Tomorrow’s World Today and Today’s World Tomorrow…

Back in the 70’s and 80’s Tomorrow’s World introduced us to some remarkable visions of the future that now seem pretty mundane. Yet despite this success it seems that nowadays we have less time for grandiose ideas of how things might turn out in twenty or thirty years. Perhaps because we are so busy processing the innovation that is emerging all around us at a ferocious pace. Is that because we are already living in tomorrow’s world and if so what might today’s world look like tomorrow?

Hallucinatory Architecture of The Future from Dark Roasted Blend

Tomorrow’s World introduced us to the concept of robots working in an American factory and a host of tech innovations including mobile telephones, CDs and personal computers. The groundbreaking show was also the first to unveil a Swedish surgeon’s pioneering laser surgery and predicted the Channel Tunnel 22 years before it became a reality. Influenced by this and countless other fantastic fictions I remember imagining that the world of the future was going to look and feel very different.

Since many of those innovations have now arrived and become part of everyday living it seems reasonable to suggest that we are now living in tomorrow’s world. However I would hesitate to describe it as a world of the future, not yet anyway…

The obvious explanation is that we grew up with these innovations and they have been drip fed to us gradually over the years so we do not perceive a fundamental shift. It is also hard to describe today’s world as futuristic when so much of the world’s population remains trapped in poverty and under threat from the environment and disease. Regrettably it seems that the future remains one step ahead of us.

Image from Pakistan Flood crisis

The question brings to mind a very convincing presentation I heard once by an ageing American economist whose name completely escapes me. Given to an audience of telecoms professionals back in 2001 the central premise was debunking the idea, popular in the media at the time, that the Internet represented a major step-change relative in significance to the Industrial revolution. If I recall correctly he was suggesting that the Internet was far less significant than people suggested. He described it as a simple development on the concept of transmitting a signal down a wire that began with the telegraph and initiated the Communications Revolution in the 19th Century. So it seems that according to him at least the future remained out of reach in 2001.

But let’s put the naysayers to one side and return to the visionaries as they’re much more fun. During its heyday in the 80s the cyberpunk genre inspired a generation of geeks with its dark futurist interpretations of where technology might lead society. A future most famously depicted in the film Bladerunner and more recently in Johnny Mnemonic.

In William Gibson’s famous novel Neuromancer, people jack themselves directly into the Internet and wear neural implants that give them instant access to vast repositories of knowledge. Meanwhile another famous exponent of the genre, Jeff Noon, gave us Blurbflies that whisper personalised sales jingles into people’s ears as they walk down the street. Cyberpunk predicted a world run by nasty repressive corporations.

Image from Bladerunner

I wouldn’t go so far to suggest that these ideas have come true but Wikipedia and Google are giving us unprecedented access to information and increasingly all manner of devices are being enabled for networking and Internet access. The inclusion of Near Field Communication capability in Apple’s iPhone 5 means we may soon be able to pay for groceries by swiping our mobile at the supermarket. Surely this raises the tantalising prospect that such technology may one day be incorporated directly into the human body? Meanwhile, for better or worse, behavioural targeting, on demand media, Internet enabled Fridges and the existence of Facebook’s social graph are clearly signposting the increasing personalisation and connectivity of technology and media in the world around us.

Many people fear that amongst all of these developments we may suffer a dangerous loss of privacy and it’s worth referring back to Raymond Baxter’s prescient quote on Tomorrow’s World. When talking about CCTV he asked:

‘Are there going to be any private lives left in tomorrow’s world?’

On that note I was fascinated to find out that HP Labs are working on a project to make the Internet physically aware. Their vision is for a network of a trillion connected devices to be given the capability to sense the world around them. Terminator fans could be forgiven for thinking of Skynet at this point but being an optimist I see the use of such data being much less intrusive and far more positive than we might fear.

Spock with Tricorder (The iPad prototype)

All things considered it doesn’t take much of a leap to get from connected TVs and Fridges to imagining a world where technology is able to sense what’s happening around it and act accordingly. How long for example before hand held devices like iPads become more like the Tricorders we remember from early Star Trek; capable of complex analysis and interaction with the world around them. As if we didn’t already know it the future is definitely mobile and only last week Google’s outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt predicted an age of Augmented Humanity suggesting that

“unconnected devices today are no longer interesting”

So, whilst the world around me may not look very different, futuristic ideas and technologies are already commonplace. In the past few months alone I’ve read about chairs made using 3D printing technology and paper batteries that charge themselves with moisture from the air. I’ve watched a BMW that drives itself and seen a video of Japanese girls trying on clothes virtually using Google’s size and colour search engine. Last year the UK, US and Australian Government’s introduced the concept of sharing open data, Kickstarter proved an entirely new financing model and today FearLess launched the Common project aiming to redraw the rules of commerce using collaborative social conventions. Meanwhile mobile devices have been casually augmenting reality and the arrival of the iPad changed the face of computing overnight. I’m convinced Tomorrow’s World has indeed arrived and we’ve taken it in our stride.

So where does that leave the future, what will today’s world look like tomorrow? Things are moving so fast I find it increasingly hard to even imagine what the world might look like in thirty years and I get the feeling that futurists may have to shorten their sight somewhat. The future is probably just around the corner and I think its defining characteristics are going to be less far reaching than our predecessors might have imagined. Could technology be less likely to expand our farthest horizons and more likely to open up new possibilities within the world that we know now?

Two concepts are central to my thinking; connectedness and context. Much of our world is already connected but those connections often lack depth or meaning and context is providing new avenues in which existing technologies can be expanded and adapted. Social networks and location aware mobile devices have already begun to suggest how powerful the two concepts can be when combined but there are far greater opportunities yet to be imagined.

Slide from the Common manifesto

Perhaps technology’s potential may only be fully realised when it starts to look outwards into the real world in more meaningful ways. The energy we’ve put into developing new entertainment gadgets and building social networks could make a huge difference if channelled towards more positive projects designed to address the very real challenges we face going forwards. If the last two step changes were the Industrial Revolution and the Communications Revolution perhaps the next won’t be technological in nature (Wot no flying cars..?!) but instead a dramatic Social Revolution enabled by collaboration, science and technology. Surely the world can only be deemed to have moved forward when we have made common cause with our fellow man and used our resources to finally solve the big global challenges of inequality, hunger, drought, disease and poverty.

Imagine a utopian future where we have thrown off the yoke of our selfish past and replaced today’s increasingly out of step commercial, civil and religious structures with a futuristic new society built on collaboration and powered by benign innovation. You never know if we combine all the human resources that we have at our disposal it might just come true and sooner than you might imagine.

Further Reading / Credits: Tomorrow’s World / Retrofuturism / Augmented Humanity / NFC in iPhone 5 / Paper Batteries / Common / Kickstarter / Physically Aware Internet / BMW Drives Itself

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