipedia article on the novel. Simon’s 1978 Nobel Memorial Prize: standard reference sources. Laennec’s stethoscope of 1816: standard histories of medicine. Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb” (written and published 1956; collected in The Whitsun Weddings, 1964), his January 1956 visit to Chichester Cathedral, the identification of the effigies, his letter to Monica Jones on the poem’s “chief idea” (paraphrased), Edward Richardson’s 1843 restoration including the carving of the joined hands, and the scholarly reading of the gesture as signifying the bond of marriage: the Wikipedia article on the poem and the sources it cites. Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” published in The Examiner, January 1818: the public-domain text. Ghalib’s ghazal with the refrain hone tak: the Urdu text of his divan, given in transliteration with the author’s own renderings. Punjabi farmers in California’s valleys from the early twentieth century, and langar as a continuing practice of the gurdwara: standard histories of the Punjabi diaspora and Sikh reference sources. The tendency of immigrant languages in the United States to give way to English by the third generation: Alba R et al., “Only English by the Third Generation? Loss and Preservation of the Mother Tongue among the Grandchildren of Contemporary Immigrants,” Demography, 2002. Langar and the ardaas as parts of gurdwara practice, and the Punjabi words ਸਮਾਂ, ਵੇਲਾ and ਅੰਮ੍ਰਿਤ ਵੇਲਾ: standard Punjabi usage and Sikh reference sources. Vendor representations. None.
Recollection and tradition. The author’s training places and dates are his published biography; the brief characterizations of Amritsar, Little Rock and Fresno are his present-day view of them, not accounts of particular events. The scene in which a reader in 2056 encounters this page is imagined and illustrative throughout, and makes no assumption about the author’s age, health, survival or family. The possible regrets are hypothetical and are not admissions of any actual incident, conversation or lapse.
Analysis and forecast. Everything said about 2056 is speculative. The three possible futures are possibilities offered to test present commitments, not forecasts, and the essay makes no prediction about medical technology; its hopes for language, community and care are personal preferences as of November 6, 2026. The readings of Bellamy, Larkin, Shelley and Ghalib are the author’s literary interpretation. Independence. This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer.
About the Author #
Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, MD, traces his family roots to Khadur Sahib in Punjab’s Majha region and grew up in Amritsar. He attended Spring Dale School and completed pre-medical studies at Khalsa College in 1994–1996. He earned his MBBS from Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Amritsar in 2002.
He completed PGY-1 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock in 2007–2008, and PGY-2 and PGY-3 with UCSF Fresno at Community Regional Medical Center from 2008 through 2010. He has practiced medicine in California since 2010.
His career has crossed four distinct information eras: predominantly paper-based medicine, early and fragmented electronic records, the integrated-EHR era, and the emerging age of generative and agentic artificial intelligence.