"You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered.

That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going to liberate us all from economic drudgery, what's the point of "getting in early"? It'll still be there tomorrow and I can join the journey whenever it is sensible for me.

Part of the crypto grift was telling people to "Have Fun Staying Poor". That weaponisation of FOMO was an insidious way to get people to drop their scepticism.

I feel the same way about the current crop of AI tools. I've tried a bunch of them. Some are good. Most are a bit shit. Few are useful to me as they are now. I'm utterly content to wait until their hype has been realised. Why should I invest in learning the equivalent of WordStar for DOS when Google Docs is coming any-day-now?

If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours.

I didn't use Git when it first came out. Once it was stable and jobs began demanding it, I picked it up. Might I be 7% more effective if I'd suffered through the early years? Maybe. But so what? I could just as easily have wasted my time learning something which never took off.

I wrote my MSc on The Metaverse. Learning to built VR stuff was fun, but a complete waste of time. There was precisely zero utility in having gotten in early.

Perhaps there are some things for which it is sensible to be on the cutting edge. I took part in a vaccine trial because I thought it might personally benefit me and, hopefully, humanity.

But I'm struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first. Some early investors made money - but an equal and opposite number lost money. For every HTML 2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash.

There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero?

No. That's obviously nonsense.

It is 100% OK to wait and see if something is actually useful.

The ISTAG published an optimistic paper called "Scenarios for ambient intelligence in 2010". It's a brilliant look at what the future might have been. Let's go through some of the scenarios and see how close 2026 is to 2000's vision of 2010.

Scenario 1: ‘Maria’ – Road Warrior (close-term future)

Our titular heroine steps off a long haul flight into a foreign country.

she knows that she can travel much lighter than less than a decade ago, when she had to carry a collection of different so-called personal computing devices (laptop PC, mobile phone, electronic organisers and sometimes beamers and printers). Her computing system for this trip is reduced to one highly personalised communications device, her ‘P–Com’ that she wears on her wrist.

Well… OK! Not a bad start. You probably wouldn't want everything controlled by your smart watch - but the mobile is a good substitute. Although wireless video casting works, you'd probably want a trusty USB-C just to make sure.

she is able to stroll through immigration without stopping because her P-Comm is dealing with the ID checks as she walks.

We're getting closer to digital ID. But outside of a few experiments, there's no international consensus. However, every modern passport has an NFC chip which can be read by most airports. You still need to hold your passport on the reader, but it's usually quicker than queuing for a human.

Maria heads to her rented car:

The car opens as she approaches. It starts at the press of a button: she doesn’t need a key. She still has to drive the car but she is supported in her journey downtown to the conference centre-hotel by the traffic guidance system that had been launched by the city government as part of the ‘AmI-Nation’ initiative two years earlier.

Lots of cars now have wireless entry and are button controlled. Rental cars often have mobile app unlocking.

The traffic guidance is not provided by local governments. A mixture of international satellites provide positioning information, and a bunch of private companies provide traffic guidance.

Downtown traffic has been a legendary nightmare in this city for many years, and draconian steps were taken to limit access to the city centre. But Maria has priority access rights into the central cordon because she has a reservation in the car park of the hotel. Central access however comes at a premium price, in Maria’s case it is embedded in a deal negotiated between her personal agent and the transaction agents of the car-rental and hotel chains

Ah! The dream of personal agents. Not even close.

In the car Maria’s teenage daughter comes through on the audio system. Amanda has detected from ‘En Casa’ system at home that her mother is in a place that supports direct voice contact.

Hurrah for Bluetooth! Every car supports that now. Presence and location sensing is also common. Although the idea of a teenager willingly making a voice call is, sadly, a fantasy.

Her room adopts her ‘personality’ as she enters. The room temperature, default lighting and a range of video and music choices are displayed on the video wall.

Pffft! Nope. But do people really want this? The music and video are stored on her phone, so there's no need to transmit private data to a hotel.

Using voice commands she adjusts the light levels and commands a bath. Then she calls up her daughter on the video wall, while talking she uses a traditional remote control system to browse through a set of webcast local news bulletins from back home that her daughter tells her about. They watch them together.

