Imagine that it’s 2115. Take a good look around you. It’s a fantastical place, isn’t it?
All your worldly possessions were manufactured on your levitating 3D printer. This includes your own biosphere, located in a well-to-do part of your underwater bubble city. You telework only three days a week, never get sick, and grow all your own food on your own hydroponic farm – an invention that has eliminated world hunger. Quantum broadband means that Windows 10 updates are delivered before Microsoft has even developed them. All that incredible stuff, and it’s only a quarter past nine (boom, boom!).
Actually, by 2115 I really mean a vision of the world 99 years into the future. Why 99 years rather than a nice round century? Patience, kemo sabe – our journey has only just begun. But it’s an adventure for which we have some keen and apparently knowledgeable guides. They’re the ones who call themselves ‘futurologists’. It might be a made-up job title but, as Maureen Lipman’s Beattie would remind us, if you have an ology, you’re a scientist. Trust me, I’m a columnologist.
You see, back above ground in boring old 2016 Computeractive receives regular tech predictions from these futurologists. Some I included in my introduction, but you’ll have to guess which ones, as they’re so daft I can’t now remember the fakes.
But it matters not: predictions of future technology are generally as amusingly unreliable as the futurologists themselves. Remember how Microsoft’s former boss Steve Ballmer laughed at the launch of Apple’s first iPhone? If you don’t, watch it right now (www.snipca.com/19675). The car-salesman-caught-in-the-body-of-amultinational-CEO’s amusement was a barely veiled prediction of Apple’s failure and Microsoft’s success in the mobilephone industry.
So, if Ballmer can’t reliably predict what’ll happen in technology a mere couple of years hence, why should I, you or anyone else listen to the latest crystal ball-gazing from Dr Predictably Double-Barrelled, Professor of Futurology at University of Nowhere?
We shouldn’t, but they won’t stop spouting. A couple of years ago I read a prediction that by 2050 human brains would be hardwired to computers, allowing software algorithms to secondguess our behaviour and fast-track our every thought. And then, just last month, I read another futurologist foretelling that humans would achieve ‘electronic immortality’ by the same date. The same futurologist also said that our pets would be able to talk to us, like real-life Furbies.
Computer-generated hallucinations. Talking pets. And digital immortality to prevent escape. That’s some future!
I guess it’s clear by now that I don’t like digital fortune-telling. But there’s one futurologist I do like. In 2014, Ed Fries – co-creator of Microsoft’s Xbox games console – delivered a conference talk entitled ‘Secrets from the Future’ (you can watch it at www.snipca.com/19716). The self-deprecating Fries presented his cautionary tale through a series of 100-year-old postcards that depicted visions of the future – so, basically, how the futurologists of yesteryear imagined we would be living today. Their predictions included flying taxis and underwater croquet, but no computers and no internet.
All of which brings me to my conclusion and the question that I left hanging at the beginning – why did I ask you to imagine the world 99 years hence? Simple. Envisioning the world in 99 years’ time is no more or less ridiculous than predicting what’ll happen in 100 years. Or even a couple of years from now – just ask Steve Ballmer.
But most importantly, 99 years was necessary to make my pathetic opening joke work. I’ve got many more rubbish gags to come, and you don’t need to be a futurologist to predict that.