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April 25, 2006

"The Future Is Already Here, It's Just Unevenly Distributed"

The above quote comes from William Gibson, and I've been thinking about it a lot lately, since it's turned up in the last two books my grad seminar in new media has read: first Peter Morville's wonderful Ambient Findability, then Joel Garreau's fascinating, overblown Radical Evolution.

Gibson's line is one of those sexy aphorisms that crystalizes a whole theory of the relationship between technology and society, like Stewart Brand's famous dictum, "Information wants to be free." But as with Brand's pontification, it conceals as much as it reveals.

What makes Gibson's phrase so appealing is the idea that we can get a grip on what is to come if we just examine today's cutting edge. To understand the future of mobile technologies, study how the hippest teens in Tokyo use IM. To see what ubiquitous broadband produces, go to Seoul. And to see the future of the human species, check out the research at DARPA's hottest labs (as Garreau did).

But there's something suspiciously self-flattering about a theory of history that so easily boils down to, "We technorati are already living in the future; now it's just up to the rest of the world to catch up."

Granted, this smug, monolithic vision of progress isn't an inevitable corollary of Gibson's aphorism. After all, the phrase doesn't specify who's living in the present, and who's living in the future. Perhaps it's Brazil's present that's the future of the USA: increasing stratification of haves and have-nots. Or maybe in a hundred years everybody will decide it's the Amish who really live the good life. We could simply interpret the line to mean, "To understand the possible shapes the future might take, study the range of ways people live today."

But when I actually see Gibson's phrase invoked, it's almost always being used to justify an author's predictions of inevitable social change to be produced by the inexorable forward march of technology. It implies you can't argue with the author's predictions of the future - after all, it's already here. And that's just a new way to justify old-fashioned technological determinism. Garreau's book claims to offer a range of "scenarios" for how the future might look. But what all of them take for granted, despite his protestations, is that the engine of history is technological change, and that such change is continuously accellerating (thanks to Moore's Law, which predicts that the speed of processing power will continue to double every two years for the foreseeable future). Even Garreau's less deterministic predictions start from the premise that humans will have to take strong action to avoid being pulled along by the tidal force of technology.

But Garreau too quickly takes the grand predictions of technologists - both the optimists like Ray Kurzweil and pessimists like Bill Joy - at face value. The past fifty years have seen many, many pronouncements of the inevitability of certain technological developments - from machine sentience to space tourism to the extension of the human life span. Each has been derailed by the irreducible complexity of the real world - by the mystery of consciousness, by the expense of space travel, by the relentlessness of mortality. Instead, the greatest breakthroughs have been in the development of a parallel universe designed precisely to escape the constraints of the material world: cyberspace. Given that track record, I'm skeptical that the next fifty years will see us finally get back to those flying cars and cancer cures we were promised fify years ago.

Moore's Law creates the illusion that technology is speeding forward at a breakneck, ever-accellerating pace. But a few minutes with Windows XP should be enough to shatter that fantasy. Processor power may double every two years, but that doesn't mean software improves at the same rate - or at all. Bloatware can make a Pentium 4 run more sluggishly than my old 386. That's supposed to be a sign of the progress that's going to transform the human species?

I'm being flip, I know. I'm sure we're in for profound changes over the next few decades, many influenced by the emergence of powerful new technologies. And certainly some awesome technologies - nuclear bombs, for one - have the power to radically and quickly transform our globe. But whenever I hear technologists make grand predictions about the future, I always consider how they may be projecting their own fantasies and fears. This is the process I describe in Electric Dreams as the dialectic of technological determinism: using the rhetoric of inevitability as a cover to authorize utopian (and dystopian) speculation. That's fine - by all means, let's talk about what kinds of futures we want to live in. But let's remember that the choice is always up to us. After all, our machines are just extensions of our selves.

The future may well already be here. But nobody can say for sure where it is, or how we'll know it when we see it.

Posted by tedf at April 25, 2006 01:31 AM

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