Future Perfect
Robyn Williams
What next? And other impossible questions
With a hefty dose of humour, the reader is encouraged to consider the impact of what we do today on how the future might look. While the book isn’t didactic, and is often jocular, Williams makes it clear that whether or not the human race survives, and in what shape, is something that we have to imagine and work towards.
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Here we are, poised at the brink of the future, as we have always been, about to enter heaven or hell. Which will it be? Most commentators relish the latter, probably because hell sells, but many of history's bold predictions of doom are today jolly japes for the optimists. We haven't starved or blown ourselves up. Maybe time won't shake off climate change so easily.
When Robyn Williams ponders the future he has the benefit of 36 years' experience of presenting science for the ABC. In Future Perfect, Williams considers the possibilities for communication, science, God, transport, cities, sex, innovation, work and people. There's conjecture mixed with scientific analysis, sure, but that's the point. This book costs less than $20 and it's probably fair to say it contains all the stuff Williams can't shoehorn into his shows, so we have the paperback equivalent of an invigorating monologue over the kitchen table. Williams taps his network of esteemed buddies for expert analysis and draws on material published in New Scientist, Nature and The Economist. But when he writes about the benefits of putting his radio show back-catalogue online or how the plot of a previous novel of his has proven to be prophetic, then we're not so much dealing with a book "which conjures up the possibilities before us", like it says on the back, as a book which is part ideas, part entertainment, part rant.
Is Williams entertaining? Sometimes, definitely, but not all the time. When he confesses to writing radio scripts on a typewriter because it forces him to be succinct, the obvious response is, why not use it to write your book? And as for the multiple digs at George W. Bush and John W. Howard, well, anyone can do that – and everyone does.
Some of his conclusions are worth it: the e-revolution will make us less human by putting barriers between us; some science should be incorporated into every university degree because science is essential to life; everyone should have a go at being boss to counter a trend towards psychopathic bosses; and there should be practical sex classes at school. Want to know more about that last one? Buy the book!
Robyn Williams
Future Perfect
This is the first age that’s ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Introduction – Plus ç a change!
The sun goes up
The sun goes down
The hands on the clock go round and round…
Thinking about the future is not a normal human activity. This may seem weird. Why would the most intelligent and imaginative species in the known universe insist on being stuck in the present, marooned in the past?
It is not so surprising when you look at the conundrum personally and historically. During the first 200,000 years of human existence not much changed. Yes, we did nip out from Africa across the globe, occupying six continents, but that took aeons. The average lifetime of 30-odd brutish years saw little variation beyond volcanic eruptions or freak weather. Otherwise, in a world uniformly hostile to human existence (not for one moment to be underestimated!) the struggle was to keep your hairy and heavy-browed self alive and ready
Future Perfect for tomorrow’s quest for dinner. Five-minute plans were occasionally legitimate; five-year plans out of the question.
About 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, in several parts of the world, something changed. We invented culture. In both Australia and Europe cave paintings show a new sophistication, probably linked to the development of complex language. Leaving aside how this may have happened at the same moment among people so far apart, it is interesting that the works reflect a life integrated with the animals they depict and with landscape. The only gesture towards a hypothetical future is seen in religious iconography as we began to wrestle with the consequences of death and alternatives to oblivion. Life was still brutish and short, just better decorated. It was essentially reactive; innovations such as fire and cooking occurred only too rarely and (according to Professor Richard Wrangham at Harvard) were more a matter of improvisation than planning.
Which brings us to the beginnings of agriculture and civilisation, about 10,000 years ago. One imagines our clever forebears mucking about in the fields with crops and creatures, noticing the potential of full-scale farming, with its greater yield and fixed addresses, and so being inspired to take appropriate measures, fine-tuning as they went. Not so. The latest archaeological information indicates that agriculture was a desperate recourse in the face of environmental catastrophe. With far fewer berries to pick and beasts to hunt, our benighted ancestors had little choice but to plant seeds and herd goats as a last resort. The penalties for doing so, as Jared Diamond has pointed out, were poorer health and the onset of plagues.
Even then, with villages and farms and the gradual invention of necessary hardware, not much varied from day to day between the toil of sowing, the grind of harvest and periodic relief at festival time when peasants gathered for a grim romp. Seasons came and went, the ruling classes took their unfair cut; life went on. Only the odd battle or skirmish with neighbours gave some respite from the relentless repetition of everything, and only the occasional preparation for wars or strategic marriages showed much long-term planning. Even great cathedrals took hundreds of years to rise, outlasting in their construction those who had conceived them. Tomorrow always belonged to someone else.
Of course, there were prognosticators and seers, from the authors of the Bible to operators like Nostradamus, but they were less involved with ideas about a better future and more concerned with keeping the troops under control. The whole basis of belief in the hereafter and the awesome sway of the Almighty was that this world was but a temporary staging post; it was what happened next that really mattered. Utopias were beside the point. Present-tense dystopias were far more useful as frighteners than some benign promised land. This life is but a vale of tears, the message went: rewards will come in the next life. So fall in line, get on with it and accept your miserable lot. Trust me!
