Anticipating the fantastic future
TODAY, poets write on their nostalgia about the past and with it the potent power of silence that permeates loneliness and prolonged solitude. The distant past, even the time long prior to our births, has that effect of moving us into teary nostalgic creatures, wishing for “the good old days,” imagining the dreamlike simplicity, peace and social harmony.
But how many of us ‘ miss’ the future? Often, many of us do, not with nostalgia but with a kind of excitement over the great expectations. The future is something which will unavoidably come, assuming that God tarries with the Rapture and the Second Coming. In fact much of what we called future two or three years ago, is already here, and what inventions we believe to be still far off are already before us, at least in the experimental or prototype phase. Søren Kierkegaard said “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
A little surfing online would show us that we are now in the incredible age of electronics whose wonders have far exceeded the fantastic engineering of the smartphone, whose operating power was unthinkable and ‘impossible’ just a few years ago. And the progress is accelerating, with the discoveries and inventions of new materials such as graphene with the facility of nanotechnology.
With the impressive advances in nanotech and 3D printing we can look forward to future abundance of products available cheaply. They have already 3D-printed the first complete house are already talking about building houses for only US$200! I can’t wait to see a future (within my lifetime, hopefully) in which almost everything is free. I know off a new Korean technology which is now offering houses which are fireproof, bullet proof and so insulated that it would be warm in winter and cool in summer – and it can be built within three days!
Certainly we have been moving towards that somewhat utopian ideal; within a few years we had dumped the public phone into the dustbins of history, and now most cybercafes have folded up and those still open offer mostly for gaming, not Internet much or surfing.
With WhatsApp and Facebook, we can now make FREE, simple and non-cumbersome calls to all parts of the world! And thankfully lining up at the Telekom office to make 30- to 50-ringgit trunk calls to the Peninsula in the 1980s is now a laughable experience. We are hoping that soon Google’s and Facebook’s promise to offer free Internet by beaming signals with drones hovering 24/7 in the atmosphere. Telekom Malaysia has now been anticipating the challenge of such developments in global communication and had been innovating to face the challenge of emerging risks of its old applications losing support, hence “these systems which have been in operation for the last 25 years would have to be migrated [disposed off].”
Rene Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom, admits there is NO way around the problem off losing telephone customers. The telcos’ first approach is to leverage on the shift to handphones but if we can make free calls without them why should we pay them a single sen?
But what fascinate me most will be the smart homes off the future. With them having solar panels there we will no longer have to be burdened by high electricity bills. Cars will run on electricity (produced by solar panels) so fossil fuels will be history. Those living near or on the sea will have portable desalination machines, so won’t be needing water supplies from government pipes.
Everyone will get their entertainment from the Internet with RTM and Astro having long gone into history. Even now we have cheap Iflix and many websites offering free movies and TV series, including the latest ones – all of which can be turned on, paused and replayed at our will, not according to telecast schedules. Now we can watch live broadcast of important events through YouTube. In fact anyone can now start a YouTube Channel and an online television station without having to going through the hassle of applying for permits! The old-model TV station is phasing out.
The functionality of the future home will be even more tantalizing than what we already have today. There won’t be any TV sets; with intelligent and connected nanomachines on the walls they become TV screens with the touch of a button, not 80 inches but 20 feet if we so desire. The walls of the house can change colour, or have the colours start moving psychedelically, becoming alive even more realistically than real aquariums of beach and mountain sceneries. Tuvie.com says that “the walls [will be] endowed with nanotechnology that can project outside view or a real-time scenery from the national park, giving the inhabitants a wider feel.”
Machines will ‘talk’ to each other to compliment each others’ functions. The fridge will tell you if the stock of fish, or orange, or beers, are about to be exhausted. And once closed their doors will become touch interfaces. There won’t be any case of the gates and doors left unlocked because they lock themselves. Nanomachines regulate the temperatures of rooms, the mattress and the blankets, hence there won’t be any need for airconditioners.
There will be rooms growing vegetables and fruits hydrophonically. Vacuum cleaning will be by robots. Peter Madden writes that “Intelligence will come from an array of sensors which automatically switch lights and taps on and off, order your groceries and even monitor your health. A central control system will manage the home for maximum efficiency, and show when the fridge needs defrosting, or if the micro-generator isn’t running at full efficiency. Houses will be interactive and fully wireless, allowing us to access data from any point.”
As for livelihood, the future promises incomes derived through the Internet by people who prefer to be internet-preneurs. Even today many people have become millionaires doing business online.
With high-tech holographic broadcasts, we will be able to watch football matches live in 3D, using the living room floor as miniature stadium in full-colour holograms. We will then be able to ‘slap’ or ‘kick’ the lousy soccer player who fails to kick straight and fails to score a critical goal. Or imagine watching a reenacted Battle of Trafalgar in full-colour 3D! Such technology will extend into exploiting the wildest sides of life, even the titillating ones.
When Eleanor Roosevelt said, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams” she was speaking of ambitions and personal visions. We can be quite certain she had no idea about the fantastic technologies that have and will turn life into a form which would have been unthinkable during her time.
But the future is not just a beautiful paradise of facilities and ease, but also of frightening potentials and prospects that may spell the end of human life on earth. But that is for another discussion.