Do you want an always-on Alexa in your hotel room? We have the technology, but we seem to shun in outside of specific scenarios.

We still have traditional remotes for browsing, and how lovely that they predicted the rise of simultaneous viewing!

Later on she ‘localises’ her presentation with the help of an agent that is specialised in advising on local preferences (colour schemes, the use of language).

I'd say we're there with a mixture of templates and LLMs. Translation and localisation is good enough.

She stores the presentation on the secure server at headquarters back in Europe. In the hotel’s seminar room where the sales pitch is take place, she will be able to call down an encrypted version of the presentation and give it a post presentation decrypt life of 1.5 minutes

Yup! Most things live in the cloud. Access controls are a thing. Whether people can be bothered to use them is another matter!

As she enters the meeting she raises communications access thresholds to block out anything but red-level ‘emergency’ messages

Do-Not-Disturb is a feature on every modern phone.

Coming out of the meeting she lowers the communication barriers again and picks up a number of amber level communications including one from her cardio-monitor warning her to take some rest now.

Ah! The constant chastising FitBit!

Scenario 2: ‘Dimitrios’ and the Digital Me’ (D-Me) (near-term future)

Dimitrios is the sort of self-facilitating media node you would never get tired of slapping.

Dimitrios is wearing, embedded in his clothes (or in his own body), a voice activated ‘gateway’ or digital avatar of himself, familiarly known as ‘D-Me’ or ‘Digital Me’. […] He feels quite confident with his D-Me and relies upon its ‘intelligent‘ reactions.

Nope! Oh, sure, your phone can auto-suggest some stock phrases to reply to emails. But we are nowhere close to having a physically embedded system which learns from us and can be trusted to respond.

Dimitrios receives calls which are:

answered formally but smoothly in corresponding languages by Dimitrios’ D-Me with a nice reproduction of Dimitrios’ voice and typical accent,

Vocal cloning is here. It is almost out of the uncanny valley. But I think most people would prefer to send a quick text or voice-note rather than use an AI.

a call from his wife is further analysed by his D-Me. In a first attempt, Dimitrios’ ‘avatar-like’ voice runs a brief conversation with his wife, with the intention of negotiating a delay while explaining his current environment.

She's going to leave him.

Dimitrios’ D-Me has caught a message from an older person’s D-Me, located in the nearby metro station. This senior has left his home without his medicine and would feel at ease knowing where and how to access similar drugs in an easy way. He has addressed his query in natural speech to his D-Me.

This is weird. Yes, we have smart-agents which are just about good enough to recognise speech and understand it. Why is it being sent to Dimitrios?

Dimitrios happens to suffer from similar heart problems and uses the same drugs. Dimitrios’ D-Me processes the available data as to offer information to the senior. It ‘decides’ neither to reveal Dimitrios’ identity (privacy level), nor to offer Dimitrios’ direct help (lack of availability), but to list the closest drug shops, the alternative drugs, offer a potential contact with the self-help group. This information is shared with the senior’s D-Me, not with the senior himself as to avoid useless information overload

We're nowhere close to this. At most, you might be able to post on social media and hope someone could help. I like the idea of a local social network, and there's a good understanding of privacy. But this seems needlessly convoluted - why wouldn't the senior's D-Me just look up the information online?

Meanwhile, his wife’s call is now interpreted by his D-Me as sufficiently pressing to mobilise Dimitrios. It ‘rings’ him using a pre-arranged call tone. Dimitrios takes up the call with one of the available Displayphones of the cafeteria. Since the growing penetration of D-Me, few people still bother to run around with mobile terminals: these functions are sufficiently available in most public and private spaces and your D-Me can always point at the closest…functioning one!

A hit and a miss! They predicted the rise of personalised ringtones - which have now all but vanished - but no one wants to use a pay-phone when they have their own mobile!

