Would you ever go to an airport just to hang out? Chances are, unless you’re an avid people-watcher, the answer to that question is no. Modern airports aren’t typically pleasant places to be, and most of us associate them with lengthy lines, security pat-downs, cramped gates and possibly a harried sprint to a terminal that seems like it’s on another continent to catch a connecting flight.

But some experts in aviation and architecture say all that is about to be history as airports adapt to evolving technology. In fact, airports around the world are already incorporating features like automated baggage checks, free wifi that actually works, better wayfinding and even checking in with selfies – and there are more advancements and improvements on the way.

Airports as Attractions

In Singapore, people really do go to the Changi Airport for a good time, even when they’re not traveling. While airports are usually transient spaces, whisking you through them on the way to somewhere else, Changi is a destination in its own right with a giant slide, kinetic rain sculptures, a butterfly garden, a sunflower garden, free massages, a huge swimming pool and some of the island nation’s best shopping. In early 2019, its new “Jewel” addition will open, offering a lush five-story terraced garden, a 40-meter-tall waterfall, a sculpture made of four gigantic slides and other attractions dreamed up by architect Moshe Safdie as a “magical garden.”

Changi may be an extreme example – it was named best airport in the world six years in a row by Skytrax, after all – but other airports are taking a similar approach as their operators take cues from the hospitality industry and shift toward more customer-friendly features and designs. The Seoul Incheon airport in South Korea has its own indoor skating rink, you can catch a movie at the Hong Kong airport’s IMAX movie theater, and the San Francisco airport has a yoga room. In the near future, many airports in larger cities will likely expand these kinds of amenities as they attempt to rebrand as community hubs.

Biometric Boarding

Ready or not, here come biometric identity verification systems that will make the process of checking in and going through security a lot smoother, albeit in a way that stokes privacy concerns among some travelers. You might not have to go through a security line at all, as airports integrate technology that constantly scans you and your bags as you walk through the complex. Theoretically, that means airports will be more secure from the moment you walk onto the property.

Heathrow Airport in London is already testing biometric identification gates that use facial recognition to match flyers to their passports, immigration photos or visas, and British Airways has expanded the use of these gates to airports in New York, Miami and Orlando. The airline claims this process allows them to board twice the customers in the same amount of time as traditional methods. Delta has already integrated facial recognition into some of its bag drop stations, Dubai is using the technology at security checkpoints by passing flyers through face-scanning tunnels and JetBlue offers a biometric ID process in which customers step up to a camera and take a photo to board.

All of this means airports could be able to devote a lot less square footage to queues, opening that space to alternate uses – like making the rest of the facility more comfortable.

User-Centric Designs

Just like customers at any other business, air travelers want speed, efficiency, cleanliness, pleasant ambiance and great service, and that includes the choice to either use self-service kiosks or interact with an attentive and friendly customer service agent if they need more help.

Some airport executives stress a desire to treat passengers more like “guests,” regardless of the class of their ticket or their frequent flyer status. That may mean doing away with grand lobbies full of individual airline check-in counters and all of their snaking lines in favor of a more open system of kiosks and employees scattered around, approaching people who seem like they could use some assistance. Travelers already prefer self-check methods to interacting with agents before they fly. Some airports are even experimenting with “virtual” boarding agents that are just holograms.

As lobbies shrink, airports could expand their small, uncomfortable gates – where passengers spend the majority of their time – or shift their layouts altogether to make navigating these often massive facilities a lot easier. That might mean pod-like mass transit systems instead of trains to get you straight to your gate a lot faster. Dubai’s redesign will involve a format that eliminates the need to ever walk more than 400 meters (about 1300 feet) to catch a connecting flight. And while it wasn’t selected for the final design, UNStudio’s proposal for the Taiwan Taoyuan airport teases a highly efficient terminal design with a small footprint for the shortest possible walking distances.

Other high-traffic airports in cities like Los Angeles and Istanbul are currently undergoing renovations that prioritize efficiency in similar ways, and in the future, we might get electronic beacons or personalized wayfinding sent to our phones and other devices so we can navigate in a hurry.

Seamless Integration with Future Tech

How will airports adapt to a near future full of driverless electric cars, fleets of electric aircraft, increasingly car-free cities and other changes to how we travel on a daily basis? We may see airport parking garages looking more like ghost towns or devoted largely to electric car sharing services as people drive their own vehicles less often, and those garages could potentially be converted to additional terminals.

