When I was a young boy I had a vivid imagination, and devoted many, many hours to dreams of what life would be like in the future. My best friend Chris and I were technophiles and futurephiles from the time we could talk, and growing up we’d often speculate on what amazing gadgets and technology might benefit humankind in years to come. Although we were really too young to visualise the economic, humanitarian and environmental aspects of life in the future, we still believed in the power of the human race to use cleverness and vision to improve its lot. We just knew the future would be amazing, and it would be better somehow.
We looked upon all the technology that surrounded us at the time, and thought to ourselves “all this will belong in a museum by the time we are 30″. We knew we had the smarts to fly to the moon by the middle of the sixties, and had no doubt NASA had been working on some top secret, amazing technology ever since. We drew inspiration from novelist Arthur C. Clark, believing these quantum leaps in technology came at predictable intervals - and that we would witness several of them in our lifetime. By 2001 we would be sending manned space missions to the moons of Jupiter, we would have a huge space station orbiting the earth, we would have a city on the moon. We never doubted this for a second.
I can remember my first exposure to “grown up” computers - IBM XT clones as they were known, and being singularly unimpressed. Here was this huge dumb box only capable of displaying two colours ( green… or orange… you had a choice of monochrome ), and running really basic text editors and calculator programs. Where was the microphone where I could ask it questions in natural language? Where were the fabulous, colourful 3D images I’d seen in the movies? In fact why have a screen at all? Couldn’t it just talk to me? “Generalboy… the answer to the question, of life, the universe, and everyting, is…”.
Even when VGA came along, delivering the miracle of true colour to computer monitors for the first time ever, I was disappointed. In spite of this, I looked at other pieces of technology that seemed clunky and outdated to me - lead acid car batteries, coal fired power stations, petrol and electric motors, jet aircraft, home appliances - and dreamt that before long they would all be superseded by something far more clever and efficient. But almost three decades on, all I see are evolutionary, incremental improvements in technology. There is nothing truly revolutionalry. Our cars would be absolutely useless without lead-acid batteries - technology that has barely changed since its invention in 1859. Our computers still are based on silicon technology from the late sixties, and even your brand new 64 bit Pentium IV Processor still carries much of the basic instruction set from its great grandaddy, the 8086 microprocessor - from 1978. The cutting edge technology that delivers this web page to you, TCP over copper wire, has hardly changed in 24 years when ARPA first adopted it. Faster, yes. More clever? Hardly.
But it’s not just our spectacular failure to innovate in terms of technology that disappoints me.
I look at cancer that kills so many people in the first world, and disease that kills 100 times more in the third, and wonder why these problems seem no closer to being solved. I look at the conflict in the Middle East that has raged for over 60 years, and watch as new glimmers of hope flicker and fade out, one after the other. I look at the ridiculous, blind, defiant consumption of finite resources on this planet, and anticipate the fall of the economies built upon it in my lifetime.
I look at corporate culture, the distribution of weath, and global conscience, and wonder how it seems to have been in a downward spiral from the time I first started to try and comprehend it. I wonder why, with all this amazing technology and cleverness at our disposal, we seem to have reached a point where we can’t make the whole world better. As I watch another phone tower being erected so that 14 year old kids don’t get dropouts while they are sending trivial SMS messages to each other, I try hard not to think of the technology in all the individual components in that tower being used instead to ensure people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia have fresh water. Any water. I picture the last piece of coal that runs the power station that provides the electricity to run the tower being dug from the ground. It’s technically complicated. It’s expensive. It’s ultimately futile.
When I stand and look out to sea, clear blue sky above me, clean white sand stretched out before me, I can stop thinking about all of this for a while. I can take in something bigger, something meaningful, something that needs no technology to exist. Something that was there before we all got so clever, and will hopefully still be there long after we discover we really aren’t. It’s something I need to do every day to help me forget.
The future is now.
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