Another challenge for sex, in future, is the one I began with: monogamy. It seems to me unlikely that any relationship that is going to last many years can reasonably be expected to be free of dalliance. If staying in thrall to one partner is your genuine preference, then good luck to you-you will have much spare time to apply creatively. If, on the other hand, you are the kind of person who is refreshed by a romantic interlude and happy to return home quietly (and women may often be more inclined to do this than men), it seems bizarre to wreck an entire relationship, home and indeed the welfare of children over anything so very nineteenth century as jealousy.
When I returned to my beloved Vienna (as described in Chapter 5), I visited the offices of the UN Population Division. There they told me that one of the worst influences on greenhouse gases was divorce. Every time a couple splits, another household has to be formed with yet more paraphernalia-energy burning, water flowing, garbage. In places like India, children are seen as their parents’ old age insurance-you have plenty of children so you’ll be cared for later on. The result of this, and the poverty that ensues, is there are 44 million child labourers in India. We cannot afford this free-for-all any more. Paul Ehrlich was right back in 1968. There are too many people. Six and a half billion and counting!
Who will make us face up to the future of sex? I don’t know. But I suspect educated women will be one answer.
The Hunches of Nostradamus
2008 Universal right to orgasm demanded by Swedes for inclusion in UN Charter.
2009 Robots replace girls in LA brothels. Men form queues.
2010 McBrothels open on three continents. Hookers demand compensation.
2011 McHooker (robot) in UK has wiring malfunction and pulps client’s member. British men line up for similar service.
2012 Pfizer launches drug guaranteed to make women multi-orgasmic.
2013 A-levels in Sex Technique offered at 27 schools in England.
2014 Marriage becomes minority relationship in OECD countries.
2015 McBrothels offer permanent companions designed ‘for your every need’. They can change shape as you fancy. They are solar powered and can be charged during the day.
2016 Richard Branson launches Virgin rival to McHookers.
2017 Fourteen per cent of Arab women turn out to be robots wearing veils.
2018 Pope agrees to sex for priests as long as no other human involved.
2019 Female Danish performance artist Stella Bang claims to have had 396 orgasms in one day. Found to have a labial South-East Asian cattle tick. Dies.
2020 Sex-free holidays corner singles market.
5500 Men and women become distinct species. (Again.)
7. The Future of Innovation – Inventing the Future?
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
– H.G. Wells
David Bodanis landed at the airport in the US in the early 21st century, survived the formalities and caught a cab. The radio was on and he heard first news and then some music. At that point something peculiar struck him.
His plane, a jumbo, had been designed in the 1960s; the taxi was really not much more than a car from way back plus gloss and widgets. The radio station hadn’t changed in style from the mid-1970s: raucous announcing, news and discs. The news itself covered the tribulations of the space shuttle, again decades old. Even the music following was good ol’ country and western, with mournful slide guitar and lyrics about dying dogs and fickle wives.
Everything that he’d just done could have taken place nearly 40 years before.
David is a friend of mine. He writes prize-winning books about the history of science-his latest, Electric Universe, picked up the Aventis Prize for best science book of the year in Britain. He, like me, is puzzled why we are not living in the space age (which began 50 years ago with Sputnik!,) but in Blade Runners, LA, a mixture of flash gear and squalid dysfunction. Trains crawl, planes are delayed, paper persists, machines break, drains block up, water leaks, tunnels fail and prime ministers hail from the 1950s. On the President of the United States I must remain silent.
With so much smart theory on innovation, why are our lives not transformed rather than tricked up? I spend my life broadcasting news about the latest brilliant technological ideas and David writing books about their impact and the people who make them happen. Are we wrong? Is everyone else living in a Shining New Age? I think not.
When I looked at the figures, it turned out that the heyday of innovation (in terms of patents per head of population) was in 1873 according to Jonathan Huebner of the Pentagon. The twentieth century slowed a bit and now, in the 21st century, innovation has dipped significantly. There are two reasons for this. First, the process of getting your idea or system up is tortuous: local rights, international rights, lawyers, manufacturing feasibilities… on and on. Second, there is a better payoff if you add a tiny twist to a proven product instead of going flat out to try to pull off a mega-innovation like an Internet or an iPod. I call this the Branson Effect.
Richard Branson has accumulated several fortunes by adding a gloss to standard products: phones, plane travel, pop music, finance-standard fare to which he gives a Branson Tweak together with lots of grinning girls in semi-undress. Now he’s intending to borrow someone else’s spacecraft to launch cosmic tourism. Branson’s boast is that he has done all this unencumbered by tertiary education. We’ll come to that. (I do, however, applaud Sir Richard’s moves to support environmental innovation).
A couple of years ago The Economist carried an editorial and devoted a section of the magazine to this effect. It demonstrated that the American food company Frito-Lay had made serious money by relaunching its corn chip with a curl in the corner instead of… well, flat. This meant consumers could now more easily scoop up a dollop of guacamole. Sales soared. The Economist asked whether making this simple, quick-return innovation was better than going to the expense of having scientists on staff doing in-house R &D. The magazine’s conclusion was that you could keep a bit of science-but outsource it.
The point about innovation, as CSIRO chair Catherine Livingston makes clear, is that a transformative idea takes a lot of investment and time to realise. And, as soon as you’ve launched it-the Viagra, the CD, the laptop-everyone knows it’s a winner and jumps on the bandwagon. Your market kill does not last that long. Better twist a crisp-an incremental innovation.
We live in an Incremental Society. Things creep, they don’t transform. Having avoided, just now, the mention of George W Bush, I must just mention the difference between the pin-point accuracy of the electronic wars our movies made much of in the 1980s and ‘90s and the utter shambles of warfare perpetrated by the world’s superpower in the new century. The Somme with lasers.
What about the innovators? Richard Branson, as I have noted, left school at sixteen. He was unbesmirched by a university degree and boasts that it is one of the secrets of his success-no second thoughts about subtleties. It just so happens that half of the UK ’s billionaires are also, notably, not university products. In Australia the ratio is similar. The last time I looked, seven of our billionaires (Richard Pratt, Kerry Stokes, Gerry Harvey, Harry Triguboff et al.) had been to some kind of college while eight (Frank Lowy, James Packer, Stan Perron et al.) had not.