What of the present generation? For a long time, I must admit, I was a little contemptuous of their preoccupation with the moment, their immersion in chattering technologies, their obliviousness towards times-to-come save where their own material wellbeing and the flights of fashion were concerned. One day, at one of those gatherings of smartest-in-the-land Year 10s I am asked to attend now and then, I had a revelation. After being introduced by a teacher as ‘someone who needs no introduction’ (I was as familiar as Tycho Brahe to the eye-rolling, lounging youth), I got up to speak. When I asked the youngsters about scientific ideas, they insisted nothing would get their attention unless ‘it has something to do with my own life’! Were these just airheads, waiting in line to become the next lot of determinedly mindless consumers? Had they any horizon beyond Planet Self?
I asked them about the future. They looked down, their faces suddenly still. They said, nearly all of them, they did not expect to see a future. They did not think they would make old bones. Everything was too big, too bleak. The environment, they said, is kaput, the day’s news too ghastly. I was taken aback. No wonder the cynical hedonism. To quote Paul Ehrlich (whom they’d never heard of) ‘If you must go on the Titanic, you might as well travel first class!’
We seem to have abolished the future yet again. Indeed, our innovation, our inventiveness, according to some authorities, appears to have reached a new historic low after the triumphs of the late nineteenth century and twentieth century. We may be trying to supply a voracious market, but we are not even pretending to build tomorrow.
My answer, and this small book, is that without that step we forfeit what possibilities remain. We become less human.
Isn’t that a contradiction? If we have spent all but a couple of hundred years out of two hundred millennia simply trying to cope with the present, why is it now a human necessity to look forward and act accordingly? The answer is that we have changed.
For the first time in human history a man or a woman can get access to nearly all knowledge, going back to the beginning of time. That makes modern people more than mere shuttlecocks of circumstance. Life is no longer a matter of escaping the sabre-toothed tiger. We have become time lords.
That we can change the future also comes with a responsibility. There is plenty of evidence that drifting complacently in whatever direction the market dictates is both lazy and perilous. The market may be the vehicle of a kind of democracy, but it is an inadequate one and its time horizon is puny.
The danger is that the natural world on which we depend will be changed disastrously and that the primitive characteristics that brought us through the triage of history will crush those characteristics we developed in our more recent Enlightenment. The thug will have beaten the thinker, the bomb the idea. This is what our bewildered younger generation may have recognised, almost intuitively. Hope is scarce.
That is why the future matters.
1. The Future of Communication – Beyond Babel?
I asked Rupert Murdoch, who had just bought the New York Post, about the difference between the Post and the New York Times and he said, ‘Show me an intellectual newspaper and I’ll show you a dead newspaper.’ I say ‘Show me an intellectual television program and I’ll show you a dead one.’
– Ray Martin, The Bulletin, 9 April 1996
It is 2027. You are coming back from one of your occasional days in the ‘office’ and want to catch up with the world. Your home media console has assembled a few programs, sound and vision, that it knows you like, just as Nicholas Negroponte and Bill Gates promised it would in the 1990s. It has also listed a few it feels (yes, this shining gear seems to have feelings and insights, though you know it can’t be so)… feels you might challenge yourself with-they have received star ratings from those you would regard as cognoscenti. So you have, potentially, a full evening to sample what’s going on worldwide.
Messages are spam- and call-centre free. Besides, you have filtered them during the day on your Hypertel. What you really fancy is spending a half hour on the BabelFish facility, where you are delving into ABC and CBC archives to assemble your own sound feature. You could have made a video one, but you prefer ‘radio’ and it’s quicker. You will end up with voices from the past forming an hour of reflections on how very young children learn-last month you assembled a similar feature on men as sole parents-and you’ll zip the result to a few friends and colleagues with an active interest in the topic. A transcript comes with it automatically. The material can be popped into the Hypertel (much like a combined MP3, phone, BlackBerry and smart card) and listened to or read wherever you happen to be.
Some of your efforts have worked so well you have offered them to the national broadcaster and they’ve gone global.
At home you are not being scanned by CCTV. Not that this worries you, but everywhere else is monitored. In 2007 in Britain, you could expect to be on camera and recorded 300 times a day. In 2027 the process is constant. Security has improved as a result. But do people fully appreciate the social costs?
Now for a pee. You are worried about both blood sugar and cholesterol. You hit the switch for ‘connect’ and the lavatory is now linked to the medical line. After a swift slash, your electrolytes and salts are registered at a clinic’s monitor 300 kilometres away. No alarm sounds. You do this with a tiny blood sample once a month, too. So far, so good.
In 2027, you are really connected.
Something revealing happened to me towards the end of 2006.
I had been commissioned by The Australian newspaper to write a feature on the year 2026 for its extensive series of supplements about the future. Part of the deal was that I appear, with three others, in a live discussion on Fox TV, chaired by journalist Matt Price.
I agreed on the basis that it is a good thing to keep in practice with all forms of media to prevent rust. On the night I was disconcerted to be asked to arrive at 7 p.m., a full two and a half hours before airtime. An entire evening was gone. I was also a little worried about going on so late, as I get up at 5.30 a.m., a habit fixed by a diabetic cat demanding a dawn breakfast and by the need to catch the early, gridlock-free bus.
On we went, after make-up and rehearsal, and I was fairly brisk in the beginning, saying I expected John Howard still to be prime minister in 2026 and the ABC to be gone. Then, towards 9.50 p.m., with ten minutes to go, I began to fade. I found myself looking dreamily at a rather adorable young woman in row two of the audience and drifting into flights of wishful imagination.
Suddenly, Matt Price was asking me a question. ‘So what d’you think of that, Robyn? Yes or no?’
I had no idea what he was talking about. So I took a punt and blurted, ‘YES!’ Everyone exploded in laughter. I then gleaned that the topic was health care and that Matt’s question had been along the lines of ‘As a pre-baby boomer, do you think it right that the younger population of twenty years from now should have to support the massive medical needs of all you oldies?’ To which I’d given the affirmative answer. Emphatically!
So, as a true, if somnolent, professional, I decided to escape the hole I’d dug myself into by following my cavalier reply with an even more cavalier elaboration.