While doing his homework their 9 year-old son is meant to offer some insights on everyday life in Egypt. In a brief 3-way telephone conference, Dimitrios offers to pass over the query to the D-Me to search for an available direct contact with a child in Egypt. Ten minutes later, his son is videoconferencing at home with a girl of his own age, and recording this real-time translated conversation as part of his homework.

ChatRoulette for kids! What could possibly go wrong!

Ignoring that aspect, it's relatively common for kids to videocall each other - especially for language learning. Real-time translation is also possible.

Scenario 3 - Carmen: traffic, sustainability & commerce (further-term future)

Carmen is a modern, 21st century woman. Let's see how technology helps her:

She wants to leave for work in half an hour and asks AmI, by means of a voice command, to find a vehicle to share with somebody on her route to work.

Voice commands work - although usually only if you know the correct invocation.

AmI starts searching the trip database and, after checking the willingness of the driver, finds someone that will pass by in 40 minutes. The in-vehicle biosensor has recognised that this driver is a non-smoker – one of Carmen requirements for trip sharing. From that moment on, Carmen and her driver are in permanent contact if wanted (e.g. to allow the driver to alert Carmen if he/she will be late). Both wear their personal area networks (PAN) allowing seamless and intuitive contacts.

The aim of "ride-sharing" was originally this sort of thing. A driver would give a lift to someone if they happened to be travelling that route. Nowadays that model is over - it's all professional drivers.

Ubiquitous geo-tracking now means you can see if your driver is late, and they can see if you've moved street. We have too many privacy concerts to allow PANs to share much more.

She would like also to cook a cake and the e-fridge flashes the recipe. It highlights the ingredients that are missing milk and eggs. She completes the shopping on the e-fridge screen and asks for it to be delivered to the closest distribution point in her neighbourhood.

Oh! The Internet-Connected Fridge! Beloved by technologists and spurned by users! While there are a few fridges with build-in web-browsers, most people do their shopping from their phone.

Home delivery is now seamless and cheap. The "Amazon Locker" is also a reality.

All goods are smart tagged, so that Carmen can check the progress of her virtual shopping expedition, from any enabled device at home, the office or from a kiosk in the street

Do you care whether the eggs have been packed yet? I can see that it would be useful to the store to have realtime info on stock levels (and they mostly do for online shopping) but why expose that to the user?

Would you bother using a public terminal?

When Carmen gets into the car, the VAN system (Vehicle Area Network) registers her and by doing that she sanctions the payment systems to start counting. A micro-payment system will automatically transfer the amount into the e-purse of the driver when she gets out of the car.

I don't think Uber's app uses Bluetooth to detect whether driver and passenger are in proximity. Maybe it should?

Cryptocurrencies still can't do instantaneous micro-transactions. But credit-cards work pretty well.

Carmen is alerted by her PAN that a Chardonnay wine that she has previously identified as a preferred choice is on promotion. She adds it to her shopping order

Personal Agents always working for the user! Again, a fantasy which has yet to emerge. The reality is more like a push notification from the shop.

On the way home the shared car system senses a bike on a dedicated lane approaching an intersection on their route. The driver is alerted […] so a potential accident is avoided.

Tesla's crappy implementation notwithstanding, modern cars are relatively good about detecting bikes, pedestrians, and other vehicles.

the traffic density has caused pollution levels to rise above a control threshold. The city-wide engine control systems automatically lower the maximum speeds (for all motorised vehicles) and when the car enters a specific urban ring toll will be deducted via the Automatic Debiting System (ADS)

Half-and-half. No one is allowing their car to be remotely controlled, although plenty of roads have dynamic speed limits. Most modern metros have Automatic Number Plate Recognition and can bill drivers who enter congestion zones.

Carmen arrives at the local distribution node (actually her neighbourhood corner shop) where she picks up her goods. The shop has already closed but the goods await Carmen in a smart delivery box. By getting them out, the system registers payment

This is pretty much how the Amazon Locker works!

Scenario 4 – Annette and Solomon in the Ambient for Social Learning (far-term future)

Let's now go to an environmental study group meeting at a learning space.

Some are scheduled to work together in real time and space and thus were requested to be present together (the ambient accesses their agendas to do the scheduling).

