The Future and Why We Should Avoid It
Copyright © 2014 Scott Feschuk
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Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0
www.douglas-mcintyre.com
Edited by Cheryl Cohen
Cover art and design by Dave Murray
Interior illustrations by Dave Murray
Text design by Carleton Wilson
Printed and bound in Canada
Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd. acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Cataloguing information available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-77162-033-8 (paper)
ISBN 978-1-77162-034-5 (ebook)
To our future overlords, be they robots, monkeys or Clintons
Introduction
The future!
It sounds so great and exciting until you give it some thought. That’s when you realize that the present—the time we’re living in right now—once was the future. Look at the calendar: politicians and futurists once forecast that this very day would exist as a utopia in which poverty would be eradicated, the races would live as equals and Nicolas Cage would no longer make terrible movies. The children of the children who were our future would be busy being their future. Or something. Point is: by now, life should be awesome and leisurely and you should be wearing a spacesuit and high-fiving your wisecracking robot sidekick. Except instead your dishwasher is broken, your goddamn iTunes won’t sync up and right now you’re reading this book on a toilet in your bathroom instead of where you should be reading it—on a toilet in your hover car.
Somehow, our priorities always seem to get mixed up. The future never seems as futuristic when it’s the present. We should be flying to work with our jetpacks. Instead, we’re focused as a society on producing 427 different Coke products, including Caffeine-Free Diet Vanilla Cherry Coke Zero for People Named Donna. Have you shopped for dishwasher detergent lately? Deciding on a university is less mentally taxing. Powders, liquids, tabs, gel packs. Not long ago at the grocery store, I came upon a grown man—thirty, maybe thirty-five—holding two boxes of Electrasol Gelpacs: one lemon-scented, the other orange. And then he, he … sniffed them. Our eyes met. Were we warriors in ancient Japan, the code of honour would have demanded that he kill himself on the spot. But we are twenty-first-century Canadians, a civilized and humane people—so the chore fell to me. “It’s for your own good!” I yelled, beating him with a Swiffer. “No life is worth living after that.”
Think of the brainpower employed by companies like Gillette, a division of Procter & Gamble. Think of all the scientists and researchers with high-quality educations and protractors who devoted years of their lives to developing the razor manufacturer’s 2014 “breakthrough” device—a handle that pivots slightly. Gillette’s Fusion ProGlide razor with FlexBall™ Technology is so powerful that it allows capital letters to be placed in the middle of made-up words. It also apparently “responds to facial contours”—unlike our old razors, which, when confronted by anything other than a perfect 90-degree angle, simply exploded into flames. The people behind the development of the FlexBall™ could have been working on a cure for cancer or for whatever makes Billy Corgan sing like that. Instead, they went to work each morning—day after day—to devise a razor that, by the company’s own best estimation, shaves facial hair one-fortieth of one millimetre shorter than before. So now men all around the world can wait an extra six seconds before they shave again. Thanks Gillette!
Because of the human imagination, the future will always amaze. Because of every other aspect of humanity, the future will always disappoint.
The Future and Why We Should Avoid It
Reason No. 1: Gadgets
You can tell that the pressure has been getting to the people at Apple. The value of Apple stock seems to drop every time the company goes several minutes without completely reinventing how humanity communicates. As a result, executives preside over launch events at which they perhaps just ever so slightly overplay the significance of the iPhone’s screen icons changing marginally in appearance or, whoa, the pixels are now 12 percent more pixelly??
Indeed, Apple keeps encouraging us to get more and more excited about less exciting products. The iPod was revolutionary. The iPhone was cool. The iPad was neat. To be followed by the … the … the iWatch? Really? Isn’t that a bit like the inventor of the wheel encouraging his audience to get pumped for his next groundbreaking creation: the hubcap?
This is not to entirely dismiss the potential of the iWatch. Analysts foresaw the device appealing to consumers who want all the convenience of what their iPhones already do, but with the added benefit of giving Apple another $200.
Okay, fine, the iWatch sounds redundant. But it may also be the best of what Apple has in the product development pipeline, which doesn’t bode well for future announcements …
Apple CEO takes the stage to unveil company’s new offering for the not-too-distant future.
CEO: Welcome everyone! We’ve got some exciting news to share with you today.
[Twitter buckles under the weight of exclamation marks from Apple faithful.]
As humans, we yearn to be connected. To friends. To family. To appliances, vacuums and casual sportswear. Apple knows this. We get it. After all, we are the company that created iSnuggie, the first fleece blanket with oversized sleeves and WiFi.
I want you to close your eyes.
I want you to picture … your toaster. You’re probably thinking, “My toaster is fine. It does the job. Why on Earth would I want my toaster to do more stuff?”
But what if I told you that your toaster could do more stuff?
[Wild applause and multiple orgasms from the Apple faithful.]