Drop-off and pickup areas are likely to expand to accommodate all the passengers using Uber, Lyft and similar services. The new Oslo Airport City (OAC) is being designed in anticipation of all these changes, including offering unprecedented access to public transport nodes, a must as the city removes cars from its city center.

Form and Function Fused

One thing airports could do with all that newly available space is pay a little more attention to aesthetics without sacrificing functionality. New airports in major cities (with the budgets to match) will likely get even more complex in their designs while incorporating passenger-friendly features like natural light and plenty of air-filtering vegetation.

Gates may be larger and more comfortable, ceilings higher, the ambiance more pleasant. We could see more parks, some of them even inhabited by birds or other wildlife, like at Singapore’s Changi. In Bangkok, a new terminal designed by DBALP will focus on offering a forest-like environment full of lush greenery and even a cascading waterfall.

Rather than the warehouse-like boxes they’ve been in the past, airports of the future could be showcases of modern architecture, perhaps celebrating the talent of local firms – as is the case at Croatia’s Zagreb Airport, which chose native firms Kincl + Neidhardt + Institute IGH – or becoming living works of art by world-class talent like Zaha Hadid Architects. The latter firm’s new international terminal at the Beijing airport will be the largest in the world once complete, and even imagery captured of the structure halfway through the building process is stunning. The airport is expected to open in 2019.

Above all, airports of the future will probably have to be as flexible as they can be to continue adapting to a constantly changing world.

The automation of many of our jobs – even those that have long seemed safe – is fully inevitable at this point. One study predicts that about 38 percent of American jobs will be at high risk of automation by the early 2030s, which is not that far away. We’re asked to trust that future work could be ‘liberating,’ but considering the way corporations tend to operate, it’s not hard to see why the masses are terrified that robots will soon leave us unemployed and unable to provide for ourselves and our families.

But at the recent World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in January 2018, experts imagined the kinds of jobs that will be around – and now we have visualizations of what they could look like. In fact, those experts stated that 65% of children in school today will have jobs that don’t currently exist.

In a scene that definitely looks straight out of a sci-fi movie, a worker sits in a glass pod high over a city, overseeing a 3D printer in the midst of building a superstructure. A ‘landfill recycler’ salvages existing materials from landfills to be integrated into new products while sitting atop something that looks like a gigantic vacuum hose. On serene turquoise waters, a ‘blockchain banking engineer’ fine-tunes a floating machine that will give people in remote locations access to secure banking.

It might be a robot operating on this woman in a rural setting, but he’s got the holographic head of the real surgeon who’s carrying out the procedure from thousands of miles away. A ‘public technology ethicist’ evaluates new technology before it goes live to determine its benefits to the public. And finally, the operator of a 3D scanning machine captures entire historically significant buildings to ensure that even if they’re demolished, they’re preserved in perpetuity.

These illustrations were produced by AKQA London together with Salt and Pepper Creative Studio based on the World Economic Forum panelists’ predictions. Concept artist Florian de Gesincourt created the first sketches, and London retouching studio Happy Finish colored and perfected them. The series was produced in a mere 120 hours in the midst of the forum so attendees could see them. They’re a pretty good reminder that the future is closer than we think.

Thus far, the 21st century has been pretty disappointing for those of us who grew up expecting flying cars, teleportation devices and recreational trips to the moon by the time we were adults. While there were some things sci-fi films like Back to the Future got right – including video calls, flat-screen televisions, wearable technology and biometrics – nobody short of a billionaire villain type actually has a robotic butler that can bring them food at the push of a button. But if you live in London, you will soon be able to access the next best thing: dinner delivery via a six-wheeled droid.

Starship Technologies, which is run by two Skype co-founders, is partnering with London food delivery startups Just Eat and Pronto to send what essentially look like wheeled coolers through the streets, dropping off meals to customers within a 2-3 mile radius. Commercial tests will also be carried out in Dusseldorf, Germany, and in Starship’s home city of Tallinn, Estonia starting this month. This is on top of 5,000 miles of previous testing in places like Glastonbury, where the bots have “met over 400,000 people without a single accident,” but this is the first time they’ll be delivering food to actual paying customers. Starship is expected to announce rollouts in the U.S. in the coming months.