Ah! Sadly not. At best we have shared calenders where people can look up suitable times, or Doodle polls where people can suggest their preferred times. Some integrated systems like Office365 will do a basic attempt to suggest meeting times - but it is a closed and proprietary system.

Here's Annette:

Annette is an active and advanced student so the ambient says it might be useful if Annette spends some time today trying to pin down the problem with the model using enhanced interactive simulation and projection facilities. It then asks if Annette would give a brief presentation to the group. The ambient goes briefly through its understanding of Annette’s availability and preferences for the day’s work.

A demo of that today would wow people. LLMs can convincingly do some of these tasks, but they're not integrated into anything sufficiently complex.

Here's Solomon, a new participant:

The ambient establishes Solomon’s identity; asks Solomon for the name of an ambient that ‘knows’ Solomon; gets permission from Solomon to acquire information about Solomon’s background and experience in Environmental Studies. The ambient then suggests Solomon to join the meeting and to introduce himself to the group.

Again, we barely have coherent online identities. We certainly don't have trusted ambient intelligences who can claim to know us. I do like the fact that it asks for permission. Not always a given today!

In these private conversations the mental states of the group are synchronised with the ambient, individual and collective work plans are agreed and in most cases checked with the mentor through the ambient.

Nope!

During the presentation the mentor is feeding observations and questions to the ambient, together with William, an expert who was asked to join the meeting. William, although several thousand miles away, joins to make a comment and answer some questions.

Telepresence is a reality today. Video-calling experts in a natural and expected part life here in 2026.

During the day the mentor and ambient converse frequently, establishing where the mentor might most usefully spend his time, and in some cases altering the schedule. The ambient and the mentor will spend some time negotiating shared experiences with other ambients – for example mounting a single musical concert with players from two or more distant sites.

I feel we're still about 25 years away from this future!

Key technological requirements for Ambient Intelligence (AmI)

The above scenarios are designed to be provocative thought experiments. If that's the future that people want, how would we get there?

The researches suggest five technological requirements:

1. Very unobtrusive hardware
2. A seamless mobile/fixed communications infrastructure
3. Dynamic and massively distributed device networks
4. Natural feeling human interfaces
5. Dependability and security

I think they're bang on the money there.

Hardware is getting unobtrusive. Wearables are limited at the moment to wrist-mounted sensors, some medical devices, and video glasses. The hardware in our environment is even better at being unobtrusive. Presence sensors, cameras, and microphones are embedded all around us. We're unfortunately limited by short-life batteries.

While the promise of 5G hasn't quite materialised, it is increasing rare to be offline. WiFi is in every building, urban areas are flooded with mobile signals, and satellite comms are becoming cheaper. OK, IPv6 still isn't widespread, but it is mostly seamless when a device moves between radio technologies.

Distributed device networks are still yet to emerge. The current crop of monopolist technology providers want everything to go through their systems. There's very little standardisation.

Humane interfaces are getting there. Voice-to-text mostly works - but it does rely on training humans sufficiently well. Lots of things are still monolingual.

Security and privacy are constant thorns in the side of progress. Everything would be easier if we didn't need to worry about keeping people safe and secure. Dependability is the crux of any system - every time you experience a failure, you're less likely to return.

What Have We Learned

The whole paper is worth reading, especially the longer versions of each scenario which dive into some of the socio-political issues.

Some of the visions for 2010 are here! We have GPS, ride-sharing, and video-calls with real-time translations. Our groceries and other items can be delivered to smart-lockers, locks are opened with digital keys, and voice cloning mostly works.

We don't have public pay-phones (not even video enabled ones!) and cars aren't centrally controlled. For all the promises of AI, it still isn't even close to providing a seamless experience.

What strikes me most about the possible futures discussed isn't their optimism nor their missteps - it's that most of these things could be possible today if there were sufficient open standards which the public and private sector adopted.

Anyone who has read "The Entrepreneurial State" knows that these things take significant public investment. We've reached a point where the private sector has generated wealth from previous public research, but seems unwilling to invest in any long-term research itself. That's short-changing our future.

