12-2-2002
Visions of the Future
Yesterday was my birthday. I haven’t received your cash gift yet, but that’s OK – go ahead and send it late. I understand. (Large bills are good, but I do accept checks.)
My dad called to wish me a happy birthday. As he does every year, he starts the conversation with some little vignette about the day I was born. (Yeah, I know it’s amazing that he can recall stuff from that far back, but he has an excellent memory. Either that or he’s making it all up…after all, how would I know?)
“I remember,” he said, “that I was scheduled to go to western Kansas to service a broken keypunch machine that day. But your mom told me I’d better not go, ‘cuz she thought you might be making an appearance. And by golly, she was right!”
Dad was a service repair technician for International Business Machines (IBM). This was about 25 years before the invention of personal computers, so the machines were not based on electronic microchips. Any sort of calculation required massive mechanical equipment that clattered and clanked and shot little punch cards along tracks of rollers before depositing them into the correctly calculated slots. Lots and lots of gleaming metal and moving parts. (See Doris Day in “That Touch of Mink” if you want to see what happens when one of those machines goes berserk.) My dad was one of the guys in a white shirt and tie who went out to the customer’s site with a clipboard and a bicep-building box of tools to fix the consarn contraptions when something got discombobulated.
He did stay in town, though, and was there at Grace Memorial Hospital when I was born. I haven’t ever asked him how badly western Kansas was affected by his refusal to go on that particular service call, but I can tell you that even today, it’s pretty much a wasteland out there.
Anyway, this conversation led to other memories. He told of how he used to ride a horse to the local one-room schoolhouse. He reminisced of the days before they could afford a radio – how his family used to gather around an old apple crate and listen as one of the neighbor kids hid behind it and talked or sang, pretending that the sounds were wafting through the ether from exotic places like Chicago or Kansas City.
That was long ago. Within his lifetime, he’s seen progress from candles to lasers; from crackly AM radio to HDTV; from slide rules to virtual reality goggles. Pretty amazing.
I love hearing him talk about how things used to be. “Tell me more about those old days,” I ask him. “Did you think the world would be like this now?”
It’s a question he has actually thought about. After he left the farm and got his college degree, my father worked as an aerospace engineer. As an early technology enthusiast, he subscribed to magazines such as Popular Science. I remember looking through those magazines as a kid (right after I finished looking through the National Geographic to see if there were any naked, er, I mean, any of those spectacular nature photos).
Popular Science and its brethren feature articles about how technology will change life in the future. According to such magazines from my youth (and similar newsreels, etc.), by the year 2000, here are some of the things we were to expect:
Videotelephones. These were supposed to be fully incorporated into our lives by the mid 1980s. Sure, the technology exists today, but the idea is still struggling for a foothold. Technology is one thing; answering the videophone in your underwear is another.
Solar energy. Everything was supposed to be totally solar powered. While solar technology is readily available today, the anticipated switchover will not happen until the economics of solar vs. petroleum have changed. Some companies (www.itnes.com) are doing some very promising work on making the technology more accessible, but the normal man-on-the-street doesn’t care enough to pay extra for clean power. Yet.
Indestructible Roads and 100% Safe Automobiles. One article I read said that highways made of recycled plastic could last for thousands of years. No more asphalt. And cars would all have radio-based guidance systems that could automatically detect every other car and direct each vehicle through the safest and most efficient route to its destination. The “driver” would then be able to have several cocktails in the comfort of the climate-controlled cabin, while listening to the future’s version of Mitch Miller and Harry Belefonte.
Personal rocket cars. Wait, we won’t need the indestructible roads. Heck, by the year 2000, we should have entered the Jetson’s society. Maybe not quite to the level of technology where your car that folds up into a briefcase, but at least we should all be able to fly around without having to worry about pedestrians or surface traction. Some even thought that personal travel to the colonies on the moon would be a commonplace occurrence. (Oh, yeah, everyone was quite certain that there’d be colonies on the moon. Maybe even Mars. Or on Venus, in the likely event that it did indeed harbor earthlike conditions under the cloud cover.)
Computers. In the 1960s, it seemed possible that most every company would own (or perhaps share) a computer. These all-powerful, building-sized thinking machines would be able to do hundreds of calculations per second, and might even be able to hook into ultra-fast printing presses that could turn out a printed page in less than a day. By the year 2100, there might even be machines capable of recognizing human speech. These amazing brains could then power robots that could help build cars, assemble toaster ovens, and dial rotary telephones faster than a human possibly could.
Hmmm.
Am I disappointed that some of these predictions were so far off the mark? Well…yeah, I guess I am. We really should have colonies on the moon. We really should have solar powered…everything. We really should have wiped out potholes by now.
(OK, the whole computer thing has gone much better than planned. And that groovy microwave oven thing has turned out to be quite the innovation, too. None of the magazines I was reading back then picked up on those ideas. Of course, nobody thought Disco would ever die, either.)
The problem with prognostication comes from trying to make predictions based on technology, without understanding the economics that drive the investment in innovation. And I’m not going to try. But sometimes I do find myself wondering what the future holds for me and the members of my generation. I’m already telling my son stories of the hardships we faced before the remote control was invented. And I’m not sure he believes me when I tell him that the concepts of “games” for us nearly always involved playing with cards or dice—rather than joysticks and DVDs.
But regardless of the advent of new technologies as many more years go by, I’m looking forward to calling my kid every year on his birthday. Whether we have those conversations on a landline phone, a cell phone, or even a videophone, I’m hoping he’ll say, “Tell me more about the old days, Dad.”
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