When I was fairly little, probably seven or so, I devised a short list of technologies based on what I had seen on television that I reckoned were at least plausible, and which I earmarked as milestones of sorts to measure how far human technology would progress during my lifetime. I estimated that if I was lucky, I would be able to have my hands on half of them by the time I retired. Delightfully, almost all of these have in fact already been achieved, less than fifteen years later.
Admittedly, all of these technologies that I picked were far closer than I had envisioned at the time. Living in Australia, which seemed to be the opposite side of the world from where everything happened, and living outside of the truly urban areas of Sydney which, as a consequence of international business, were kept up to date, it often seems that even though I technically grew up after the turn of the millennium, that I was raised in a place and culture that was closer to the 90s.
For example, as late as 2009, even among adults, not everyone I knew had a mobile phone. Text messaging was still “SMS”, and was generally regarded with suspicion and disdain, not least of all because not all phones were equipped to handle them, and not all phone plans included provisions for receiving them. “Smart” phones (still two words) did exist on the fringes; I know exactly one person who owned an iPhone, and two who owned a BlackBerry, at that time. But having one was still an oddity. Our public school curriculum was also notably skeptical, bordering on technophobic, about the rapid shift towards Broadband and constant connectivity, diverting much class time to decrying the evils of email and chat rooms.
These were the days when it was a moral imperative to turn off your modem at night, lest the hacker-perverts on the godless web wardial a backdoor into your computer, which weighed as much as the desk it was parked on, or your computer overheat from being left on, and catch fire (this happened to a friend of mine). Mice were wired and had little balls inside them that you could remove in order to sabotage them for the next user. Touch screens might have existed on some newer PDA models, and on some gimmicky machines in the inner city, but no one believed that they were going to replace the workstation PC.
I chose my technological milestones based on my experiences in this environment, and on television. Actually, since most of our television was the same shows that played in the United States, only a few months behind their stateside premier, they tended to be more up to date with the actual state of technology, and depictions of the near future which seemed obvious to an American audience seemed terribly optimistic and even outlandish to me at the time. So, in retrospect, it is not surprising that after I moved back to the US, I saw nearly all of my milestones commercially available within half a decade.
Tablet Computers
The idea of a single surface interface for a computer in the popular consciousness dates back almost as far as futuristic depictions of technology itself. It was an obvious technological niche that, despite numerous attempts, some semi-successful, was never truly cracked until the iPad. True, plenty of tablet computers existed before the iPad. But these were either klunky beyond use, incredibly fragile to the point of being unusable in practical circumstances, or horrifically expensive.
None of them were practical for, say, completing homework for school on, which at seven years old was kind of my litmus test for whether something was useful. I imagined that if I were lucky, I might get to go tablet shopping when it was time for me to enroll my own children. I could not imagine that affordable tablet computers would be widely available in time for me to use them for school myself. I still get a small joy every time I get to pull out my tablet in a productive niche.
Video Calling
Again, this was not a bolt from the blue. Orwell wrote about his telescreens, which amounted to two-way television, in the 1940s. By the 70s, NORAD had developed a fiber-optic based system whereby commanders could conduct video conferences during a crisis. By the time I was growing up, expensive and klunky video teleconferences were possible. But they had to be arranged and planned, and often required special equipment. Even once webcams started to appear, lessening the equipment burden, you were still often better off calling someone.
Skype and FaceTime changed that, spurred on largely by the appearance of smartphones, and later tablets, with front-facing cameras, which were designed largely for this exact purpose. Suddenly, a video call was as easy as a phone call; in some cases easier, because video calls are delivered over the Internet rather than requiring a phone line and number (something which I did not foresee).
Wearable Technology (in particular smartwatches)
This was the one that I was most skeptical of, as I got this mostly from the Jetsons, a show which isn’t exactly renowned for realism or accuracy. An argument can be made that this threshold hasn’t been fully crossed yet, since smartwatches are still niche products that haven’t caught on to the same extent as either of the previous items, and insofar as they can be used for communication like in The Jetsons, they rely on a smartphone or other device as a relay. This is a solid point, to which I have two counterarguments.
First, these are self-centered milestones. The test is not whether an average Joe can afford and use the technology, but whether it has an impact on my life. And indeed, my smart watch, which was enough and functional enough for me to use in an everyday role, does indeed have a noticeable positive impact. Second, while smartwatches may not be as ubiquitous as once portrayed, they do exist, and are commonplace enough to be largely unremarkable. The technology exists and is widely available, whether or not consumers choose to use it.
These were my three main pillars of the future. Other things which I marked down include such milestones as:
Commercial Space Travel
Sure, SpaceX and its ilk aren’t exactly the same as having shuttles to the ISS departing regularly from every major airport, with connecting service to the moon. You can’t have a romantic dinner rendezvous in orbit, gazing at the unclouded stars on one side, and the fragile planet earth on the other. But we’re remarkably close. Private sector delivery to orbit is now cheaper and more ubiquitous than public sector delivery (admittedly this has more to do with government austerity than an unexpected boom in the aerospace sector).
