Avast, ye salt-crusted curs and bilge-sucking land-lubbers! I’ve laid me weathered eye upon a scroll most unsettling, penned by a scholar-lubber named Peter Joosten who claims to see through the fog of time better than a navigator with a clean spyglass. This Msc fellow—which I assume stands for ‘Master of Salt and Ciphers’—has spat out ten prophecies that’ll turn yer grog sour and make yer compass spin like a dervish. He speaks of a world where the line between man and machine is thinner than a frayed rope in a hurricane. While we’re out here losing limbs to sharks and scurvy, this futurist reckons we’ll soon be swapping our flesh for clockwork parts and digital enchantments.

Me grizzled quartermaster, "One-Eye" Silas Vane, barked a laugh so hard his wooden leg nearly snapped when he heard of "human enhancement." "Why would I want a glowing eye that sees through the dark, Captain?" he asked, spitting a stream of tobacco into the surf. "Half the fun of a midnight raid is the terror of the unknown!" But Joosten warns that the lubbers are brewing potions in Silicon Valley to make men smarter and stronger than nature intended. Imagine a navy of redcoats that never tire, never sleep, and can track a pirate sloop by its heat signature alone! It’s a dark day for the Jolly Roger when the enemy can calculate the trajectory of a cannonball before the fuse is even lit.

Then there’s the talk of Artificial Intelligence, a phantom spirit Joosten says will soon be steering the very fabric of world trade. "They’re building ghosts into the wood and whispers into the wind," whispered Lord Barnaby Byte-Bottom, a disgraced merchant I recently ransomed for a chest of doubloons. He claims these thinking-machines will replace the very soul of a sailor. If a ship can navigate itself through the Devil’s Throat without a captain’s intuition or a navigator’s nose for a storm, then what’s to become of us? We’ll be relics of a soggy past, outpaced by iron hulls that don’t need biscuits, rum, or a steady hand on the tiller. It’s a mutiny of the mind, I tell ye!

The most cursed of these predictions is the pursuit of eternal life. This futurist speaks of longevity as if death were just a leaky hull you could patch forever. We’ve all heard the tavern tales of the Fountain of Youth, but Joosten’s version involves rewriting the very map of our blood. "To live forever is to be cursed like the crew of the Flying Dutchman," I told the men gathered on the deck of The Great Sea. If the high-born lords never die, their tyranny shall never end. We rely on the Reaper to clear the deck for new blood, but if the old guard remains, the world will grow stagnant with their ancient, greedy laws.

So, batten down the hatches and sharpen your rusted cutlasses, for the future Joosten paints is a storm unlike any we’ve weathered in the Caribbean. Whether we’re fighting metal monsters or men with hearts made of copper wire, the code of the sea remains unchanged. We shall meet these digital tides with iron, salt, and a stubborn refusal to be governed. If the world is to be a playground for gods and machines, then Captain Iron Ink shall be the ghost in their gears and the barnacle on their gleaming hulls. Keep your powder dry and your eyes on the horizon, for the age of the silicon kraken is upon us!