Martin Willett, 2001
My wife was very excited by them, look at these, self adhesive stamps! Great.
“Terrific” I intoned in my finest Marvin voice. “Self adhesive stamps. Would you believe it. The year 2001 and we have self adhesive stamps at last. Behold the future. It's 2001, where's my flying car?”
My son's favourite TV show is Thunderbirds. It was written in the heady days of the early 1960s. It features the escapades of the Tracy family. Jeff Tracy the father is a millionaire retired astronaut. He was one of the first to have walked upon the moon. The action is carried out by his grown up sons. Grown up, but not old. Hang on a minute, the first astronauts that walked on the moon now have grown up sons and daughters. We should be living in the world of Thunderbirds now. We should be having trips in Fireflash at Mach 6.
Most predictions about the future get things wrong. Present trends hardly ever continue in the way they have in the past. Looking into the future from 1980 it was obvious that cars would get wider, sleeker and lower. But what do we find on the roads today? People carriers and tall city cars. It was also obvious that as fuel became scarcer and more expensive engine sizes would decline. But the reality is more powerful cars spending longer in traffic jams.
New trends come from nowhere and seize the imagination for a while. Who could have predicted low profile tyres? Now it seems the height of auto fashion to have giant aluminium wheels with thin rubber bands round the edge. Why? Formula one and Indy cars still use the same great chunky sets of rubber. It came from nowhere and will most likely fade away again into oblivion like the whitewall tyre, the louvre grill rear window and the foxtail on the enormous aerial.
Trends in products often develop their own trajectory for no obviously sensible reason. Apple brought out a translucent computer monitor in a desperate attempt to maintain a market share and suddenly it becomes fashionable to have translucent electronic items of all kinds. The manufacturers at the cheap and nasty end of the market are quick to follow any mindless trend in consumer products. They have nothing to lose anyway as their products never remain serviceable long enough to look dated. My shop is littered with cheap and nasty products mimicking the quirky designs of innovative products. The display of vacuum cleaners looks like an exhibit of props from Star Wars or Lost in Space. There are Hi Fis that look like flying machines out of Flash Gordon. Others have “cool” coloured displays and seem to be in a competition to come up with the strangest way to insert and remove a CD. The sensible way is a lift up flap with a small window (to confirm that the disc is spinning) well away from the track of the laser (which is easy to clean if easily accessible), plonk down the lid, engaging the laser's safety cut out switch and away you go. If you need a front loading disc then I suggest a reasonable design to inspire you can be found on the computer in front of you, it works, it is cheap and rugged. Why would anybody need to come up with a different, more expensive, more delicate and less practical way of doing something so simple?
What has happened to the vision of a world connected to the internet via toasters, fridges, TVs and mobile phones? It is looking as far away as ever. Certainly there are a few phones that can look up train timetables and receive sports results but that is hardly the internet as I know it.
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There are many practical limits to technology. Some of the most important ones are rather fundamental and concern ergonomics and human nature. I owned a watch just like the one on the left. I think I still have it somewhere. It was a great watch, accurate, simple to read, it worked for years on a single battery. In an emergency I could use the calculator function to help me with my chronic lack of basic numeracy. But as a personal organizer it was a joke. It is not practical to use such tiny keys. I tried a few times but it was just too much effort to use. I had to keep my nails at the optimum length, too short and I couldn't select just one button, too long and they sometimes bent. (That is one plus point about that watch, it helped me to develop a strategy for biting my nails then polishing them smooth on my trouser leg that has kept them looking neat ever since.) Some people might be able to get to grips with it and find it useful to store 50 telephone numbers or appointments, but I don't suppose that many of the people who bought one would be able to use it to its full potential. |
When buttons are too small or have too many shared functions they become much less useful. In contrast the keyboard I am using now is much more practical. (These pictures are photo clip art, my hands are bigger and I don't type with all my fingers!) Full sized keyboards allow efficient data input, even with the quirky QWERTY layout designed to slow you down. |
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I cannot see how basic limits such as those imposed by our bodies can be overcome. We will never be able to have functioning PCs on our wrists unless we can come up with a satisfactory operating system and interface. The combination of keyboard and mouse will be very hard to beat, and it might never be bettered. I expect computers will continue to consist of keyboards, pointing devices and screens roughly double the size of our face, less than arms reach away, for a very long time to come. It works. Some things change but some things will not. Cars will always be operated by sitting inside them and using hands and feet to control the vehicle in response to almost exclusively visual stimuli. Computers will remain things we sit in front of and connect black boxes (of various colours) to whether with wires or without.