Even those prime innovators the Chinese were far more interested in maintaining the genuflecting obedience of the masses to whichever panjandrum happened to occupy the celestial throne than in exploiting the native inventiveness all around them. So it was that technologies that could have been adapted in a thousand brilliant ways (paper, magnetic compass, sandpaper, water-driven clocks, wallpaper, earthquake detectors, noodles, paper money, toothbrushes, playing cards, gunpowder, printing, movable type) were allowed to languish until rediscovered in Europe hundreds of years later. The people were endlessly creative but the leaders were rigid, like great Confucian statues, and society stayed much the same. In old China the motto might have been plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!
Not until after the devastation caused by plague in the fourteenth century were people forced to imagine a different way of doing things. From Florence, where nearly 80 per cent of the population perished, to parts of northern Europe where the figure was a scarcely less chilling 20-30 per cent, people had to adapt to a new reality. Where labour had once been in unlimited supply, now labour-saving devices were needed. Science and technology emerged as vital to survival and, with them, the twin requirements to think ahead and maintain an anti-authoritarian scepticism. Imagine how powerful this experience must have been. Practical inventiveness was needed to stay alive and new ideas had to flow to deal with a world that had been turned
upside down. Put them together and you have what eventually became the Enlightenment. This new freedom was the birth of modern science. Before then, pure science had not been theoretical musings, like those of a Stephen Hawking or a Paul Davies, which were then taken up and tested by the experimentalists. Pure science had been what relaxed classical gentlemen did lounging by the grotto without getting their hands dirty. Aristotelian science was more like philosophy, a matter of the high-minded gaining insight into the perfection of nature and the universe. Labs were for proles. The Enlightenment changed everything. Novel thinking was prized: the more daring the better. But so was experimentation. Hands-on was combined with minds freed. Galileo, the father of modern science, was a rebel to classical science; his cosmology affronted the Church, but that didn’t worry him.
Such is history: long stasis, giving way to rapidly accelerating change. Of the four hundred generations since the start of civilisation, only about seven or eight generations, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century with the start of the industrial revolution, have witnessed rapid social change. Before then we never had reason to think that profound change was possible, so dwelling on possible futures seemed the province of wastrels and effete poets. Besides, most people prefer things to stay much the same. Upheaval is discombobulating.
Which brings me to the personal. My own family has a poor history of longevity, especially on my father’s side. Men would typically expire of spectacular strokes in their forties; even my father, whose time on Earth was slightly more comfortable than that of his brothers, expired at age 57. I am now six years older than he was when I last saw him, a somewhat creepy experience.
Seeing oneself as a sprinter in life gives little encouragement for pondering the future. Quite the reverse: a kind of resigned stoicism rules instead. Add to that the common refrain of the 1960s, when I was passing my majority, that one should ‘not trust anyone over the age of 30’ and you can well understand our lazy, arrogant belief that the future would take care of itself. Then comes the selfishness of age. I may have only ten weeks, ten months or ten years left, so it is easy to say that global warming and Holy War are your problems, bambino! And yet…
What of the present generation? For a long time, I must admit, I was a little contemptuous of their preoccupation with the moment, their immersion in chattering technologies, their obliviousness towards times-to-come save where their own material wellbeing and the flights of fashion were concerned. One day, at one of those gatherings of smartest-in-the-land Year 10s I am asked to attend now and then, I had a revelation. After being introduced by a teacher as ‘someone who needs no introduction’ (I was as familiar as Tycho Brahe to the eye-rolling, lounging youth), I got up to speak. When I asked the youngsters about scientific ideas, they insisted nothing would get their attention unless ‘it has something to do with my own life’! Were these just airheads, waiting in line to become the next lot of determinedly mindless consumers? Had they any horizon beyond Planet Self?
I asked them about the future. They looked down, their faces suddenly still. They said, nearly all of them, they did not expect to see a future. They did not think they would make old bones. Everything was too big, too bleak. The environment, they said, is kaput, the day’s news too ghastly. I was taken aback. No wonder the cynical hedonism. To quote Paul Ehrlich (whom they’d never heard of) ‘If you must go on the Titanic, you might as well travel first class!’
We seem to have abolished the future yet again. Indeed, our innovation, our inventiveness, according to some authorities, appears to have reached a new historic low after the triumphs of the late nineteenth century and twentieth century. We may be trying to supply a voracious market, but we are not even pretending to build tomorrow.
My answer, and this small book, is that without that step we forfeit what possibilities remain. We become less human.
Isn’t that a contradiction? If we have spent all but a couple of hundred years out of two hundred millennia simply trying to cope with the present, why is it now a human necessity to look forward and act accordingly? The answer is that we have changed.