Large-Scale Remotely Controlled or Autonomous Vehicles
This one came from Kim Possible, and a particular episode in which our intrepid heroes got to their remote destination by a borrowed military helicopter flown remotely from a home computer. Today, we have remotely piloted military drones, and early self-driving vehicles. This one hasn’t been fully met yet, since I’ve never ridden in a self-driving vehicle myself, but it is on the horizon, and I eagerly await it.
Cyborgs
I did guess that we’d have technologically altered humans, both for medical purposes, and as part of the road to the enhanced super-humans that rule in movies and television. I never guessed at seven that in less than a decade, that I would be one of them, relying on networked machines and computer chips to keep my biological self functioning, plugging into the wall to charge my batteries when they run low, studiously avoiding magnets, EMPs, and water unless I have planned ahead and am wearing the correct configuration and armor.
This last one highlights an important factor. All of these technologies were, or at least, seemed, revolutionary. And yet today they are mundane. My tablet today is only remarkable to me because I once pegged it as a keystone of the future that I hoped would see the eradication of my then-present woes. This turned out to be overly optimistic, for two reasons.
First, it assumed that I would be happy as soon as the things that bothered me then no longer did, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. Humans do not remain happy the same way than an object in motion remains in motion until acted upon. Or perhaps it is that as creatures of constant change and reecontextualization, we are always undergoing so much change that remaining happy without constant effort is exceedingly rare. Humans always find more problems that need to be solved. On balance, this is a good thing, as it drives innovation and advancement. But it makes living life as a human rather, well, wanting.
Which lays the groundwork nicely for the second reason: novelty is necessarily fleeting. What advanced technology today marks the boundary of magic will tomorrow be a mere gimmick, and after that, a mere fact of life. Computers hundreds of millions more times more powerful than those used to wage World War II and send men to the moon are so ubiquitous that they are considered a basic necessity of modern life, like clothes, or literacy; both of which have millennia of incremental refinement and scientific striving behind them on their own.
My picture of the glorious shining future assumed that the things which seemed amazing at the time would continue to amaze once they had become commonplace. This isn’t a wholly unreasonable extrapolation on available data, even if it is childishly optimistic. Yet it is self-contradictory. The only way that such technologies could be harnessed to their full capacity would be to have them become so widely available and commonplace that it would be conceivable for product developers to integrate them into every possible facet of life. This both requires and establishes a certain level of mundanity about the technology that will eventually break the spell of novelty.
In this light, the mundanity of the technological breakthroughs that define my present life, relative to the imagined future of my past self, is not a bad thing. Disappointing, yes; and certainly it is a sobering reflection on the ungrateful character of human nature. But this very mundanity that breaks our predictions of the future (or at least, our optimistic predictions) is an integral part of the process of progress. Not only does this mundanity constantly drive us to reach for ever greater heights by making us utterly irreverent of those we have already achieved, but it allows us to keep evolving our current technologies to new applications.
Take, for example, wireless internet. I remember a time, or at least, a place, when wireless internet did not exist for practical purposes. “Wi-Fi” as a term hadn’t caught on yet; in fact, I remember the publicity campaign that was undertaken to educate our technologically backwards selves about what term meant, about how it wasn’t dangerous, and about how it would make all of our lives better, as we could connect to everything. Of course, at that time I didn’t know anyone outside of my father’s office who owned a device capable of connecting to Wi-Fi. But that was beside the point. It was the new thing. It was a shiny, exciting novelty.
And then, for a while, it was a gimmick. Newer computers began to advertise their Wi-Fi antennae, boasting that it was as good as being connected by cable. Hotels and other establishments began to advertise Wi-Fi connectivity. Phones began to connect to Wi-Fi networks, which allowed phones to truly connect to the internet even without a data plan.
Soon, Wi-Fi became not just a gimmick, but a standard. First computers, then phones, without internet began to become obsolete. Customers began to expect Wi-Fi as a standard accommodation wherever they went, for free even. Employers, teachers, and organizations began to assume that the people they were dealing with would have Wi-Fi, and therefore everyone in the house would have internet access. In ten years, the prevailing attitude around me went from “I wouldn’t feel safe having my kid playing in a building with that new Wi-Fi stuff” to “I need to make sure my kid has Wi-Fi so they can do their schoolwork”. Like television, telephones, and electricity, Wi-Fi became just another thing that needed to be had in a modern home. A mundanity.
Now, that very mundanity is driving a second wave of revolution. The “Internet of Things” as it is being called, is using the Wi-Fi networks that are already in place in every modern home to add more niche devices and appliances. We are told to expect that soon that every major device in our house will be connected to out personal network, controllable either from our mobile devices, or even by voice, and soon, gesture, if not through the devices themselves, then through artificially intelligent home assistants (Amazon echo, Google Home, and related).
It is important to realize that this second revolution could not take place while Wi-Fi was still a novelty. No one who wouldn’t otherwise buy into Wi-Fi at the beginning would have bought it because it could also control the sprinklers, or the washing machine, or what have you. Wi-Fi had to become established as a mundane building block in order to be used as the cornerstone of this latest innovation.
Research and development may be focused on the shiny and novel, but technological process on a species-wide scale depends just as much on this mundanity. Breakthroughs have to not only be helpful and exciting, but useful in everyday life, and cheap enough to be usable by everyday consumers. It is easy to get swept up in the exuberance of what is new, but the revolutionary changes happen when those new things are allowed to become mundane.