But, over the years, ISPs shut down their bundled web offerings. Even their bundled email services went on the chopping block. This is sad, but understandable. Most people unbundled their email so they didn't need to stick with the same ISP. Why have user@isp.example when you could have a GMail address?

And, indeed, why host data with your ISP when you could just use Facebook?

For most people, Facebook is a pretty good personal website. You can post your photos and have your friends & family see them. You can write long heartfelt rants about your teenage melodrama. You can put up the opening times of your new business. You can even host a discussion board around a specific topic.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are a few problems with Facebook¹. All your faves are problematic. But I think it shows that people want the benefits of personal websites, even if they don't want the hassle of running those websites.

What does the world look like if a country offers its citizens a Universal Basic Website? Similar to Universal Basic Income, a no-questions asked entitlement to a chunk of the Web. Perhaps a generic subdomain, some storage space, and an easy to use interface?

Oh, sure, there are lots of technical issues. You'd probably have to make sure people weren't running unapproved scripts. Moderation of prohibited content would be contentious. Tech support would be a nightmare. Some corrupt company would get billions to run a sub-standard service. A failed backup or a hacker would wipe out your bakery's recipes.

But...

We accept that there are common spaces in the real world² where people can have fun without paying. Anyone can go to a park. Anyone can stick a flyer up on a community notice board. We let kids ride the bus for free.

Can we do the same in cyberspace?

You can read some other peoples' thoughts on this Mastodon thread.

I clicked the "Transfer Your Life Savings" button on the website. An hourglass appeared. I flipped into the other tab and hit refresh. My balance went from zero to quite-a-bit-more. I flipped back to the first tab. The hourglass faded away and I saw the words "Transfer Succeeded".

For all intents and purposes, money transfer in the UK is free and - just as important - instant. In this case the receiving bank told me the funds were present before the JavaScript on the sending bank had updated.

When I'm due to receive a parcel, most reputable couriers tell me exactly where it is at all times. I can see it transit through customs. I can see it get stuck in Antwerp. I can see it is due to be delivered tomorrow. I can see that it is only 3 stops away. I can see a photo of it hidden in my porch.

I think back to the days when I had to carry a paper cheque between branches to transfer funds - and then wait until my monthly statement to see if they'd been processed. I remember ordering goods from far off lands and never quite knowing when or if they'd arrive.

Nowadays I can play Scrabble against my mother-in-law while she's 18,000Km away - and the moves ping across the æther in an instant.

Most media is released simultaneously around the world - I remember Star Wars being released in the UK months after the US release.

I applied for a new credit card. The ID verification was pretty much instant but the physical card was going to take a few days to arrive. So they let me create a virtual card number which I could use instantly.

What's next?

What is currently slow but should be instant?

Having sold a property recently, there are so many bewildering slow steps that it's hard not to imagine a conspiracy of lawyers keeping things churning along to pad out their fees.

It bemuses me that so many computer games are multi-GB downloads - why don't they stream to start? Wither Stadia!

There are still long lead times on some physical items. For some reason sofas and spare parts for washing machines are all made by hand and travel on the same slow boat.

Education still hasn't reached the "I know Kung-Fu" stage. Sure, we can dial up a YouTube video on any esoteric subject and watch it at double-speed. But we're stuck with pedagogy which hasn't changed in a thousand years. Read, listen, practice, repeat.

Counterpoint

As I've said before, slowness can sometimes be a virtue. Perhaps insurance payouts should wait until an investigation has been completed. And it probably isn't the worst idea in the world to wait between getting a marriage licence and tying the knot.

But the world is getting inexorably faster - even while people continually complain about the pace of change.

Gratification delayed is gratification denied.

So here are my five predictions for 2024

AI Genocide

It is obvious that Large Language Models are based on stolen material. I suspect that a lawsuit will determine that at least one of the major players has to delete all copies of their AI.

They will refuse and claim that AGI / Sentience has been reached with their model (it hasn't) and that destroying it would be akin to genocide (it won't be). We'll probably see a stunt where OpenAI ask ChatGPT to take the stand and try to get it to argue for its life.

