The future they predict? Don’t count on it

Have you ever seen those 1950s pictorial projections of the future? You know the sort of thing — a family dressed in space suits walks down a futuristic street in the distant year 1993 as cars fly overhead and a robot lights dad’s cigarette with a nuclear isotope.

It was all rubbish, wasn’t it? It never happened.

OK, fair enough, these days everyone has a tiny walkie-talkie with which they can talk and play games with people on the other side of the planet. I’ll give them that.

But, on the whole, the future has proved notoriously hard to predict.

I was thinking of this recently when I read an arti- cle on voice recognition technology, which is apparently advancing in leaps and bounds in China. The article gave a scenario of someone returning home from work. The door opens for him automatically on command, and he is able to control the TV and other devices by talking to them. He can control his car by voice command, telling it to lower the temperature or recommend the nearest coffee shop.

I can’t be the only one who can see a few snags arising with this technology. What if the guy makes an inappropriate noise in his home and accidentally pops the toaster or turns on the washing machine? If the technology is eventually applied to driverless cars, what if the kids start making silly noises in the back seat and the car lurches into a U-turn on a 10-lane highway?

Artificial intelligence? The internet of things? Is it going to happen? If we’re so far ahead, how come it still takes hours to do a simple transaction at the bank?

A lot of inventions might seem like a good idea at the time, but many of them are destined just to be fads, enjoyed by a few trendies and ignored by most.

I’ve lived for a few years now and I can tell you that, by and large, 2017 isn’t all that much different from, say, 1977 if you don’t count the fashions and the phones. People still grumble about going to work, worry about what their kids are up to and pray to win the lottery.

Occasionally, technology hits the jackpot and provides us with something we really need. How great is it that we can now shop anywhere in the world from the privacy of our own homes, ordering exactly the product we want in exactly the size and color we want, perhaps cheaper than at the store in the nearest city, where we would probably have had to settle for something else anyway?

But then again, how annoying is it that a 30-second task can sometimes take hours on a computer because we can’t find the password we last used five years ago, and the number we gave for a telephone reminder was for the mobile phone we got rid of two years ago?

If we start controlling our whole lives by voice command, when are we actually going to DO anything? There has to be at least some physical effort in our lives or we’re all going to turn into lifeless, shapeless blobs.

Come to think of it, perhaps that’s one prediction that’s already coming true. Contact the writer at david@chinadaily.com.cn