Futures

This page looks at forecasts of new technologies: what is in the pipeline, what are some of the implications, will we share the same future (or inflict it on others)? 

It covers -

• introduction
• whose future
• pervasiveness
• intelligence
• indulgence

The more detailed profile on communications revolutions offers a perspective by exploring economic and historical studies about visions, plans and actualities.

     introduction

Sci-fi novelist William Gibson famously quipped that "the future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed". If 'future' equals access to and use of particular technologies, some people may not leave the 'past' and the 'present'.

Comments on media and technology periodisation feature elsewhere on this site.

     whose future

From an Australian perspective much of the writing about digital futures is denominated in US dollars and determined by a narrowly US perspective (eg expectations about business structures, cultural values and regulatory regimes such as First Amendment protection for free speech).

It is unlikely that everyone will be sharing all aspects of digital economy that is based on -

• cheap, ubiquitous and stable telecommunications
• business models that embrace mass customisation and tools such as RFID tags
• rapid turnover of devices such as desktop personal computers, PDAs and mobile phones
• automated billing systems, particularly those centred on transnational micropayment schemes

Much of the world is only tenuously integrated with the global economy. Many villages in Africa and Asia, for example, have sporadic access to Coca-Cola and faux Nike t-shirts - what we have dubbed 'globalisation lite' - but are not equipped with barcode readers, utilities and the income to buy the latest glossy toys from MIT, Stanford or Munich. They appear to be underwhelmed by hype about hand-held wireless personal computers or other 'solutions' for information inequalities.

As noted in the Digital Divides profile elsewhere on this site, as of 2003 the cost of a basic personal computer in Bangladesh was roughly eight average annual incomes. In Nepal internet connectivity cost around 280% of average monthly earnings, somewhat more than the 1.2% of earnings in the US. Globally over a billion people burn dried cow, goat and camel dung to cook their meals.

     pervasiveness

When Things Start To Think (New York: Holt 1999) by Neil Gershenfeld of the MIT Media Lab, is a thought provoking study of how 'pervasive computing' will change our lives, though we are not sure about the toaster with more intelligence than the devices used to build this web page.

Gershenfeld's team has been working on everything from electronic ink and wearable computers - including devices that are powered by the movement of your feet, giving a whole new meaning to the term 'Walkman'. 

In calling for an emphasis on how things should work rather than merely loading them with extra chips and memory he argues that the web

touches the rather limited subset of human experience spent sitting alone staring at a screen. The way we browse the web, clicking with a mouse, is like what a child does sitting in a shopping cart at a supermarket, pointing at things of interest, perpetually straining to reach treats that are just out of reach.

Regrettably that call is not being heeded by many of his colleagues, including the visionaries at the 2000 Invisible Computer conference who propose tomato sauce bottles that report on the weather and fountains that recite monologues. (We shudder at the prospect of coffee spoons reciting J Alfred Prufrock.)

Tim Berners-Lee's May 2001 article on The Semantic Web offers a vision of the next generation of the web.

Michael Dertouzos' What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (Harper: New York 1997) and The Unfinished Revolution: Making Computers Human-Centric (New York: HarperBusiness 2001) are other essential reads. They are more impressive than Jonathan Margolis' A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Bloomsbury 2000). Leonardo's laptop: Human Needs & the New Computing Technologies (Cambridge: MIT Press 2002) by Ben Shneiderman, one of the more perceptive writers on design and accessibility, teases out several themes highlighted by Dertouzos.  

     intelligence

At the end of the millennium David Gelernter, AI expert and Unabomber victim, published The Second Coming, a manifesto about the shape of computing in the next twenty years.  

His The Aesthetics of Computing (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1998) is provocative: a mixture of insight and wackiness that ranges from the shape of artificial intelligence to his interest in mahogany-encased personal computers.

Andrew Leonard's Bots: The Origin of New Species (London: Penguin 1998) shares the futurists' enthusiasm for gee-whizzery but is alert to privacy and other questions posed by 'bots', software programs that range from spell-checkers to packages that compare prices across the Web or generate (or cancel) spam. In cyberspace Robbie the Robot - the dress sense of the Tin Man, the aplomb of the Cowardly Lion - is redundant: all you need is a network and some code.