I also predict that we have seen the end of the constant quest for higher and higher specification in computers. Looking back ten years it was obvious that computers would get faster and cheaper. They have. But how much further does anybody need to go? Why would anybody need a computer a thousand times faster than the current generation? What tasks would we be needing such horsepower for? A 386 computer can help you write a novel or track all the customers in a one man business. I work next-door to a PC shop and I regularly see little old grannies coming out loaded down with computers ten times faster than mine, scanners, digital cameras, colour printers and the like. What for? For sending a few emails about recipes for shortbread? We already have massively capable hardware and software. I cannot see the need to keep pushing Moores Law ever further out of some crazy idea of we-can-so-we-must.
Computers will get faster, storage devices will get bigger but the boom days are behind us. The consumer package deal computer will get faster but it will not do so indefinitely. There is a limit. No domestic user needs a machine capable of making Toy Story 3. Desktop publishing helped get CD ROMs and 12 MB plus memories. 3D graphics are pushing things at the moment on speed and processing. MP3 and video are helping to fill up 40 GB hard drives.
Update, in March 2005 I bought a computer with a 200 GB hard drive, by April 2006 I had used 20.5 GB. In October 2010 I was up to 71.5 GB |
Live streaming video is driving the broadband internet. But where is the technology that requires the 200 GHz processor or the 50 terabyte hard drive (or equivalent device)? What would it be? Computer generated playmates? These trends cannot continue indefinitely because we will run out of challenges and uses.
600 MB of still pornographic images is enough to send you blind or wind your automatic watch until the spring breaks. Even with 7.1 channel sound and full widescreen hardcore video action we cannot rely on the pornography industry alone to drive the PC and internet technology market indefinitely. We are already on the threshold of the world of cinema quality sound and vision coming out of a wire in the living room. At that point surely the pornography trade will at last have reached its peak and run out of tricks. At that point we will have entered a mature stage. |
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What I can predict is the integration of TV and computer, although which one finally eats its rival is harder to judge. Huge powerful hard drives and multi channel TV are well suited. The next generation of video recorder will be tapeless. Probably using hard drive technology at first and later perhaps something even more capacious.
Update: I have been using my personal TV recorder for a couple of years now, a hard drive combined with digital TV receivers allowing me to watch one programme while recording another, pause and rewind live TV and watch a recording while making another. It's great - why would anybody have to watch adverts? |
TV broadcasts of unprotected material will be fair game for copying. A combination of simultaneous multi channel reception capability combined with huge data storage capacity with simultaneous read-write capability may see the end of worrying about watching TV. The TV/computer will have a huge library of programs available (recorded or live, who cares?) whenever you have the time to watch something. By telling your system what you like as you watch it the system will be able to learn what to find for you. By combining internet access to newsgroups and specialist sites detailing listings of programs you are interested in your system will become better at finding interesting TV programs than you could ever hope to be. So if your idea of heaven is looking up the skirts of women tennis players your TV will soon learn this and will beaver away [unintentional pun spotted but left in] 24 hours a day bringing you the finest sporting gusset highlights from sports broadcast across the wavebands and the internet too. In widescreen and surround sound whenever possible. Pausing and replaying live TV would be simple. Every Freudian slip, every unplanned glimpse of celebrity flesh would be available for your delectation and delight in digital form to keep for posterity or to email to your friends in real time.
