Jim Baen's Universe

Nonfiction articles

What I’ve Learned Interviewing Futurists

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

Two years of asking people for their expectations about the future has radically changed my view of what is to come.

For decades I thought I had a pretty good notion of what the future might hold, certainly better than most people since I’ve been reading science fiction since I was in grade school, and have gone on to write several science fiction novels as an adult. But in hosting The Future And You I've listened to descriptions of trends that I had no idea were building all around me. I’ve heard of discoveries and innovations and areas of research I’d never expected. And I've listened to evidence in support of ideas that I’d previously thought too crazy to be true. Combing these many bits of data has painted for me a somewhat startling picture of the future.

Here are just a few of the conclusions I’ve come to.

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The changes we observe in our world will occur at an ever increasing rate. Not just change in the form of technological advancement, but all changes: social, economic, political, linguistic, you name it and it will change faster. This is because people will continue to be more and more connected. They will talk and share information and ideas more and more easily. And because of this, the changes which people bring about in every area of life will happen faster and faster.

Changes that would take ten years to occur today will be done in five years, then three years, then two, and eventually only one. The pace of life, and the sweep of changes, and the volatility of stock markets, will be overwhelming to some. These people will withdraw from society and seek refuge in quieter places of lower technology. But most will function at the more frantic pace; some will even thrive in it.

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We, and I mean every individual in every developed or developing country, will never again have as much privacy as we have today. From this point on into the future, at least for the next few decades, our privacy will shrink every year. And every year we will feel as though it has become invaded so much that it can't get any worse, and then the next year to our amazement it will get worse. And every little bit of privacy we lose, we will never get back.

This has nothing to do with our overprotective or paranoid governments spying on us; and has everything to do with the relentless progress of technology: cameras in cell phones, in public places, in every police car, and soon in ordinary eyeglasses. These will be increasingly popular, and the images they produce, increasingly accessible through networks—some through private networks and some through the internet.

Soon video cameras will be small enough to be glued onto the back of a bee or a housefly. You will find them in the electronics department at all the big stores. Teenaged boys all across America will release a fly camera into their neighbor’s house or the house of their girlfriend or the girl’s shower room at school.

Eventually the camera won't need the living fly to carry it through the air, and will instead use a robotic fly. Then it will go directly to where it is instructed, perhaps by joystick. And it will continue to shrink, eventually becoming too small to see or feel. Then it can be guided to travel under that woman's clothing who just happens to be walking by.

I suggest you enjoy the privacy you have today, because you won't have it for long, and you will never again have this much.

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Virtual worlds (sometimes called virtual reality) will become increasingly popular in direct proportion to how effectively they provide their users (or inhabitants) with a meaningful personal experience. The current limitations on this are: the power of home computers, the quality of the virtual world's programming, the power of the virtual world's computers, and the bandwidth available to the user and throughout the internet. Every one of these is improving at an exponential rate.

Eventually virtual worlds will look and feel and sound to their users as authentic as the natural world. For some it will be a world in which they are young and strong and beautiful, though in the real world they are old and frail and haggard. For others it will be a world in which they can walk and run, though in the real world they have no legs.

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Cell phones will merge with the internet. All popular forms of information technology will be accessible through cell phones and become completely portable. All TV shows, all radio stations, all newspapers, all video games, all commercially produced books, even encyclopedias and libraries. Any entertainment or information company that fails to make the transition to the internet, and therefore cell phones, will fade out of existence.

Books printed on paper will become like candles: decorative objects that we all love and give to one another as gifts but never actually rely upon for their original function.

As more visual entertainment becomes accessible through the cell phone, an optional screen worn as eyeglasses will gain popularity and become the dominant means of viewing TV and movies. This visual device will eventually be replaced by wiring the visual input directly into the optical nerves.

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Just as prosthetic devices have been developed to replace amputated limbs, so too, prosthetic devices will be developed to replace amputated portions of the brain. Eventually these will become common. Someday, after they become common, they will be improved so much that they work better than the tissue they replace. And sometime after that a few people—only a few at first—will begin to migrate their minds into them, completely abandoning their original organic brains. If these pioneers prosper in their new abode, others will follow.

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As our technology allows us greater flexibility to manipulate large complicated organic molecules such as proteins, hormones, genes and viruses, those people who today are hacking the internet will redirect their focus upon this new technology and begin hacking biota. The viruses they unleash upon the world will be viruses in the traditional, not metaphorical, sense.

A hackers usual goal is not to destroy—or in this case to kill—but to impress ones fellow hackers by disrupting people's lives in some dramatically visual way. But while a bio-hacker’s goal may be to make everyone in Chicago's hair fall out in a single day, or to make the skin of everyone in New York City turn neon pink, errors can be made, and those errors may be fatal to everyone in Chicago or New York City.

The worst news is that bio-hacking is probably not preventable. Computer hacking wasn't and still isn't. We may have to invent bio-firewalls and bio-virus-checkers to protect our bodies against such attacks. The only good news might be that such firewalls might protect us from nature's viruses as well. In which case we would never again catch a cold.

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Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that people either love or hate. There seems to be no emotional middle ground. Yet Wikipedia is growing at an exponential rate. As I write these words it is more than ten times larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica. Eventually, it would seem, that all human knowledge will be contained in this, and other wiki’s, and will be made freely available to everyone with internet access.

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The big screen TV will become ubiquitous and will get all its shows and movies as downloads through the internet. Not some, but all. The internet will become the primary means of distribution for TV shows and movies.

This will occur through a merging of the various TV delivery services. Cable TV networks, for example, will expand their offerings of internet services to their customers until eventually they become indistinguishable from the internet. The same will happen to the satellite TV systems.

Movie theaters will remain popular in their current form for at least a decade and possibly several decades, however, because people go there for the experience of "going out" as a couple or as a group not simply for the content.

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eBay will continue to grow through the next few decades, and will remain the dominant online auction house, though it will also grow in its sales of items which are sold at a pre-set price rather than by auction.

The only competitors to eBay that will prosper are those which sell things eBay refuses to allow. There are dozens of such things, such as fireworks, food, human body parts for surgical transplant, and Nazi memorabilia.

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The Earth (which over geologic-time has never remained at any particular temperature) is currently getting warmer.

Human-Caused Global Warming as a concept is extremely popular within the scientific community as well as with virtually all people who are either young or describe themselves as liberal.

The concept of non-human-caused global warming is not popular within the scientific community but is generally considered a possibility. It is moderately popular, however, with those whose life-style choices are blamed for human-caused global warming.

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More and more surgery will be done using remotely controlled manipulators which enter the patient’s body through a small incision. These devices will get progressively smaller, and be mounted on the end of a thinner and thinner cable, until eventually the cable will be as thin as a human hair, and the manipulators will be available in sizes ranging from that of a peanut for big surgeries, to a grain of sand for very delicate work. In this way surgeries will become progressively less invasive.

At some point the remote surgical manipulator will become liberated from the end of the long cable altogether. These wireless manipulators will be tiny remotely controlled robots.

Exploratory surgery will be done by these robots which will shrink in size over a period of several decades. Early versions smaller than a honey bee may be in use by 2015, and by 2035 they may be too small to see with the unaided eye, but will continue to shrink to the size of a single living cell.

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Learn More

You can learn more about Stephen Euin Cobb here or here.

Or learn more about his podcast The Future And You here, or here or even here.

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