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SF Author Robert J. Sawyer Looks at 2014
Alex writes "Canadian science fiction author Robert J Sawyer takes a positive look at a typical day in 2014 for Backbone Magazine, looking at where both scientific and sociological advances of the next decade will take us. Sawyer is a multi-Aurora, Hugo, and Nebula award winner, and was one of the first major authors to use a website to promote his work. Readers might associate some of these innovations and ideas from his fiction."
Article text:
July 13, 2004 - 20:06
It's 2014, and life is the same. Only better
By Robert J. Sawyer
As a science-fiction writer, my job is predicting the future. And that's gotten harder with each passing year. Moore's law tells us that computing power doubles every 18 months. If that holds up -- and i believe it will, with breakthroughs in nanotechnology, new techniques of producing three-dimensional circuits, and new substrates for microprocessors -- then in 10 short years, we will have computers 128 times more powerful than those that exist today. Can anyone guess how that much computing muscle, widely available and inexpensively priced, will affect our day-to-day lives? Well, let's find out.
Here are some of my predictions for a typical day in late 2014; feel free to track me down in 10 years' time and tell me i'm wrong!
Our mornings will still begin with waking up. But forget the old-fashioned alarm-clock buzzer. Tomorrow's bedside clock will be a sophisticated brainwave monitor. It'll keep track of your sleep cycle, gently bringing up the room lights at precisely the right time so that you'll feel rested, not cardiac arrested, as you awake.
Today, your coffee can be brewed while you sleep; tomorrow's robokitchen will have an entire hot (but low carb!) breakfast waiting for you. Also waiting will be an electronic-ink newspaper, with stories geared to your particular interests culled from sources worldwide (with foreign-language news automatically translated into English).
Of course, you aren't the only one who has to get going in the morning. Your spouse and kids will be taken care of, too -- with smart toilets analyzing their urine and sensor-rich toothbrushes checking their saliva to make sure everything is ticketyboo; most health problems will be caught early and be trivial to correct.
Your spouse might telecommute -- perhaps half of all white-collar workers will do so in 2014 -- but you might still have to physically go to your office. Along the way you'll take your kids to school.
No point quizzing them on facts as you travel along, though. In a world in which any information can be easily accessed anywhere, mere memorization is no longer part of the curriculum. But analysis of information -- knowing how to think -- ah, that's the ticket!Naturally, your electric car will drive itself, communicating with millions of chips that have been steamrollered into the asphalt covering our roadways. No more traffic accidents; no more gridlock.
Once you've dropped the kids off -- yes, learning can be done online at home, but socialization still happens best in a real school and at a real playground -- you will use the rest of your commute time productively, catching up on full-motion-video e-mail and reading reports (or having them read to you by totally realistic voice synthesizers). You'll arrive at your office relaxed.
Throughout the day, your wristband -- a combination cellphone, PDA, camera, and e-book display, all controlled by spoken commands -- will be your lifeline.
You'll have just one phone number, good worldwide with no long-distance or roaming charges, and the wristband will screen calls for you, with a computer-generated avatar kicking in to deal with most routine matters.
Still, even 10 years from now, much business will require face-time. No problem. One major wall of your office in, say, Toronto, will be a vast flatscreen, showing you your company's Vancouver office. You'll be able to walk up to the wall and chat with whomever is depicted as casually as if you were both sharing the same water cooler.
Your cubicle will have a smart wall of its own, giving every worker the appearance of having a window; yours might show real-time footage of Lake Louise, assuming that global warming hasn't melted the adjacent glaciers and flooded everything. And no matter which office chair you sit on, it will adjust automatically to your body's proportions.
Of course, we'll all live in an enhanced reality. T
everyday is another shooter.
Sawyer is head and shoulders above the bulk of scifi authors in taking on predictions that will or will not come true within his lifetime. But he could even be head and shoulders above so called "futurists" who can't be bothered even to register their opinions on longbets and foresight exchange -- of course, that's if Sawyer actually does so.
Seastead this.