July 2000
Just for some summer fun, I thought I’d answer some of the questions I get along the lines of: ‘What happened to the glorious future we were promised 25 years ago?’
Why don’t we have a 25 hour work week and 8 weeks of vacation? George Jetson worked at Spacely Sprockets. He arrived at 11 a.m., put his feet up on his desk until lunch, pushed a button, and then went home. Nobody ever asked: If all George Jetson ever does is push a button, who needs George Jetson? Automation, combined with competition for routine work from developing countries that have wage rates that are a fraction of ours, has replaced a lot of routine jobs, and will replace even more as time goes on. The jobs that remain are more demanding, and allow less feet-on-the-desk time. As a result, the 25 hour work week and the eight week vacation will remain science fiction for the foreseeable future.
Why can’t we vacation on the moon yet? The space race was run primarily for public relations purposes. Once the U.S. won the race to put a man on the moon, the public lost interest, and budget cuts followed, so that for the last 20 years very little has happened. However, since 1994 interest in space has been rekindled, possibly because of the cumulative effects of Ron Howard’s movie of Apollo 13 , plus Star Wars, Star Trek, and Babylon 5, along with all their imitators. There is now a blossoming new interest in space, both for commercial exploitation, and for tourism, so that you may be able to vacation on the moon within the next 20 years. But it will cost you millions of dollars, and you may find it much more boring than you thought.
Why can’t my car drive me to work while I read or snooze? There are groups working on computer-driven cars right now, and this may well become an option, starting with luxury cars, within the next 10 years. However, the real question is: are we prepared to relinquish the wheel to a computer? I don’t know the answer to this question, but it is the crucial one because technology doesn’t drive consumers; consumers drive technology. Self-driving cars will be possible within ten years, perhaps even sooner, but consumer preferences, plus legal and insurance issues, will probably delay their arrival.
Whatever happened to Rosie the Robot, who was going to do my housework? Trying to produce a stereotypical robot, capable of doing the broad range of cleaning tasks around the house, turns out to be much tougher than we thought. Hence, while we can have robots bolted to the floor that do limited, specific jobs on an automobile assembly line, building a robot that can move around without bumping into things, or destroying things in the process is massively more difficult.
Sony is marketing a robot dog, Akio, for about $2,000 that will walk around and do a few, limited tricks, and one of the 1998 Christmas’ big toys was a Lego set with a computer controller that allowed you to build your own programmable robot. But it’s a long, long jump from there to Rosie. I don’t expect to see a Rosie-type robot anytime within the next 20 years, principally because I don’t think people will pay the high cost of owning one, and hence commercial development won’t go in that direction.
What happened to the paperless office? This is a prime example of something that has been possible for some time, but that nobody wants. Human beings seem to insist on having printed copies of anything and everything done electronically, so that the computer revolution has produced more paper, not less, none of which is necessary given the level of current technology. Ironically, because of the speed with which competition now moves, companies are being forced to do things electronically – without paper – or else slow the flow of information to unacceptable levels. However, they still back it all up with paper copy.
Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction writer and visionary, is credited with saying ‘The future isn’t what it used to be.’ Now you know why.
by Richard Worzel, futurist
© Copyright, IF Research, July 17, 2000
