I fear for a future of rockets and angry sex robots

THE future, once that hazy, far away thing, is starting to crowd us. By the end of 2018, promises Sir Richard Branson, his Virgin Galactic spaceship will be welcoming paying passengers aboard. I remember when he used to be in the gramophone record business.

By the end of 2019, Volvo will no longer be producing motor cars solely reliant on the internal combustion engine for making them go. People will have to charge them up like they do now with telephones.

And well before 2030, scientists predicted this week, the lonely and unlucky-in-love will be turning to sex robots for consolation. That is assuming, of course, the androids are switched to consolation mode.

Checking in the rear-view mirror, we find men and women of no vision littering the highway to our present age of technological sophistication.

‘I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,’ Thomas Watson is said to have opined in 1943. He was the chairman of IBM.

Others suggested no one in their right mind could want to stare for hours at a box showing pictures.

Nobility

I should have learned my lesson when Apple sold more than five of the tablet thingies I said went out of fashion with Moses. Yet here I am again, accusing the future of invading our personal space, telling it to slow down, get its hands off. But this time I’m right.

There is a certain nobility, I suppose, in Sir Richard’s space programme. It is in our nature as humans to explore and push against and break boundaries. And, we Earthlings don’t have all that much time – only another five billion years or so – to find an alternative planet before our sun becomes a red giant and vaporises us. I guess we have to start somewhere in getting the public accustomed to interstellar nomadism.

But can we really consider these brief jaunts beyond the Earth’s atmosphere ‘space travel’? You don’t even get a leg stretch outside the capsule before you’re off home again. It is not exactly Star Trek. It isn’t even The Clangers.

And the fee for these few minutes of floating in a most peculiar way in the bit of universe right slap in front of our noses? £200,000 a skull.

‘We will never be able to build enough spaceships,’ said Sir Richard. ‘The demand is enormous.’ Seriously? Why? Give it time and the price will surely come down. Give it time and you’ll be boarding your tin can to nowhere alongside stag parties dressed as Darth Vader, buying scratchcards to win more space miles to contribute to that free orbit back to the place you started. Similarly, the electric car may look like the future but it has the past written all over it.

We already know what happens when products must be charged up to make them work. We forget to charge them up, we forget our chargers and we explain more and more of our failures to achieve goals in terms of devices without enough juice in them.

We know, too, that our devices run out of charge ever more quickly as they age and that this does not worry manufacturers one bit because they have many new devices to sell us. It worries manufacturers so little, in fact, that they introduce new software and sockets which don’t work with the old devices in order to starve owners of said vintage models back into their showrooms.

How many ‘classic’ 2019 Volvos will still be running in 20 years, do you suppose? Around the same number, I am guessing, as there are first generation iPods or iPhones in daily use today.

Insidious

I am not unsympathetic to saving the planet. But big business is unsympathetic to us. So there is something reassuring about a petrol-driven motor vehicle chugging away through the decades (through the power cuts too) and something insidious about the planned obsolescence electricity will bring to motoring.

But it is the rise of the sex robots we should be fretting about most. Already they are available at prices from £4,000 for your basic wham-bamthank-you-ma’am entry model to £11,600 for the ‘deluxe’.

Quite how the deluxe compares to Thandie Newton who plays what I imagine must be a very pricey love machine in the TV series Westworld, I cannot say. What I can say is we should take a step backwards from this science fiction grotesqueness. Better make it a giant leap actually.

All my adult life I have gently coached older generations on the smooth operation of computers, set-top boxes, MP3 players, smart phones and the like. Are we to imagine that, in the not too distant future, my generation will be seeking sons’ and daughters’ advice on having a good time with life-size androids?

Already some of those mechanised dolls come with ‘compliant’ personalities. How long before ‘not-so-compliant’ is added too? How long before ‘I’m not going to take this any more’ is incorporated into their software?

The worst that could possibly go wrong with a computer, my parents’ generation imagined, is you could wipe its entire memory by hitting the wrong button.

Mis-programme a sex robot and … well ... mind how you go out there in the future.