Sun, 01 May 2011
The Future is Here
This Saturday (2011-04-30) I was fortunate enough to attend the first Bar Camp Canterbury. Various talks were on offer ranging in subjects from Load testing websites, to building clocks with Arduinos, to Growing your own Vegetables. But, amongst all of these talks there was one which I found particully interesting. It was given by Proactive Paul, and the title was simply "The year 5001". The session was a discussion group on what we all thought the world would be like in the year 5001.
As you might expect from a group of geeks that probably read to much scifi, alot of the answers were almost text book, or atleast blatently lifted from Peter F Hamilton's Nights Dawn Trilogy but in all this, there was an exchange between two people, and it started like this:
Where's my flying car?
The response was as flippant as it was cliche:
"The future is already here. It just isn't evenly distributed." — William Gibson
But a seed was set. Over many beers in the pub after the event, the thought festered. Laying in bed trying to stop the room spin, the thought festered. It hit me. Gibson is right. The future is here, we're just looking in the wrong place. Take for example the idea of the flying car. The stylised view of this imparted upon us from many a scifi work makes us imagine a small personalised flying vehicle we can take from our home to business. We have that. For the rich, there is the private helicopter. No longer is the Helicopter the sole preserve of Governments and Military. Infact no longer is it the sole preserve of the über rich, with small helicopters being available for the price of a high end BMW. But what of the rest of us? Well as with how the car was for the rich in the beginning, there was for everyone else the Omnibus. Well, the same applies to flying car. Jenson Button can fly from his home in the Channel Islands to the Mclaren Technical Centre, but you and I? We take Ryanair. That is our flying car. It is here.
What about other scifi concepts? What about teleportation? Well, that's here too. Ok we aren't quite disassembling an individual atom by atom, and transmitting them to a destination and reassembling them. But, we are transmitting the essence of people round the world every day. It's called Skype. My Father can sit at his computer in the UK, and transmit his "essence" to my sister in Australia, and at the same time she can send the essence of her and my Nephew back in the oppsite direction. And it is the use of the word "Essence" there that is important. We don't need to transmit the whole human, we just need to transmit their avatar (thank you Snow Crash). But, and most importantly, that is conceptually our teleportation. I have my doubts that full on teleportation as envisage by Star Trek will happen, I suspect that the simple "very funny scotty, now beam down my clothes" element will put pay to any chances of it happening, but we don't need it, we can achieve the same effects now, with our technology. The future is here. We just don't realise it
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