Is it really the next best thing to a robot butler, though? The first question that pops into many people’s heads when reading about this technology is whether somebody can just kick that self-driving droid around a little bit and steal your food for themselves. It’s a fair question. Starship says for these first test drives, the bots won’t be fully automatic – the company will monitor their progress remotely and take over if anything goes awry.

The zero-emissions delivery bots sense obstacles in their path and navigate around pedestrians, getting out of the way as necessary, as seen in the video above. Not just anyone can access what’s inside, either. The customer who ordered the food has to use an app on their phone to open it, ensuring that the robot doesn’t just roll up to somebody else who lives in your apartment building and give them your pad thai.

The science fiction of the past thirty years has evolved beyond the midcentury’s optimistic space-age visions into a darker, grittier place, where technology is out of control and resources are running out. Whether you think these imagined dystopian futures are overly dramatic or prescient of harder times to come, their depiction of our downfall can be absolutely riveting, and worth watching for the urban scenery alone. Short films offer an ideal medium for filmmakers of all skill levels to explore these concepts, including architecture that’s taken on a life of its own and high-tech surveillance societies.

In fact, if you want to know what sci-fi films might be coming out in the next few years, keep an eye on the digital shorts that are proliferating across the internet, as many of them get snapped up by major studios to become full-length features.

Spatial Bodies by AUJIK

Architecture in Osaka, Japan takes on a life of its own and begins to grow organically like vines and trees in the short ‘Spatial Bodies’ by AUJIK. “Spatial Bodies depicts the urban landscape and architectural bodies as an autonomous living and self replicating organism. Domesticated and cultivated only by its own nature. A vast concrete vegetation, oscillating between order and chaos,” say the creators, a collective referring to itself as a ‘mysterious nature/tech cult.’

Megalomania by Factory Fifteen

From digital film studio Factory Fifteen, which has produced a number of striking shorts set in the future, Megalomania imagines a world in which cities are constantly in active construction mode. “The built environment is explored as a labyrinth of architecture that is either unfinished, incomplete or broken. Megalomania is a response to the state of infrastructure and capital, evolving the appearance of progress into the sublime.”

TEARS OF STEEL by Ian Hubert/Blender Institute

This Creative Commons-licensed short made entirely with free and open source software was made in the Netherlands by the Blender Institute, which crowd-sources funding in online communities of 3D artists and animators. In ‘Tears of Steel,’ a group of warriors and scientists gathered at Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk attempt to stage a crucial event from the past in a desperate attempt to rescue the world from destructive robots.

The Sand Storm by Jason Wishnow and Christopher Doyle

Starring Chinese dissident and artist Ai Weiwei, ‘The Sand Storm’ by Hong Kong-based cinematographer Christopher Doyle and director Jason Wishnow examines a dystopian future that’s not so far away, where society is facing water shortages and technology is not as helpful as we might hope.

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Urban Dystopia 11 Short Sci Fi Films Set In Future Cities

All of the books in the world still exist, yet are just out of reach, locked up in an impenetrable fortress or stacked so high we can’t hope to reach them, in this dystopian vision by Shanghai-based artist Jie Ma. The series of fictional libraries renders information inaccessible, teasing us with glimpses of what we could have but always keeping it just beyond our grasp.

Combining futuristic fantasy art reminiscent of movie or video game concepts and architectural assemblage, Ma’s series envisions libraries as stark structures that haven’t quite been abandoned altogether, but aren’t exactly in great shape. Human figures mill around in seeming frustration, stopped from actually finding anything by darkness and disorder.

In some of the images, books are scattered around in spaces that look as if a storm has just ripped through, or they’ve been left to deteriorate for decades. It’s impossible to see the spines of any of the books, and there are no ladders offering access to shelves that tower many dozens of feet into the air. In a bibliophile’s worst nightmare, walkways to rooms full of books have crumbled away.

In others, the libraries are like off-limits military facilities, surrounded on all sides by water or mud, frustratingly devoid of actual entrances. One of these works, entitled ’Eclipse VII: Deep Reverence for Arnold Böcklin,’ pays tribute to a famous painting known as ’Isle of the Dead.’

Yet, in contrast to these scenes are more hopeful ones, in which people examine oversized books with gigantic magnifiers in orderly rooms overlooking concrete landscapes. The series seems to suggest a sense of hope for human curiosity, driving us to keep seeking knowledge no matter how many obstacles we may encounter.