Futuristic visions quickly come to fruitation

Technophile

By: Kevin Lynch

Posted: 10/29/04

Over five millennia ago, the first areas of the world began the slow transition from the Stone Age into the Bronze Age. Quality of life increased dramatically with the new technology made available and the rise of complex urban civilizations and cultural centers. Around this time, the first written languages appeared. It was not until the 1450s that this process was automated with the invention of the movable type printing press by Johann Gutenberg, and information was truly available to the masses. Two hundred and fifty years ago, steam power was revolutionizing the world, bringing the major powers into the Industrial Age with mechanical innovations. Fifty years ago, the Space Age was still only a dream and the modern world was still relying on industry to keep the world running, with vacuum tubes only seen in a few applications. All of that changed within a decade.

Politics aside, the world today is much different from it was fifty years ago, twenty-five years ago, or even ten years ago. With technology advancing so quickly in such an exponential fashion, it is difficult to accurately predict how we will live our lives in ten years, or even next year for that matter. However difficult, many visionaries have tried to foresee the world of tomorrow through many different mediums, ranging wildly from the mundane to the absurd.

Some futurists foresee a pleasant world filled with robot servants, flying cars, and many more innovations of fantasy, while others predicted an electronic world where humans were controlled by their own creations, as in The Matrix. While The Matrix may seem a bit too extreme in predicting the future, it is not alone. In Neuromancer, the science fiction masterpiece by William Gibson, humans have cybernetic implants and traverse a virtual world filled with data and artificial intelligence. At what point, though, do these insights stop being predictions and start to be dreams of an overactive imagination?

There have been several attempts made to address this issue, attempting to bring accuracy and credibility toward predicting the future. These efforts not only look at the progress made toward technological advancements throughout history, but also towards society's reaction to those improvements. Alvin Toffler, one of the most influential futurists, explored the super-industrial society that is to come. In his books Future Shock and The Third Wave, Toffler predicts a world where technology is changing at an extremely fast pace, forcing people to adapt quickly to the changes. As a result, information is to become the new driving force behind society. In addition, Toffler predicted that the material needs and wants of the many niche markets could be mass customized and produced "just in time", as they are needed.

So far, Toffler's predictions have proven correct. In less than a decade, the world has switched from a still largely factory and warehouse based world of the early 1990s and earlier to the computer oriented world, focused around the internet and the information that is provided through it. Rather than waste time, the world today is willing to pay to access archives of newspapers or full encyclopedia articles instead of spending time going to the library for free access to the same information.

This desire for efficiency is encouraged by the development of new technology, and allows for time to be put into more productive things to benefit the world. This cyclic relationship is exactly what Toffler predicted would cause technological advancements to increase exponentially.

The exponential increase in technology has been predicted several times. By analyzing the increase in technology throughout the course of history, it is clear that revolutionary achievements are becoming more and more prevalent. Just over the past one hundred years we have seen the publishing of the theory of relativity, the atomic bomb, airplanes, space flight, and the discovery and the mapping of the genome.

The list of innovations is far too great, but we have not only made amazing discoveries. We have also improved upon them greatly, discovering more knowledge and more applications. In 1965, Gordon Moore, founder of Intel Corporation, predicted that the number of transistors in a microprocessor would double every 18 months. To date, this prediction, known as Moore's Law, has held true not only in the semiconductor field but has also been expanded into other fields which rely on processor power.

Today Moore's Law is no longer a prediction. Instead, it is a reality which serves as a goal for which to strive and to pace our technological growth. However, there will come a time when the law is no longer a valid method of measuring progress, and conventional technology will need to be replaced. Quantum computing will replace traditional computing with transistors, alternative energy sources will become more efficient and economical in cars and homes, and nanotechnology and other new materials will allow for better, stronger structures in buildings and human replacements.

With all of the hype that is always being placed on the future, predictions of the immediate future are slowly dropping down to a more realistic level. People are more interested in what can be done now rather than fifty years from now. As a result, the imaginative world's fairs of the 1950s have evolved into more realistic technology shows, touting not only mundane improvements of old technology, but also extremely innovative designs and concepts designed to help bring the modern world a step closer to the future. Obviously, no one is able to fully predict how or when the world will change, but it is still always fun and useful to learn about ourselves and our needs and desires as a whole. Dreams are what keep us going, and without anything to hope for in the future, we will soon find ourselves in the middle of a second dark age.

Kevin Lynch is a sophomore in computer enigineering.