Say hello to Life in the Future

I’d like to introduce you to Life in the Future, one of my all-time favourite books, which got a passing mention in my diary on 26th July 1986, 28 years ago today. It was published in 1976 and still graces my bookshelf.

My favourite bit of the book has always been the double-page spread above, illustrating a Delphic Study from the mid-60s in which a host of experts were asked when they thought specific technologies might become available. Their answers were collated and plotted on a timeline (starting in the 1970s and finishing with ‘Never’), with markers to show when 50% and 90% of them agreed a particular technology would be in use.

The predicted dates were only part of the fun for me. What really interested me was which technologies had been chosen. My favourites – truly children of their time – were:

• Two-way communication with extra-terrestrials (50% of the experts were expecting this by about 2025, while the rest pessimistically chose ‘Never.’)
• Automated language translators (should have been done and dusted by the early 70s if you believe the study)
• Effective, simple and inexpensive fertility control (predicted to be available by 1985)
• Economic regional weather control (1990-ish)
• The widely accepted use of non-narcotic drugs for changing personality characteristics (somewhere between the 80s and 90s)

Re-read rather ironically from my vantage point here in the far future – some way past the previously mythical 2000 AD – the book as a whole provides a fascinating insight into 70s thinking.  The influence of the  preceding few years is obvious: the new liberalism and free thinking of the 60s, the 70s energy crisis and the expansion of nuclear power (the accident at Three-Mile Island was just a few years away), the rise of the environmental movement, significant improvements in medical technology  (the first heart transplant was already old news by this point), the development and early use of packet switching telecommunications networks, and so on.

Longer-term hopes featured in the study included the feasibility of education by direct information-recording on the brain, the breeding of intelligent animals as a low-grade labour force, the control of gravity by modifying gravitational fields and economic ocean farming to produce at least 20% of the world’s food. Wonderful stuff.

Despite the boundless technological optimism on show, the experts had to draw the line somewhere. They baulked both at the use of telepathy and ESP in communications, and at the idea of induced long-term comas used as a form of time travel.

Before long, I’ll be reading Life in the Future on a date beyond the end point of the study, which was around 2020. Compiling a list of likely technological change over the next 60 years would be just as difficult today as it was back in the 60s – but it might be fun to try (suggestions below please!).

Finally, it’s worth noting that while the study was busying itself with telepathy, controlling gravity and alien contact, it missed a few rather important developments that we take for granted today:

• Instant access to a worldwide network of connected computers – from a device you hold in your hand
• A system allowing you to search all the world’s knowledge – anytime you want, and from pretty much anywhere
• In-vehicle video and audio navigation systems controlled by a global satellite network

…to name but three!

If you were taking part in a similar study in 2014, I’d love to know what key technology breakthroughs you’d expect between now and 2080. Who knows, if we compile a big enough list, the Internet could help us run a Delphic study of our own!

*Life in the Future was written by Michael Ross-Macdonald, Michael Hassell and Stuart McNeill. I can’t remember how I came by it (I wasn’t keeping a diary back then!), but it’s essentially a broad and very readable look at predicting the future and how people affect it by the way they organise themselves and live their lives. I realised as I got older that  it was written with a clear environmental slant which was very new at the time. I owe it a lot.

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Why waiting matters

Diary date: 11th June, 1985

If you believe my diary, there seems to have been an awful lot of waiting around involved in living in 1985 – along with a fair amount of lingering, dallying and even the occasional bout of tarrying.

Mostly, I seem to have been waiting for friends who were late for something, but I also spent lots of time waiting for buses and trains, or for a particular book to become available at the library, or even for a letter to arrive. Waiting was often a pain in the backside, but it did have its occasional serendipitous upside – like the unexpected chance to chat to the cute girl from down the road who you never managed to accidentally bump into no matter how hard you tried.

Many of the things my 80s self used to wait for now sound distinctly old-fashioned. That boring half an hour spent on a street corner waiting for my friends to show up has disappeared altogether and been replaced by a preventative text, Facebook or WhatsApp message. News from my extended family now arrives instantly by email instead of days later by exhausted-looking letter. If my train is late, my phone buzzes to let me know before I’ve even left home. My holiday snaps are seen by friends and family while I’m still away – instead of weeks later after they’ve been printed out on special paper at the local chemist. And my parents used to have to wait till I came home from university before finding out much about what had happened during each term. These days, they’d probably be able to fashion a blow-by-blow account from blogs, texts and status updates – even if I decided not to let them be my friends on Facebook.

Given all this general speeding up, whizzing around and instant gratification, it’s nice to know that waiting for some things still takes just as long as it used to. It still seems to take around nine months between conceiving and having a baby, for example – which is almost certainly a good thing for all concerned. Mercifully, there are also still 12 months between Christmases and birthdays. And the average waiting time for a date with the cute girl from down the road isn’t necessarily any shorter these days just because you follow her on Twitter.

In reality, we’re still waiting for a lot of the important stuff in life just like we always have done. What’s really changed is how quickly and easily we can communicate about it with other people.

Given that anticipation is allegedly half the feast, the fact that waiting hasn’t gone completely out of fashion is no bad thing. These days, perhaps all we’re doing is sharing the feast just that little bit more.