For the first time in human history a man or a woman can get access to nearly all knowledge, going back to the beginning of time. That makes modern people more than mere shuttlecocks of circumstance. Life is no longer a matter of escaping the sabre-toothed tiger. We have become time lords.
That we can change the future also comes with a responsibility. There is plenty of evidence that drifting complacently in whatever direction the market dictates is both lazy and perilous. The market may be the vehicle of a kind of democracy, but it is an inadequate one and its time horizon is puny.
The danger is that the natural world on which we depend will be changed disastrously and that the primitive characteristics that brought us through the triage of history will crush those characteristics we developed in our more recent Enlightenment. The thug will have beaten the thinker, the bomb the idea. This is what our bewildered younger generation may have recognised, almost intuitively. Hope is scarce.
That is why the future matters.
1. The Future of Communication – Beyond Babel?
I asked Rupert Murdoch, who had just bought the New York Post, about the difference between the Post and the New York Times and he said, ‘Show me an intellectual newspaper and I’ll show you a dead newspaper.’ I say ‘Show me an intellectual television program and I’ll show you a dead one.’
– Ray Martin, The Bulletin, 9 April 1996
It is 2027. You are coming back from one of your occasional days in the ‘office’ and want to catch up with the world. Your home media console has assembled a few programs, sound and vision, that it knows you like, just as Nicholas Negroponte and Bill Gates promised it would in the 1990s. It has also listed a few it feels (yes, this shining gear seems to have feelings and insights, though you know it can’t be so)… feels you might challenge yourself with-they have received star ratings from those you would regard as cognoscenti. So you have, potentially, a full evening to sample what’s going on worldwide.
Messages are spam- and call-centre free. Besides, you have filtered them during the day on your Hypertel. What you really fancy is spending a half hour on the BabelFish facility, where you are delving into ABC and CBC archives to assemble your own sound feature. You could have made a video one, but you prefer ‘radio’ and it’s quicker. You will end up with voices from the past forming an hour of reflections on how very young children learn-last month you assembled a similar feature on men as sole parents-and you’ll zip the result to a few friends and colleagues with an active interest in the topic. A transcript comes with it automatically. The material can be popped into the Hypertel (much like a combined MP3, phone, BlackBerry and smart card) and listened to or read wherever you happen to be.
Some of your efforts have worked so well you have offered them to the national broadcaster and they’ve gone global.
At home you are not being scanned by CCTV. Not that this worries you, but everywhere else is monitored. In 2007 in Britain, you could expect to be on camera and recorded 300 times a day. In 2027 the process is constant. Security has improved as a result. But do people fully appreciate the social costs?
Now for a pee. You are worried about both blood sugar and cholesterol. You hit the switch for ‘connect’ and the lavatory is now linked to the medical line. After a swift slash, your electrolytes and salts are registered at a clinic’s monitor 300 kilometres away. No alarm sounds. You do this with a tiny blood sample once a month, too. So far, so good.
In 2027, you are really connected.
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Something revealing happened to me towards the end of 2006.
I had been commissioned by The Australian newspaper to write a feature on the year 2026 for its extensive series of supplements about the future. Part of the deal was that I appear, with three others, in a live discussion on Fox TV, chaired by journalist Matt Price.
I agreed on the basis that it is a good thing to keep i
n practice with all forms of media to prevent rust. On the night I was disconcerted to be asked to arrive at 7 p.m., a full two and a half hours before airtime. An entire evening was gone. I was also a little worried about going on so late, as I get up at 5.30 a.m., a habit fixed by a diabetic cat demanding a dawn breakfast and by the need to catch the early, gridlock-free bus.
On we went, after make-up and rehearsal, and I was fairly brisk in the beginning, saying I expected John Howard still to be prime minister in 2026 and the ABC to be gone. Then, towards 9.50 p.m., with ten minutes to go, I began to fade. I found myself looking dreamily at a rather adorable young woman in row two of the audience and drifting into flights of wishful imagination.
Suddenly, Matt Price was asking me a question. ‘So what d’you think of that, Robyn? Yes or no?’
I had no idea what he was talking about. So I took a punt and blurted, ‘YES!’ Everyone exploded in laughter. I then gleaned that the topic was health care and that Matt’s question had been along the lines of ‘As a pre-baby boomer, do you think it right that the younger population of twenty years from now should have to support the massive medical needs of all you oldies?’ To which I’d given the affirmative answer. Emphatically!
So, as a true, if somnolent, professional, I decided to escape the hole I’d dug myself into by following my cavalier reply with an even more cavalier elaboration.
‘By then, of course, our bodies will be maintained by both nanobots-minuscule robots repairing and maintaining our insides-and by transplanted organs grown artificially in ear, nose, kidney, lung and heart factories. So the costs won’t be as crippling as they are in the present-day blunderbuss system.’
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