Artificial Intelligence visionary Hans Moravec offers a strangelovian forecast in Mind Children: The Future of Robot & Human Intelligence (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1990) and Robot: Mere Machine To Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1999) with predictions that old-fashioned wetware - ie you and I - will shortly be supplanted by hardware and software. 

His optimism is shared by Raymond Kurzweil, famous for work on speech recognition & synthesis, in his tracts The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (London: Phoenix 1999) and The Age of Intelligent Machines (Cambridge: MIT Press 1990). 

In a similar vein Nobel laureate Arno Penzia's Harmony: Business, Technology & Life After Paperwork (New York: HarperCollins 1995) argues that we are

on the brink of a new era ... the era of harmony, a system of marketplace value that will emphasise ease of use, true systems integration and environmental renewal.

The acerbic Paul Strassmann notes, of course, that office automation has resulted in the proliferation of paper - a comment explored in The Myth of the Paperless Office (Cambridge: MIT Press 2001) by Abigail Sellen & Richard Harper. Penzia's hymn to celestial harmony in a high tech future is an echo of the millenarian enthusiasms of past electrical and electronics pioneers, evident in works such as Ronald Kline's Steinmetz: Engineer & Socialist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1992).

Pamela McCorduck's Machines Who Think (New York: Freeman 1997) is an authoritative introduction to artificial intelligence, usefully read in conjunction with Philip Agre's Computation and Human Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1997). We recommend the fascinating, infuriating The Science of Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster 1985) by MIT artificial intelligence guru Marvin Minsky.

The Singularity Institute (SI) aims to "bring about the Singularity - the technological creation of greater-than-human intelligence", premised on the belief that it will soon be possible to upload your mind into an 'immortal' computer. That notion is cogently challenged in 'Singular Simplicity' by Alfred Nordmann in IEEE Spectrum (June 2008).

Nordmann comments that

The story of the Singularity is sweeping, dramatic, simple—and wrong. Take the idea of exponential technological growth, work it through to its logical conclusion, and there you have the singularity. Its bold incredibility pushes aside incredulity, as it challenges us to confront all the things we thought could never come true—the creation of superintelligent, conscious organisms, nanorobots that can swim in our bloodstreams and fix what ails us, and direct communication from mind to mind. And the pièce de résistance: a posthuman existence of disembodied uploaded minds, living on indefinitely without fear, sickness, or want in a virtual paradise ingeniously designed to delight, thrill, and stimulate.

This vision argues that machines will become conscious and then perfect themselves ... Yet for all its show of tough-minded audacity, the argument is shot through with sloppy reasoning, wishful thinking, and irresponsibility. Infatuated with statistics and seduced by the power of extrapolation, singularitarians abduct the moral imagination into a speculative no-man’s-land.

     indulgence

Frank Ogden's Navigating in Cyberspace: A Guide to the Next Millennium (Toronto: Macfarlane Walter 1995) and Douglas Rushkoff's Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (New York: Harper 1994) are far less insightful: all gee whizz and unconsidered forecasts. 

They are the sort of hype that has rightly attracted the scorn of usability expert Alan Cooper in his incisive The Inmates Are Running The Asylum (Indianapolis: SAMS 1999) and Why Things Bite Back: Technology & the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (New York: Knopf 1996) by Edward Tenner.

Glimpses of Heaven, Visions of Hell (London: Hodder 1992) by Barrie Sherman & Phil Judkins is a popular study of virtual reality and its implications.  We recommend the varied and much weightier essays collected in Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge: MIT Press 1991) edited by Michael Benedikt or the US National Science Foundation's report (PDF) on Societal Implications of Nanoscience & Nanotechnology.

Michio Kaku's Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century (New York: Bantam 1998) is another example of boldness or mere digital delirium: nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, colonisation of the outer planets, immortality .... 

All very well, but will the reruns get any better? 

Tips For Time Travellers (London: Orion 1997) a starry-eyed set of futures by former British Telecom chief technologist Peter Cochrane, has the virtue of being epigrammatic. The US Foresight Institute is another deliriously upbeat techno-millennium organisation.

The LongNow Foundation - also based in the US - offers LongBets

a venue where people can make accountable predictions or bets about future events of interest to society with philanthropic money at stake. ... It is our goal to foster long-term thinking and long-term accountibility.

Subjects of Longbets "must be societally or scientifically important", which for us excludes the most prominent bet - in 2002 - on whether the US soccer team would win the World Cup before the Red Sox won the World Series.



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