Ladies and gentlemen, Apple is on a roll when it comes to forever changing the way people live, work and stare blankly at things.
Last year we unveiled iCap, which used sixteen precisely calibrated sensors to finally take the guesswork out of detecting hat head. I am proud to announce that we have now shipped in excess of twenty million units of iCap 2, which does pretty much the exact same thing but has a little propeller.
Six months later came another Apple game-changer. And I hope you don’t mind me taking a moment to brag because, despite all the catch-up work done by our competitors, I can still make the claim that only iCouch allows you to update Facebook using your ass. Take that, Google Heinie.
Most recently, we delivered iShoe, the only footwear with micro-gyroscopic technology—so it can send a text message to let you know when you’ve fallen down.
And now: iToaster.
Take a close look. The new iToaster is breathtaking. It is elegantly crafted in brushed chrome, with rounded edges and textured accents. It’s a wireless router, a backup hard drive and a stopwatch. It’s a calendar, a lie detector and a sentient being that feels love and pain. It includes an embedded GPS so you’ll never again lose track of your bagel.
But there’s more. Today’s toaster manufacturers are wedded to the tradit
ional slot system—two or four rectangular openings, each designed to accommodate a single slice of bread. It’s been the standard for decades. It works perfectly.
And that’s why we’ve abandoned it. Instead, every iToaster will come with a grid of tiny slots that will accommodate up to thirty-two slices of micro-bread. Currently, no commercial breadmaker slices its bread this way, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s the industry standard, probably.
The new iToaster: spend time with it and you won’t believe you once lived in a world in which your toaster could not exchange sexts with your jam.
And I’m excited to tell you that all iToasters will ship with a free download of Toast, our new app, which shows you what your toasted bread would have looked like if we’d had room in our new device for any heating coils.
Happily, your new iToaster will have plenty of company in the kitchen. The joyous age of the Internet of Things will soon be upon us!
Tech nerds are super-excited about how, in the glorious future, your phone will be able to communicate wirelessly with your pants, everything will be connected to everything, and our world will at last become a utopia … until none of our technology works and we are forced to return to a barter economy in which chickens are the dominant currency.
Not long ago, Wired.com looked at some of the downsides of the so-called Internet of Things:
Downside: Security. A lot of these “connected” devices will not be well protected, meaning it’ll be easy to hack your toaster oven. Yes, progress will have been attained—but at the cost of countless croque monsieurs.
Downside: Complexity. My high-tech cable box recently stopped sending a picture to my high-tech TV. The cable technician couldn’t fix the problem. His supervisor couldn’t fix it. They brought in the guy who fixes the unfixable problems—and he couldn’t fix it. Together, these guys set a new record for making sounds that convey confusion and frustration. I counted seventeen utterances of “welp” alone. Eventually, one of them said: “Your cable box and your TV just don’t like each other.”
Welcome to the future, everyone! Now excuse me while I break up an argument between my iPad and my blender.
Downside: Privacy. How would you feel about your employer using “wearable technology” to track your movements? This would raise questions such as “Where do we draw the line on privacy?” and, among my bosses, “How long is Scott going to spend in the cereal aisle?” (I’d like to see them choose between Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Golden Grahams. It can’t be done.)
None of this will stop us. In the glorious future, we’ll be able to spend thousands of dollars on an internet-linked washing machine, a WiFi-enabled oven and maybe a wisecracking panini press of some kind. Think of the benefits of making our household contraptions more advanced and connected: I, for one, can’t wait to go online and read the Facebook status updates of celebrity-owned appliances (“Taylor Swift’s refrigerator … is feeling lonely.”).
No longer will humans be forced to open the fridge door to see if there’s any milk left. Instead of this taxing ordeal, we will simply log the milk’s arrival on a touchscreen keypad, type in its expiry date, routinely take note of its level, provide our mobile phone number and wait for the fridge to send a text message indicating it’s time to buy more milk. What could be easier?
The dawn of connected appliances has been predicted, touted and hyped for years now. Perhaps some people figured that appliance manufacturers had given up on the idea—but no. General Electric, Sub-Zero and others have never wavered in their quest to answer the vexing question that has long plagued us as a species: Why can’t I use my dishwasher to Instagram?
Believe me: I’ve seen these gizmos first-hand and they are a marvel to behold. Take Samsung’s internet-enabled refrigerator. It features a video interface that runs apps, displays news stories, creates to-do lists and enables family members to post to Twitter. If Samsung engineers can somehow find room for a compressor, the fridge may one day even keep stuff cold. Amazing.
LG, meanwhile, is introducing an oven that can access a computer server, download preprogrammed recipes and display them on a built-in screen. And thank heavens for that, because until now there has been no way to obtain recipes other than by computer, iPad, smartphone, book, magazine, cereal box, soup can, memory, guesstimation or grandmother. And who’s ever got any of those handy?
