The future was different back in 1968. Cleaner. Less crowded. And more, well, old-fashioned. We expect the future to be like a huge wave, carrying us forward. We expect to see it coming. Instead, it leaks in around our feet and rises over our heads while we are doing other things. We live in a science fiction world, and we haven’t noticed.
Of course we didn’t get the moon base. That was because we realized that the Race for Space had been a mad bout in international willie-waving. So we left the exploration of space to a bunch of flying Lego kits and, instead, filled earth orbit with dull satellites that do dull things.
Remember the transatlantic phone calls, usually made at Christmas, which were a matter of a vast sum of money and a lot of technical negotiation? And then we spent a lot of time saying, “It’s dark here, is it dark where you are?” and marvelled at the fact that you could have two times at the same time. But recently I rang home while walking through Perth, Australia, to check that the cat was okay. I just dialled the number. It wasn’t very exciting. I didn’t even ask if it was dark.
The price of a very cheap video recorder now buys us a little GPS device that’ll pinpoint us anywhere on the planet. You read Longitude? The sheer excitement of humanity trying to find out exactly where it is? A little black box now does the job better than the man with the sextant and the chronometer ever could. It’s rather dull. Even my car knows where it is and in a pleasant voice, rather like HAL’s sister, can navigate me through Swindon. We don’t have to be lost anymore.
Remember the weather forecasts? They used to be one step above a lottery, rather than a pretty good description of what’s going to happen.
Dull, dull, dull. This stuff is all science fiction that has come true—Arthur C. Clarke is a keen and persuasive salesman for the benefits of satellite technology—and it has come true quietly and it has become humdrum. We hold in our hands a power that emperors dreamed of, and we say, “It was only ￡69.95 because Dixons had a sale on.”
What’s odd about the movie 2001 now? It’s not “Pan Am” on the side of the spaceship. Companies come and go. It’s not Leonard Rossiter wandering around the space station, or the sixties style, all black and white and cerise. It’s the lack of keyboards.
Dr. Heywood Floyd is important enough to have a moon shuttle all to himself and he uses a pen? Where’s the portable computer? Where’s the handset? You mean he’s not in constant communication? Why isn’t he shouting, “HELLO! I’M ON THE SHUTTLE!’? Why isn’t he connected!’? The Bell videophone he uses in the movie? What? You mean they still have call-boxes?
I’d have to stop and think before I could say how many computers we own, but the most amazing thing is that three … no, four … no, five of them, all miracles of technology by the standards of the sixties, lie unused in cupboards or stripped for parts because they are uselessly out of date. Like many other people, I suspect, I’ve got a few drawers full of cutting-edge technology that got blunted really quickly. Even I, easily old enough to be a grandfather (I could say to the kids, “See that Moon up there? We used to go there”), used them more or less instinctively. I grew up reading about this stuff. I suffer from the other kind of future shock: I’m shocked that we still don’t have reliable voice recognition as good as HAL’s, for example.
Science fiction certainly predicted the age of computers. Sooner or later, if you burrow deep enough in the piles of old magazines, you’ll find it predicted more or less anything you want; if you fling a thousand darts at the board, some of them will hit the bull. There are even references to something that could be considered as the Net. But what took us by surprise was that the people using the computers were not, in fact, shiny new people, but the same dumb old human beings that there have always been. They didn’t—much—want to use the technology to get educated. They wanted to look at porn, play games, steal things, and chat.
We’re not doing it right. We get handed all this new technology and we’re just not up to scratch. And that’s just as well, because the dream as sold is pretty suspect, too. It’s a worldwide community, provided you use American English. It’s a wonderful tool for business, if you’re the right kind of business—that is to say, one that doesn’t make anything except losses. It brings people together, if your idea of social intercourse is an in-basket full of spam written by people with the social skills of pig dribble. It’s a wonderful education tool, if what you want to learn is how to download other people’s work straight into your essay.
What we are, in fact, are electronic ape-men. We woke up just now in the electronic dawn and there, looming against the brightening sky, is this huge black rectangle. And we’re reaching out and touching it and saying, “Is it WAP enabled? Can we have sex with it? Can you get it in a different colour? Is it being sold cheap because the Monolith2 is being released next month and has a built-in PDA for the same price? Can we have sex with it? Look, it says here I can ‘Make $$$ a Month by Sitting on my Butt’. Wow, can we use this for smashing pigs over the head? Hey, can we have sex with it?”
And like ape-men trying out sticks and stones and fire for the first time, there’s a lot of spearing ourselves in the foot, accidentally dropping rocks on the kids, acute problems in trying to have sex with fire, and so on. We have to learn to deal with it.
Where will it all take us? We don’t know, because we’re back to being ape-men again. And if ape-men try to second-guess the future, they’ll dream of little more than killing bigger pigs.
We don’t know what the new wave of technology is going to bring because it’s still only up to our knees and we’re not used to living in it, so we’re trying and discarding ideas very quickly. Reading books off a screen? It doesn’t seem to work for us. But electronic paper is already out there. Maybe you’d like just one book on your shelf, that looks and feels just like a book, but which could be any one of a thousand titles chosen from the little keypad on the back? That’s still ape-man thinking. There’s nascent technologies out there that could give us the power of gods—at least, some of the more homely ones.