10mar2004: I've
had my suspicions for a while now, and now I'm sure: the future
is here!
Anyone who enjoyed sci-fi as a kid has spent a long time waiting for the
future; somehow it never seems to arrive. Those silicon dreams and Bladerunneresque
cityscapes always seem to be on just the other side of exotic, even though Piccadilly
Circus has been screaming neons for decades and everyone's been to Tokyo.
But: I was out in the British countryside yesterday on assignment.
And I realised that from a building put up circa 1580, in a tiny village, my
laptop could see at least two Wifi networks. Among wooden arches that grew in
the Dark Ages, I could chat to a guy in Silicon Valley.
The future is really here. It's finally here. And the
evidence is all around us.
Computers. Easy one first. A slim box that fits
in a briefcase contains billions of words of knowledge and can connect to trillions
more via an always-on, real-time worldwide network spanning countries, cultures,
and communities. And all this comes to me via a simple point-and-click interface,
on a high-resolution screen in glorious colour.
Everything is gradually connecting to everything else via a few simple
protocols that've evolved from the primordial soup: IP, HTTP, Ethernet, HTML.
Even the government's getting in on the act (one of the few things the Blair
government is doing right.) I file my taxes, pay them, check my credit, find
my house, register land ownership, and maintain my electoral record without paper
or stamps.
Of course, there's a dark side. The UK's home secretary - a blind man,
who wants to see everything - wants national databases of practically everything:
identity, DNA, what you do and who you do it with. Backed up by 500,000 cameras
on the streets of London alone, making the UK the most heavily-surveilled country
in the world. While new software recognises faces in a crowd and selects airline
passengers based on their probability of not causing trouble. Privacy and democracy
are essentially dead, and we barely noticed.
Communications. A pocket-sized device allows instant
communication with practically anyone else in the world; in the UK, the 'tipping
point' of over 80% of people having a mobile phone was passed some months back.
Unwired telephones outpace fixed lines everywhere. And the device in your pocket
now holds your calendar, address book, to-do list, and handles email. Roaming's
finally sorted out; even the USA is on board, and I can use my little box anywhere.
Media. On the home front, the gogglebox is
becoming part of a homebased media network, with home cinemas, surround sound
and widescreens common. A tiny box in your pocket contains a jukebox of 10,000
songs, while movies fit onto a slim plastic disc.
Reality TV is the kind of insane pastiche that used to occupy transitional
panels in 2000AD comics - 'Tonight: six young single men compete for a chance
to date the stunning Miriam, who unbeknown to them is a pre-op transsexual.'
Motion pictures are a showcase of brands; the Olympics and rules-of-the-game
get adjusted to fit US TV schedules. Product placement happens in novels; Ford
now pays an author to put her heroine behind the wheel of a Fiesta. And whenever
a war starts, control over the local TV and radio stations always gets priority.
Across the net, entertainment has grown into a bigger business than
Hollywood. Thousands take part in experiments in social community like Ultima
Online, while rivers of blood are spilled in massive Unreal tournaments. Media
is participatory, hi-fidelity, and connected.
The media now stands apart from reality, constructing its own stories
and non-events to justify its existence - and these non-events take on a reality
of their own. Perhaps the ultimate sign the future's arrived.
Business. The major part of the biggest companies'
value lies in something totally intangible: their brands. $44bn of Coca-Cola
exists only insofar as six billion people have heard of it. If that doesn't sound
strange to you, think again. Accounts no longer bear any real relation to the
companies they purport to represent financially. CEOs resort to subterfuge, hire
image consultants, and commit outright crimes for their own enrichment. Staggering
wealth is available and oceans of capital seek somewhere to grow. Entire nations
are governed far more by boards than elected politicians.
Nations. A war is fought in the media while real people
die - but in a safe, far-off land, just as in cyberpunk there was always a war
going on somewhere. Dictatorships and shadowy cabals control outwardly democratic
nations like the USA. New threats appear from nowhere, as the West fails to realise
other people may have different concepts of nationhood and race.
Work. People are true knowledge workers; only a
tiny fraction of the workforce grows food or makes things of metal and plastic.
Countless millions have a laptop as the only 'tool of their trade'. Labour mobility
is amazing; with NAFTA and an expanding EU, nearly a billion people have a choice
of countries to work in. Yet craftsmanship isn't dead: artisan bakers, independent
farmers, artists taking private commissions and bespoke tailors are growing in
breadth, becoming a new status symbol in a world where everything can be made
precisely and cheaply.
As trade expands Nike and M&S leave their mark on other economies.
