Every time I think about what the world will look like in the distant future, my mind always travels back to that Disney Channel original movie, "Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century." I remember watching that movie when I was younger and always being so excited to grow up because I thought that was how I would be living.

Unfortunately, that isn't at all how the future turned out to be. The good thing is that I still get to look forward to some crazy new inventions in the coming decades. The bad news is that projecting into the future tends to just bring a sense sadness or foreboding.

"Black Mirror" is a Netflix Original show and recently just released its fourth season. This show follows a different story every episode with new characters, places and new technologies. One theme stays the same throughout, however; as great as the technology may seem at face-value, it can and will go wrong.

If you've seen episodes of "Black Mirror," you know exactly what to expect by now. If not, good luck convincing yourself to watch it after the first episode.

A couple months ago, after I had finally gotten through season three, I started to wonder why the future was portrayed to seem so bleak. Why is it that technology--something we currently hold with such high esteem--is ruining our lives?

For many of us, we look forward to the future bringing technologies that might look something like this:

Wouldn't it be so much easier if your work was all out in front of you at once in mid-air?

Exactly what kinds of technology does "Black Mirror" discuss? Well, there are chips inserted into your brain that allow parents, friends or any other loved ones to watch you all day long through your eyes.

"Black Mirror" also show a brand new way to work that involves running on a treadmill all day, every day to earn points. You spend these points to buy food, skip ads on TV and when you accumulate enough, you can even go on a talent show to try and get a real job.

What if you could actually block the people with whom you no longer want to communicate? Doing this means their figure in real life will turn grey and pixellated. You wouldn't be able to see or hear them ever again. Who, if anyone, would you block? This is one of the more frightening "Black Mirror" technologies.

Now, maybe all this technology isn't in our future, but similar technology is. In fact, Japan already uses robots to take care of their elderly family members.

Something that we may actually have to look for in the future is the idea of growing organs in laboratories. Scientists have already had success growing sheep embryos with human cells in the preliminary research toward organogenesis within animals' bodies. Organs aren't 3D-printed or grown in a petri dish; rather, they are grown inside another species for removal and transplant once they have developed. Of course, there is always the possibility that the organ would be rejected within the human's immune system. This is being made less likely, however, with human-specific cells grown within these animals.

As amazing as this breakthrough may be, it makes me a bit uneasy.

Our future is going to come with many different advancements, many of them in the field of biology and medicine. I don't know how long it's going to be before we start injecting metal chips into our brains, but hopefully, those "advancements" are a long way off. Some say we may be connected to the internet through brain implants as early as 2020; I, however, am hoping that this technology never becomes a part of our society.

The future we are heading into may frighten or excite you...or maybe you just don't care and you're willing to "go with the flow." No matter how you feel, it is important not to exaggerate what is in store for all of us, especially considering that we all thought we would be flying around in hovercrafts to floating buildings by now.

Whatever awaits us in the coming years, we can all rest assured it will be exciting to experience.