Back to the Future

While at the library quite recently, I come across an old issue of the Time magazine with a cover story, The Future is Wow!’. It is summer of 1995 and Time magazine was making a prediction on the ‘Top Ten Technologies that would change our lives’.
Making predictions about the future is not an easy task. There is just so many number of unanticipated events that can occur that can possibly derail any chance of accuracy. Foresight is tough. Hindsight, on the other hand is quite easy. Beside it is much more fun to look at what people thought back in the old days and do a ‘Nelson Muntz‘.

Anyway, lets look back at the ten technologies Time mag thought would be life changing :

First off, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles ‘could be on the road in force within little more than a decade’. Or not, as it happens. Hope nobody bought a bunch of stock thinking this was sure to come true. I wouldn’t even bet on it for 10 years from now. Even the number of electric cars on the road are not enough to even dent the GNP of Venezuela.

Next technology : high-temperature superconductivity. Basically, researchers discovered years ago that when some metals commonly used to make wires’”like copper’”were chilled down to nearly the dead cold of outer space, they became amazingly efficient conductors of electricity, with no resistance or loss of signal. Ever since, there’s been a race to find ways to achieve this superconductivity at balmier temperatures, with certain ceramic materials being the first big breakthrough, back in 1986. Since then, well, we are still doing researching and our lives remain.

Third technology is genetic engineering. With the promise of eliminating disease, better crops and animal stocks comes the fear of the effects of ‘playing God’. the involvement of politics, confusing publicity and fear of the unknown hinders its use by the mainstream.

Bionics? Actually there has been a lot of progress in robotics and prosthetics, but not enough to make anyone willingly give up a perfectly good limb in order to acquire metal parts instead.

Here’s one that’s only partly wrong: universal personal telephones. Time is correct to assume we’d be able to travel much of the world using the same cell phone, but I don’t think it’s as inexpensive as they wanted to believe. As for ‘phones are already so small they can fit in a shirt pocket and so cheap that companies give them away to pull in customers’, you could say the same today, but the concept that ‘the jump from pocket to wrist will probably happen in the next year or two’ is not only unfulfilled but also impractical. It’s taken a decade just to get the little wireless earpieces we’d require in order to talk on a wrist-mounted phone. How are we expected to dial numbers?

That is when Time stated the next technology, voice-activated computing, that’s how. And not just for phones but in computers, remote-controlled electronics, and bank machines as well. Well, it is in some phones (but doesn’t work very well), is available for computers (but takes time and dedication to optimize), isn’t in use to change TV channels at all, and would be a stupid thing to add to bank machines, unless they started building them into little soundproof booths. Too many Star Trek reruns, that’s the problem here.

Next is nanotechnology. It hasn’t changed our lives yet, but it is definitely an area with a lot of promise. Same with optically based electronics, where photons are used to transmit information instead of electrons. Rather prescient of Time to spot these two.

But coming off of two winners, Time flies into the abyss when it comes to the next choice. It’s hard to believe that people in 1995 still thought virtual reality was going to work out, but so it seems. The magazine is correct that some spin-off applications for 3-D medical and architectural presentations are very useful, but even computer games have largely given up on it. Being bold enough to proclaim: ‘within a decade people will be taking utterly realistic virtual vacations to other countries’”or even other worlds’ is the kind of prediction that just begs to be scoffed at. Hell, in 1995 we already knew that about a third of people in VR were prone to puking. It unsettles the brain to have audio and visual information swirling about in the absence of physical sensations of movement. You’d probably get a lower nausea rate if you filled up a bunch of teenagers with warm beer and sent them to a laser rock show.
The final chosen technology is ‘new materials’: all those alloys, composites, plastics, and metal-ceramic hybrids and so forth. It’s a valid prediction. In fact, hasn’t it been kind of a truism since, oh, about the Bronze Age that new materials can revolutionize society?

So, in 1995 those were Time’s top 10 technologies for the future. What’s wrong? There’s something missing, isn’t there? It seems to me there was another useful technology already well established by 1995, one of those transformational things that later became widely used. I used to know what it was called. You know, that thing, the freakin’ Internet!!!. I wonder whatever happened to it?

Other than a passing reference in the top-10 write-ups, the closest thing to recognition of the Net in that old Time issue is a separate two-pager about how a bunch of countries are racing to install fibre-optic cables and ‘create national infobahns’. Hey, remember when people actually used to talk like that?