They pay little, but the contracts they sign bring new wealth into developing
countries; the knowledge they leave behind becomes a competitor a few years later.
China is getting on with the work of becoming the world's largest economy; India
pumps out software like samosas; even Russia has a developing middle class. Many
developed countries like the UK, far from having too few jobs at home, are having
huge problems finding workers for all the jobs on offer. And jobs are changing:
information architects and user experience designers abound, job titles not heard
of even five years ago.
Medicine. A man in Kentucky has just celebrated his fifth
year with a left hand he wasn't born with; immunosuppressives have given new
life to a corpse's hand, bone/blood/flesh fused to a new owner. At least four
teams are racing to be the first to carry out a face transplant, and while heart
and lungs and livers aren't exactly routinely switched between bodies, people
who've had such surgery can live decent lives. It's no longer strange to think
whole heads couldn't be transplanted onto young bodies.
Cryonics is an increasingly non-yuk option; over 800 people now sleep
in the deep dark cold, hoping to wake up someday, dreaming silently of eternal
life in perfect health.
Drugs are designed on computer, software predicting how long wiggly ropes
of amino acids will fold up into three-dimensional shapes that lock onto bugs
and render them harmless. Genetic crops are widespread; European opposition is
starting to fade as the UK authorises its first planting (yesterday.) In development
- and in some cases at market - are large mammals manipulated to produce nutraceuticals,
food that contains useful drugs to get patients off the pill-popping routine.
Slowly, the brain is being understood. Mental illness can now be keyed
to particular brain regions, aiding treatment whether the delivery method is
surgery, drugs, or just talking things out.
We're finally winning the battle against cancer. Longterm survival rates
keep climbing as non-invasive treatment regimes get a grip, progressing from
drugs that starve cancer cells of blood into real-down-low genetic editing, snipping
out and pasting whole chunks of chromosome into and out of the human genome.
AIDS is now regarded as a longterm illness, no longer a death sentence. Vaccines
are being developed - for cancer and heart disease. Even old age may not be a
death sentence; telomerase research and stem cell morphing demonstrate that while
our cells may be programmed to get old and die, they may also be reprogrammable.
Alien life. With ancient water detected on Mars
and almost certainly whole oceans under the ice of Jupiter's earth-sized moons,
it no longer seems fantastic that there's someone else out there, somewhere.
Hubble show us 10,000 bright lights in the sky: not stars, but entire galaxies
containing billions of stars like our sun. And in our own galaxy, over a hundred
planets have already been detected looping our stellar neighbours. It's just
not even a serious question any more: with so much to look at even in our backyard,
and another 10,000 galaxies beyond that, it's far stranger to imagine that we're
alone in the universe.
Architecture. Norman Foster's gherkin soars into
the London sky, soon to be joined by over 60 tall sci-fi buildings now inhabiting
big pieces of paper. After the dark blocky decades of the 60s and 70s, new materials
and computer-aided design mean even modest budgets can result in incredible bespoke
buildings. In his 70s, Frank Gehry finally has the means to build the creations
he's had on the drawing board for decades, as the cost/safety equations finally
balance. Taipei 101 and Petronas soar half a kilometre into the sky; Dubai's
got an 800m one planned.
Cities are retrofitted. Old docks and factories take on new life as high-tech
apartments. The futures of Gibson and Sterling - plausible because they were
derived from a present that actually exists, not simply creating a new reality
from scratch - are here, people and machines connected together by those machines
for living in we call homes.
Transport. A train in central London can whisk you to
Paris or Brussels in a couple of hours. Flights across Europe now cost less than
a bus ticket; hundreds of thousands of Britons own homes in France, enpowered
by £20 return flights. There's talk of an entire British retirement town
on the coast of France, a chunk of suburban Britain franchised out to another
country.
While cars that can fly and take to the water were never practical propositions
- societal and safety constraints mean you'll never be able to park your plane
at your highrise apartment - both vehicles are now on the market, albeit as oddities.
Antilock brakes, crumple zones, and 4WD mean people walk away from 100km/h crashes
that resulted in certain death just twenty years ago. While in even the cheaper
cars, GPS tells you where to go whenever you ask.
And the biggest reason I think the future's here: the way
we keep losing things. Nothing seems important when everyone has it
or it's been around for a long time, so beautiful Victorian houses get chopped
into tiny flats while ancient institutions like Parliament fall into disuse or
get sidelined. Private banks become just brands of High St names, while icons
of the past get ripped to false-colour video and used in ad campaigns.
We're creating a lot of new stuff, here in the future. But I hope the
good old stuff sticks around a bit longer.