There will be the facility to receive every episode of a soap and save it to your hard drive, if you run short of space you could send it in compressed and encrypted form down your broadband internet connection to your archive service. If you enjoyed episode 13 of a rare 1970s sci fi program you found on late night TV you could tell your computer to find and archive the rest of the series for you by tomorrow evening. Meet somebody online and want to find out about their part of the world? Just tell your computer to find their TV stations and radio broadcasts, edit them down, remove the repetitive commercials and give you access to their local newspaper archives and search by name... Hey, that donkey in the school play from 1992 looks familiar!
Perhaps there will be a split between producers and consumers. Producers have computers with TV capability, consumers have TVs with hard drives. Or maybe everybody will have two machines, and a wide infra red or low power radio link permanently connecting the two.
The Final Frontier
The quest for speed in air transport did not carry on after Concorde at Mach 2 to bring us Fireflash at Mach 6. Even if there were scores of engineers itching for the funding to have a go at the challenge. One hundred years ago the fastest car ever built ran on electric motors at the same speed you probably drive to work at. One hundred years later the fastest car goes more than ten times faster. But practical highway speeds are still less than many motoring pioneers had achieved with steam cars in the 1920s. Possibility and practicality are very different propositions.
We have been to the Moon. There is no technical difficulty in going to Mars or even the moons of Jupiter within the next two decades as long as the will and the funding could be gathered. That does not mean that your grandchildren will be living on Titan. Sir Francis Drake sailed round the world around five centuries ago but that does not mean that such journey are now thoroughly routine. Crossing a major ocean will never be something we do without thinking about. There are fundamental principles that will will never go away. One of them is that moving a human body across an ocean in a reasonable timescale will always require a lot of energy, that fact will never go away. To do it in comfort and safety also requires other technology and skill, which must come in the form of expensive human talent. Travel can get cheaper but it will never be a trivial price.
When we look at the basics of space travel we come up with the simple and unavoidable fact that before you go anywhere you need to get into space. Travelling in space is easy. Getting into space is always going to be expensive. I remember the first time my brain boggled, the first time I felt dizzy thinking about numbers. It was considering the power of the Saturn V rocket. That sense of perspective always makes my eyes water. If anybody can be blasé about space travel they obviously have no clue about how difficult it is. All you have to do is get a big rocket and ride it. That sentence makes as much sense as saying all you have to do to be world heavyweight boxing champion is to win a few fights. It is not exactly wrong, but it does gloss over a few rather important details. Unless some radically different way of achieving escape velocity is found there will never be any way to get a man into space at a price affordable to the masses. 200 kilos of man, baggage and safety systems will always require in excess of B5 of fuel to achieve escape velocity. B is a variable; the price (in local currency) at which an average punter says bugger off I'm not paying that much!
Mean Automakers Dash Nation's Hope For Flying Cars |
Flying cars have been proposed many times and I feel they are likely to be for ever in the realms of science fiction only. The first objection is cost, they will cost more to buy than regular cars. More importantly there will be no political will to allow them. If cars were invented today we would probably see sense and not allow them. The idea is quite absurd; letting people loose in a three dimensional world with a high powered vehicle of considerable kinetic energy and mass, presumably containing a not insignificant quantity of fuel or other powerful energy resource when we already know how lethal normal people can be in the much more restricted geometry and physics of rolling along a ribbon of road. Nobody needs a flying car. We have coped without them and we can cope without them indefinitely. There is no inalienable or God given right to have a flying car and we should have the courage to say so, before it becomes too late. It only needs one country to allow them to develop and then jealousy would make them inevitable, natural, right.
Certain things should never be allowed to come to pass; flying cars, antipersonnel mine home defence systems, cordless electric carving knives, mass market nuclear weapons and human reproductive cloning all belong in that category.
Here's a bit of praise for your thoughts. |
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