Future Part Four

I was reminded by an article in The Globe and Mail that yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Queen Victoria's death. We think of Victorian era as quaint and outmoded; more than a lifetime ago, but it isn't. There were tremendous technological advances during her reign. Unless you were well off, though, it was still possible to starve or freeze to death.

While we don't have to think about the necessities of life as much as they did, we do have to pay a lot more attention to a great many other things. The range of choices we face are truly astonishing, even overwhelming. Our brains are designed to focus our attention on what is important to us, and filter the other stuff out. But how can one rationally filter out the dozens of different kinds of toothpaste within one brand, to find the exact item you want? Then do it again for shampoo, then soap, then aspirin, then the next item on the shopping list? Then do it again next week?

When you do anything too many times you get tired of doing it. Even shopping. Even sex. Much as consumers have asked for choice in their lives, I think it has gone too far. How much choice does one need, after all? No, the decisions are not life or death, but they never stop. This is one of the causes of our stressed lives, and our belief that the world is changing faster and faster. We keep seeing new things, and our brain processes them as new things even if they are just an updated product or service.

Of course, some things really are new, or at least new to most of us. Fax machines for example. They started being common in the late 80's and now they are everywhere. People wonder how business got done without them. Yet the technology was invented back in the 20's. They only became prominent because of that one invention that I mentioned in part 2. Of course, I'm speaking of the computer. If any one item would distinguish the 20th century from the 19th, it is the computer.

I don't intend to go into the prehistory of computers, but most people have heard of Charles Babbage referred to as the father of computing. Depending on which church you compute at, you might choose either Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as the inventor of the modern personal computer. However, the drive to pack more memory and computing power into a small box has had unexpected spin-offs. Who would ever have thought that cars would have computers built into them? Or that combining a computer with a clock would produce a device that can mesure a location on Earth's surface to within a few metres? Or that a computer and a laser beam would produce a compact way of storing musice and other information? Almost anything electronic has a computer of some kind in it, even a simple coffee machine. A computer married to an old facsimile machine produced the modern fax machine.

During the 80's people talked about the "paperless office," which makes us laugh today. Computers allow us to produce more versions of more documents, which we share by e-mail and the recipients print them. Computers have allowed the price of electronic devices to drop and drop, yet increase in quality and features at the same time. It has also led to the explosion of choices that we face every day. I don't think many people would want to go back to a pre computing world, even if it was a simpler place.

So what happened to the future? It arrived, and people didn't recognize it for what it was. We were (and are) buried in choices so we didn't notice. We kept thinking that it was supposed to be better than this. But our world grew and evolved from the world of the Victorians, which grew and evolved from earlier periods of history. The revolution that has come about from the computer is amazing, and I don't think it is over yet. We're still figuring out how to make best use of the Internet, for one thing, and we still have to wire the rest of the world into it.

Anybody reading this is living in what 99% of the people who have ever lived would call heaven. Plenty to eat and drink, unimaginable personal freedom, access to more entertainment choices than were dreamed of even 100 years ago, along with access to more goods and services than one could ever sample in a lifetime of trying. The least you could do is enjoy it.