Robots, of course, have been around us for decades – assisting surgery, cleaning floors, dominating production lines. Driverless and flying cars, super-intelligent sentient AI, cyborgs, augmented reality, smart cities: where are they? The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow’s Technology Still Isn’t Here by Nicole Kobie tells us why many of these visions have only just shimmered over the horizon.
A few more years, the companies and researchers and marketers always say, but things that work in the lab are not easily brought into the real world. The first flying car was approved by regulators in 1956, but here we are, still stuck on the road. Hyperloops require route-length concrete tubes propped up on towers in the sky – as technically infeasible as the hovering trains once imagined too. Impressive as today’s AI applications are, we don’t have artificial general intelligence, the ability to make a machine think.
It took a century’s worth of patient effort and computing advances to set off a cascade of inventions: driverless cars depend on satellite navigation, neural networks needed GPUs, wearable computers needed lithium batteries and so on.
In 1994, a German student was able to pick up people from the airport in a car that he handed over to a computer to drive, safely changing lanes and overtaking others. And yet, it’s one thing to drive on a highway, another to deal with streets of pedestrians, pets, safety cones and other confusions.
Automation in cars has been conceived at several levels – from the basic cruise control of many modern cars to San Francisco’s driverless Waymo or Cruise cars that can manage an entire journey in controlled stretches. But the car that needs no human support remains mythical. And yet, the book shows, some of these discarded dreams like the ‘electronic highway’ with charging cables, could have taken the world in a different direction.
Robots, of course, have been around us for decades – assisting surgery, cleaning floors, dominating production lines. They just don’t look the way we imagined. From clunky Eric in the 1930s to Optimus and Walker, humanoid robots are mainly meant for entertainment or research. Retail, logistics and security use automation – it makes sense to combine human decision-making with robot bodies in high-risk operations. Same with cyborgs: while bionic humans don’t exist, and brain-tech melds are still in hype territory, cochlear implants and pacemakers have helped many lives.
Meanwhile, smart cities have been planned everywhere from South Korea to Saudi Arabia to Andhra Pradesh but none have materialised, because cities are not made topdown by fantasist master-planners. At the moment, they offer little but efficient surveillance.
Who builds the future, and who decides what gets built, the book asks. Many of these dreams emerged out of military investment, directly or indirectly. Corporations in Silicon Valley, driven only by their shareholders, took charge of the tech future, and are now followed closely by Chinese innovation.
Obviously, the more diverse the dreamers and doers are, the more likely we are to have tech that solves real-world needs. Today’s billionaires want to colonise space or create fabulous cities on oceans and deserts – to fly over traffic rather than address traffic as a civic challenge. Not every human problem can be engineered out of existence, the book reminds us. But the pursuit is valuable, and it leads to random successes that could not have been imagined at the start.