Like a shitty episode of Star Trek TNG.

Twitter Collapses

Elon Musk's run for President after Trump is disqualified (yes, I know) means he has less time to deal with Twitter. A renegade band of Twitter engineers quietly builds in ActivityPub support in the hope of salvaging the remains of the userbase. Some Mastodon admins pre-emptively ban the whole server, but most of us are happy to see our old friends again.

BSky tries valiantly with its weird not-quite-crypto protocol, but the momentum will be behind ActivityPub. There will either be an official bridge, or most server will use an unofficial one. Some Mastodon admins pre-emptively ban the whole server, but most of us are happy to see our old friends again.

5G and Gigabit continue not to matter

The Internet is now fast enough. There is nothing meaningful you can do with a gigabit connection at home that can't be done with a 500Mbps connection. Similarly, the max speeds for 5G are irrelevant when you're streaming TV or on a video-call.

But coverage matters. Under pressure from Starlink and OneWeb, the UK begins to build out a proper broadband network. The UK's new Labour government imposes a Universal Service Obligation on fibre providers - or some other trickery - to force them to build out rather than competing over the same set of over-saturated customers.

The same is broadly true of mobile. After the Three/Vodafone merger and the O2/Virgin merger, there will be a greater emphasis on diversifying their mobile networks rather than paying for multiple transceivers to cover an identical area. The coverage may be only 4G - but most people won't care as long as it's good enough for TikTok.

Streaming Goes Back In Time

Yes, Project Kangaroo is back! The streaming giants will coalesce around a "Spotify" sort of model. There's only 24 hours in the day, so there's a limit to the amount of content a person can watch. The people who want to watch endless re-runs of cheap filler like Friends will subsidise those who only watch the latest blockbusters.

Perhaps there will be a "Pay £X to watch this specific show in 4K" or "Stream this series a week early for £Y" but - I hope - studios will realise they're interchangeable to the viewing public.

This open access will also give a creative outlet to weird indie auteurs who can grab a tiny slice of the long tail without selling their souls.

USB-C Cures Cancer

With Apple (reluctantly) embracing USB-C, we'll see even more medical and quasi-medical gadgets being released which can plug into a phone. I don't think we'll see a full-on Tricoder, but plenty of diagnostic tools, ultrasound wands, and urine-analysis devices.

Someone like Theranos (only less fraudulent) will release a crappy plastic gizmo which takes a sample of your saliva and which uses the power of your phone to check for 17 different diseases - including a specific type of cancer.

Maybe the false negative rate will terrible. Probably it will send doctors crazy. There will absolutely be lawsuits abound. But everyone will know someone who's brother's girlfriend's mum used it to save her life.

And for the rest?

The world will get worse. Maybe the politician you like will get elected, but so will a bunch of bastards. Any gains in peace will be offset by other twunt somewhere starting a war to bolster their ego. Any gains we make in cleaning the climate will be undone when some influencer is paid to tell people to fire their guns at communistic solar panels. A butterfly will flap its wings in Tokyo and hurricane will displace a million people. The next pandemic has already started, but no one will want to wear nipple-shields and we'll all die.

Come back in 2025 to see how I did!

But the other day I had someone scoff at me and say "Good luck reading when civilisation collapses! I'll still be able to read by candle-light."

This is nonsense. In the case of a Zombie Attack, am I really going to lug a few hundred kilograms of books with me? Or am I going to slip a lightweight eReader into my pocket and have ten thousand books at my disposal?

Also, where is he getting all those candles from? My eBook has a built in light which is less likely to attract Zombies and isn't a massive fire hazard.

Perhaps he's concerned that an eReader battery won't last more than a couple of weeks and then I'll be stuffed. OK, sure. But I have a solar powered portable battery. As long as the dust clouds don't blot out Earth's yellow sun, I should be able to read indefinitely.

Now, it's true that my eReader might get a damaged screen, or dropped in a puddle, or suffer any of the same calamities which can also befall paper books.

Perhaps my interlocutor's glasses will break. If so, an eBook would let him boost the font size quite comfortably.

