Last month, I envisioned a U.S. economy where a relative few have highly paid creative jobs and most everyone else is unemployed, their manufacturing and service jobs outsourced to countries with low labor costs. Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, is pretty worried about that prospect as well and wrote a thoughtful opinion piece for Bloomberg News about the need for American manufacturing jobs. You can read it for yourself at http://tinyurl.com/grove-opinion (my column is also online in case you missed it).
Lots of people are disappointed that the future doesn’t look quite the way people envisioned it “way back when.” Daniel Wilson wrote a brief book titled Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived, which covers marvelous devices like the jetpack, robot servants, globe-circling zeppelins and vacations on the moon. The good news, however, is that soon you will be able to buy a jetpack—actually more of a turbine-powered-ducted-fan pack, but the basic idea is the same: Strap it on your back and fly away. If you want to see what it looks like, visit MartinJetpack.com, which has both pictures and video footage. Alas, you’ll still have to wait a bit to preorder one, rumored to cost about $86,000 (which includes a ballistic parachute, just in case). They’re expected to go on sale late this year.
Disappointment with the future is to be expected, since it’s pretty hard to tell what the future is going to look like. Missed predictions litter the landscape of imagined tomorrows. We don’t live in plastic homes like the one in the Monsanto “World of Tomorrow” exhibit at Disneyland when I was growing up in Orange County. We don’t have colonies on the moon or on Mars, something that seemed imminent after man walked on the moon more than 40 years ago. The picture phone finally arrived, but not from AT&T (which demonstrated it at the 1964 World’s Fair). It came from Skype, Google and Apple (FaceTime for the iPhone 4 lets you conduct a video call with another iPhone 4 owner over a WiFi connection). Except I don’t find myself making many video phone calls, mostly because I work a lot from my comfy chair in the living room, and I really don’t want people seeing that. Maybe if I lived a more conventional, cubicle-based existence….
Robots were big components of the imagined future of the 1960s. There was Robbie in Forbidden Planet (1956), the capital-R Robot in Lost in Space (the 1965 TV version with Guy Williams, not the so-so 1998 movie remake with William Hurt), and Rosie, the robotic housekeeper on The Jetsons. The robots that actually showed up turned out to be a great deal different, though: manufacturing robots and Roombas, not humanoid sidekicks. Honda has been doing interesting stuff with its Asimo series of human-like robots, but it’s still a technological curiosity, not a functional replacement for a human.
OK, so a robot with human-like mobility and intelligence is a tall order. But we don’t even have those cars of the future that were supposed to drive themselves, making automobile accidents all-but-impossible. We don’t have highways with embedded wires that guide cars safely from door-to-door (like I read about in Popular Science when I was a kid). Instead, we’re driving pretty much the same way as people did their Model T Fords: with a steering wheel and two pedals. No joystick, no clear Plexiglas bubble and no tiny nuclear powerplant in the trunk. The best you can do is a GPS system and the “adaptive cruise controls” that respond to vehicles braking in front of you while cruise control is engaged. Oh, and OnStar, which will call someone if you hit something hard enough to deploy the airbags.
One impediment to the future is simply human nature itself. I remember how the future was supposed to eliminate ugly power transmission lines (to make room for our flying cars). Instead, clean, cheap electricity would be beamed to our homes from orbiting solar power satellites. Given the hubbub around PG&E “smart meters” beaming information back to the mothership and the alleged radiation danger of free Wi-Fi from Sonic.net, I can just imagine how that future would have played out where I live in Sebastopol. (By the way, Sebastopol: The air is already full of radio waves, television signals and random cosmic rays. You’re soaking in it. Please take a remedial science course. Thanks.)
Perversely, the future seems to arrive first in the most backward places (and no, I’m not talking about Sebastopol here). In Kenya, for example, people routinely conduct their banking via text messages from their cell phones, an idea that has yet to really catch on stateside. Why? Because Kenya didn’t have a highly developed banking infrastructure with branch banks everywhere—not to mention ATMs and credit cards. Just getting money (in the physical form of paper bills) to rural locations is a real problem in most of Kenya and other African nations. Want another example? Truly high-speed Internet to homes happened first in countries without a long history of home telephone service based on copper wires. One of the problems with the future arriving on time is the money that’s already been invested in the past. Things like telephone lines, highways and gas stations. In developed countries, the future fights an uphill battle against sunk costs and “good enough” technology that’s already in place.
Most companies won’t invest in infrastructure unless they know with a very high degree of certainty that they’ll see the investment repaid in the future. So, those companies who’ve invested in expensive infrastructure aren’t likely to bring you a future that’s much different from today. The government has traditionally helped fund the basic research that portends the future as well as the infrastructure investment (interstate highway system, anyone?) that actually makes it a reality. Alas, the government has its own problem with the future, called massive deficits (and an appalling overabundance of partisan politics).
I truly believe in the fundamental ability of technology to improve the lives of everyone. But flying cars or no, we need a future where people can earn a living that puts a roof over their head and food on their table. To do that, everyone needs a decent job. I don’t know where those jobs will come from in the future, at least if world population continues to grow unbounded.
The good news? Like everyone else, I’m probably completely wrong about the future.
