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Future

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George Jetson’s Neighborhood

If any writer alive today has a handle on the future—what it is likely to be—that writer is William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and the inventor of the term cyberspace. I have just finished reading his book of essays, entitled Distrust That Particular Flavor. In a talk delivered o the Book Expo America in 2010, he wrote:

But I really think [that pundits are] talking about the capital-F Future, which in my lifetime has been a cult, if not a religion. People my age are products of the capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a product of that, If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.

The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on a hill or radioactive postnuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely … more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidia.

I think of Gibson’s capital-F Future as being more along the line of the old The Jetsons animated television program or the novels of H. G. Wells or Isaac Asimov. The future presented in those works is more a reflection of their creators’ times, and not our own.

William Gibson

I think that, because of his belief regarding the future, Gibson’s more recent novels have been less science fiction-y. Books such as Zero History are set in what appears, on one hand, to be the present—but instead are set in some not-too-distant future with multiple hooks to our present.

In a number of essays, Gibson examines our strange atemporal present, with fascinating essays on Tokyo (“My Own Private Tokyo”) and Singapore (“Disneyland with the Death Penalty”).

In the Year 2000

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It is always fun to look at how a previous age viewed the future. More than a hundred years ago, Jean-Marc Côté drew a series of illustrations to be used for cigar boxes and postcards depicting what the world would be like in the year 2000. You can view a selection of these pictures at The Public Domain Review, from which I have taken the charming “Rural Postman” above.

Far from having flying postmen covering the farm households of America, we are now considering how to pay to deliver mail to them at all. And what kind of fuel would all these personal flying vehicles use? And, given France’s horrible auto accident rate, who would police the traffic in the air so that an accidental sneeze or text message would not send flyers plummeting to their deaths below?

A casual look outside your window would demonstrate that the steampunk dreams of yesterday were not realized. We now live in a digital world, immersed in tiny handheld gadgets with teeny-tiny screens that contain our lives and distract us mightily from the business of daily life.

And our forecasts for the future? We are so tied now to a digital paradigm that we don’t see that it can—and will—be replaced by something else, and probably sooner than we realize. Subconsciously, we have internalized Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on integrated surfaces doubles every four years. But as we know, trends do not last forever. There will be a new paradigm, a new equivalent to Moore’s Law, and there we go again!

What will it be? Can it be, possibly, a return to analog? It’s possible. There may even be something which we haven’t yet begun to imagine.

Nonetheless, I will hazard a prediction. I predict that the future will bring new wonders and new problems in roughly equal measure. Certain problems that we now regard as insoluble will be solved; and new problems which will seem insoluble will emerge. Of one thing we can be sure, our children will look upon the wonders of the digital age exactly the way we look at steampunk. Those thirty-somethings tapping away on their notebook computers and iPads at Starbuck’s will look like mustachioed suspender salesmen behind the wheel of their Ford Model-Ts.