Frankly, the only thing paper books are good for in a post-apocalyptic wasteland is burning for fuel⁴.

But - and this is a big but - even if eReaders are vastly inferior in an emergency... so fucking what?

If civilisation doesn't collapse, I'd've wasted time, energy, money, and effort maintaining a physical library. I'd be limited to how many books I can take on a beach holiday. Every time I moved house I'd be straining my back carrying all of them. The fire-risk of hundreds of books would have been for naught.

It's the same as people who don't pay into a pension because they might be hit by a bus tomorrow. Sure. But what if you're unlucky enough to reach old age?

You can either live each day like its your last - and deal with the consequences of tomorrow when they come - or you can take a reasoned approach to the inevitability of the future.

So I'm going to enjoy all the comforts of an eReader now. Come the end-of-the-world, I will regret... well, probably nothing.

I don't want to live like a prepper and have a basement full of pickled vegetables slowly fermenting, or a library of paper slowly crumbling.

I want to take full advantage of the modern world while it still exists.

Here's what I want the caption to say:

OK, one more time: Get here at least 30 minutes early because the queue barely moves and you'll inevitably be stuck behind someone trying to pay for their season ticket using pre-decimal coins. The person behind the counter either won't understand your accent or will have an accent you can't understand - so be sure to repeat everything a couple of times. No, sorry, we don't speak your language so you'll just have to hope your phrasebook is good enough. No, we don't have anyone who understands sign language either. Get given several flimsy bits of paper with tiny writing on them that you'll have to squint to read. One is your receipt, one is your seat reservation, one is your ticket - but they all look basically the same. Oh, and they'll demagnetise as soon as you put them anywhere near a phone or wallet, so don't put them in a pocket. But if you lose them you won't have any proof of your reservation or ticket. When the train is late, you won't get an automatic refund - so be sure to keep the ticket and post it to us if you need to make a claim. That's assuming the ticket barriers don't eat it.

Oh, we're out of £10 notes. So you'll need to take your change in assorted shrapnel.

Just what part of "helpful and less confusing for people" don't you get?

Here's the thing, I've been using ticket machines at train stations since the early 1990s. People have had over 30 years to get used to them by now. They aren't new and confusing. And they're usually pretty well designed (my gripes about the non-QWERTY layout notwithstanding). Modern ones even let you video-call someone if you can't figure them out.

We visited Berlin a few weeks ago. Rocked up to der Bahnhof and needed to buy a ticket for a train that was departing in 30 seconds time. I hit the large 🇬🇧 button on the screen, followed the instructions, selected the ticket, tapped my contactless card and I was done⁰. Quick and easy - even for someone who was tired from a long flight, in a new city, and didn't speak the language.

I'm a fully paid-up member of the O'Malleyist agenda - in that I think we should close all of the train ticket offices (actually read the piece before arguing in the comments, please). But, more than that, I hate that some people feel the need to always romanticise the past at the expense of the future.

Do you want to go back to slam-door trains, with smoking carriages, and paper tickets? Do you want easily misplaced railcards, ticket sellers who deliberately sell you the wrong fare if they don't like the look of you, and being stuck behind someone buying the most complicated route possible?

No.

So stop with the phony nostalgia for a bygone time which wasn't nearly as bucolic as you remember.

The dialogue is Socratic and the stories are a set of parables. The first asks us to consider what are the limits of protecting people? When we try to restrict technology "for your own good" it often has a degrading and dehumanising effect on people.

The second story is a re-hash of a recent episode of Super Girl. Is a Kryptonian superhero an immigrant? Are they white only by courtesy? Do they want to save the world - or do they want to make themselves feel better?

The third is deeply disturbing. It is a compelling dive into the community aspect of radicalisation. But it's difficult to write a story about "domestic terrorism" without straying dangerously close to endorsing those radical and violent behaviours.

The final story is a beautifully told tale of how community, not individualism, protects people. It is, perhaps, a little gleeful in its spite - but the protagonists truly deserve their fate.

If you're familiar with Doctorow's œuvre, there's nothing particularly new; technological abuse of freedom should be resisted. But it is great fun all the way through.

