The Present Future Tense
Minority Report: information on a computer can be manipulated by a user wearing an adapted glove. Seems like a logical step forward from touch-screen technology (who wants a dirty screen?). The use of retinal scans also appears to be sound. Advertising billboards identify specific products for each passer-by. (Probably already possible.)
But the transport system? Cars run automatically along tracks, which is fine (surely we can expect to do less and less driving as GPRS develops), but they also slide down the sides of buildings and clunk/hum as big lumps of metal tend to do. They are unwieldy and impractical, and here, the logic runs out. Surely the least we can expect for our future is a light-weight vehicle. Something a distance apart from our current gas-guzzling beasts. And sending these cars down the sides of buildings? Impractical and a little messy.
The world as it stands is cluttered. In Britain at least, we can attribute this to the Industrial Revolution, when we came to the realisation that matter (animate or inanimate) was made up of solid blocks of immoveable atoms. If we could just harnass these atoms into good enough tools, we thought, then nature could be controlled. Materialism ensued; the collection (deifying?) of ‘things’.
Many dystopian stories make the mistake of assuming that our world will continue to develop in this way, cluttered and clumsy. But, thanks to superstring theory, we no longer see the composition of matter as solid clumps of atoms. We now see that matter consists of varying, shifting waves, and strings of molecules which are ever-evolving. Materialism is dying out.
A better vision of the future (as long as we’re talking about logical progression, rather than the obliteration of the human race) would be one of simplicity. Anti-materialism is already taking its grip on our world-view. We are no longer as interested in the production of ‘things’, and instead our focus is on the importance of information, connectivity and communication. The universe (our one) is, by nature, simple. It follows a set of mathematical rules. Slowly we are coming to realise this, and simplicity is beginning to infiltrate our daily life.
Most electrical objects are now wireless (can you even still get a dial-up modem?), small and efficient. We are reducing our carbon emmissions. We expect information to be at our beck and call, and we get cross when it isn’t so. Books are to be replaced by ebooks, CDs by MP3s, DVDs by MP4s (there is no place in our future for Blu-Ray). We will eventually come to terms with our mathematical rule-book.
A far better dystopian vision is found in Artificial Intelligence. Although the creatures who appear at the end of the film to rescue Haley Joel Osmond from his icy tomb are supposedly extra-terrestrials, they could easily be the evolutionary future of humanity. Their powers of communication, and the elegant means by which they travel, are far more logical to the way we live now. (Two caveats though: 1. The rest of A.I. is so ridiculous that it renders the end laughable. 2. To be fair to Minority Report, it is only set in the near-future, rather than the distant.)
Look at how far we’ve come, simply in the way that we record and listen to music. From absolutely nothing, we have gone through large plastic discs and reams of metallic tape and smaller metal discs and arrived back at the beginning, with nothing. We record music digitally, as in, we record music into nothing tangible. All in a hundred years or so. It is inconceivable that our lives will not become more and more elegant, and less and less concerned with material goods.
Evolution is a powerful thing, unstoppable and driven by chaos, and half the time we don’t even know it’s happening.