LG’s new refrigerators go even further. They allow you to use a “drag-and-drop” menu to keep track of precisely where you’ve placed each food item inside. This will be a godsend to all of us who store our butter in the middle of the minotaur’s labyrinth. And that’s not all. An excited LG spokesperson noted in a news story: “I have the ability to see what’s in my fridge from my phone!” At last, a solution for those who get separation anxiety from their pickles.
Don’t get me wrong: progress is great. We owe a debt to the many scientists and engineers who have worked so hard and sacrificed so much to ensure that modern refrigerators have WiFi. In our bold and bright tomorrow, no bottle of ketchup will be denied the opportunity to unfriend a leg of ham.
The visionaries behind connected appliances are building their industry on the indisputable theory that if you take one good idea (household appliances) and combine it with another good idea (wireless internet), you can’t help but wind up with an idea that is, at minimum, double good.
Sure, maybe we ordinary folk have trouble seeing the merits of one day watching an episode of Scandal on a thousand-dollar blender. But that’s our fault. As a news story put it: “It can be hard to explain to consumers all the promise of a Web-connected dishwasher or washing machine, but [an executive at Whirlpool] said they’re inevitable.” Got that? Inevitable. So stop not understanding why they’re building it and start not understanding why you’re buying it.
Those who question the viability of connected appliances just don’t grasp how business works. It’s about the relationship between supply and demand. When there is absolutely no demand, you need to compensate with an overabundance of supply. At least that’s how Hollywood did it a few years back with Jude Law movies.
It comes down to this twenty-first-century maxim: if something can be made with technology, it must be made—whether we want it or not. That’s how we ended up with the Segway, Cher’s face and Dubai.
As one industry executive put it: “We’re connecting devices that have never been connected before and we’re connecting them to you.” Why? Who knows. To what end? Who cares. The only certainty is that we won’t stop there. Next we’re going to connect your toothbrush to your car engine. Then we’re going to connect your razor to your vacuum. It won’t make your life any easier, but the devices will enjoy being able to talk about you behind your back.
This focus on innovation extends beyond the kitchen. The new Sleep Number x12, for instance, is a mattress so laden with wires, sensors and computer chips that using it must be like sleeping on the Terminator. And it’s always watching you. It uses software called SleepIQ to track your movement, breathing rate and heart rate as you sleep, which sounds pretty stressful. It then grades your sleep performance, saying you seem pretty stressed. The bed retails for $7,999—which sounds like a lot, but you can’t put a price on waking up to a fact-based analysis of how your terrible sleeping patterns are leading you to an early grave.
There’s more. The Sleep Number x12 uses a video screen to offer helpful tips, such as: “To prevent trips to the bathroom, limit how much liquid you drink after 8 PM.” Thanks for the brainwave, super-bed.
The Sleep Number x12 was one of the many futuristic products featured at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Another popular item? Vibrating underwear for women. Manufactured by OhMiBod, the vibrating pads involved are operated through a smartphone app. Not to worry, ladies: your boss at work is vain enough to assume it’s his PowerPoint presentation that’s putting a smile on your face.
Personal
ly, my interest lies with the people who designed the vibrating item. I’d like to have been there with them over the holidays when their extended families sat down for dinner.
Grandma: So, Brian, I hear you’ve got a new job.
Brian: Yes, Grandma.
Grandma: It’s great to see you using the education that your parents sacrificed so much to pay for. Tell us all about this job.
Brian: Um, it’s pretty technical. I don’t want to bore you.
Grandma: Nonsense. Spare no detail.
Brian: Well, I guess you could say it involves advanced sensors that are activated via wireless technology.
Grandma: And these sensors are used to … what? Diagnose medical ailments? Improve productivity? Solve irrigation issues that undermine agricultural prog—
Brian: I make vibrating underpants for ladies, Grandma.
[There is a pause.]
Aunt Heather: Go on.
Or, for $222, you can buy a plastic figurine called Mother, which looks like an overweight bowling pin. With glowing eyes, Mother helps you keep track of important things like how long you brushed your teeth, whether you’ve consumed enough water, and what you just wasted $222 on.
Another problem that needed solving: some of us tend to linger outdoors in summer. Currently, the only way to avoid spending too much time in the sun is to engage in the antiquated process known as “thinking.”
Thanks to a company called Netatmo, you can instead spend $100 on a bracelet that tracks UV exposure and lets you know via smartphone when to go inside. You just have to think long enough to put on the bracelet and sync it to your smartphone and bring along your phone and make sure the bracelet is exposed to the sun and make sure your phone is nearby at all times and remember to check for updates. Simplicity at last!
Another emerging trend is wearable technology. Companies are breaking new ground here. For instance, EroGear high-heeled shoes feature a band of LED lights that you can configure to display light patterns or even show off your Twitter feed. So now everyone in the dance club can see you’re terrible at fashion and spelling.
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