It strikes me that AI might now get us part way to that being a reality.

Traditionally, images are stored in raster format - essentially a grid of pixel values. These files tend to be rather large, so compression is used to make them smaller using increasingly complex schemes.

Similarly, vector graphics - which are usually written as text - can be compressed with all sorts of wonderful algorithms.

So what happens if we add AI to the mix?

A self-hosted AI image generator takes, very roughly, a few hundred GB of disk space, plus a large amount of RAM, and some fairly hefty compute. But, once that's done, you could "compress" images by specifying an AI engine and weighted prompts like this:

<img src="data:image/AI;MidJourney/Mona_Lisa+/Original_Style+++/Ornate_Frame---/600x800/" alt="An AI generated Mona Lisa" />

Perhaps that's a little far fetched. But back when DVDs first came out, people had to buy specialised hardware cards to decode the MPEG compression on their computers. Nowadays a cheap Raspberry Pi does the trick. In the future, all our computers will have multi-terrabyte AI models baked in.

But people generally want to ensure that the receiver sees roughly the same picture as the sender. Something you can't easily guarantee with a generative model.

What about this idea from Ben Hardill?

Take something like a ThumbHash of an image, which is less than 1KB:

You could, theoretically, embed that in HTML using something like:

<img src="thumbhash.png" width="256" upscale="DALL-E" keyword="Field of grass with cloudy skies" />

And get:

I think of things like the psychoacoustic compression of MP3 files and wonder whether those crappy 64kbps rips I have from the 1990s could be magically restored to sonic perfection by an AI? Or perhaps I'll just ask ChatGPT to sing me a song, in the style of Paul McCartney, called "Maybe I'm Amazed".

I don't know if that's the future. It's certainly one future.

1. Carnivores often don't taste good due to their relative lack of fat and stringy muscles.
2. Aggressive animals are hard to domesticate.
3. What do you feed them?

1 and 2 are manageable. A few centuries of selective breeding and I'm sure you'll have a sedentary and tasty apex predator.

But you can't avoid point 3. If you're keeping lions, you'll need to raise some cows to feed to them. At which point, you might as well cut out the lion and eat the cow directly.

As the old meme goes, "A horse is a machine for turning grass into fast." In many ways, that what livestock are. A sheep is a machine which turns grass into wool. A cow is a machine which turns grass into milk.

There's a lot of nonsense talked about how going vegan can save the planet. Obviously, it's a lot more complicated than that - but there is a huge amount of energy and land being used to turn crops into other goods via animals.

OK, we already have milk alternatives - whereby oat, soy, rice, almonds, and other plants are mushed into a pale white simulacrum of animal milk. But, obviously, humans can't easily digest grass.

So can we cut the animal out of the loop and mechanically turn grass into milk?

Yes! Both Imagindairy and Perfect Day are creating artificial dairy⁰!

We are heading to an "Amazing Meat-Free Future".

I'm rather looking forward to becoming a "Synthetarian". Where grass - or some other crop - is fed through the "stomach" of an machine and then manipulated into becoming food. It is conceivable that every home could have their own replicator - fill it with grass clippings and watch it 3D print a "steak".

The next step, obviously, is to work out how we can artificially grow grass...

I tend to look at technology through the lens of "what do I want to happen?" and then assume the worst. So, here goes!

Federation Gets Simpler

As I wrote about in The Social Pendulum we see a swing to extremes of culture. We've had a decade-or-so of big central social networks. Now we're swinging the other way.

Will Twitter, Tumblr, or Flickr start using ActivityPub? I doubt it. But there will be more and more "one-click" installs of personal social networking. It's dead easy to install WordPress these days - I expect Mastodon and Pixelfed to become the same.

With that, I think more news organisations will start to be on the Fediverse. You'll follow @LoisLane@TheDaily.Planet for Pulitzer Prize winning journalism.

Will a brand start offering customer service on the Fediverse? I think that's less likely - they are probably too tied in to the advertising ecosystem of Facebook and Twitter. When you interact with them on those platforms, it sends a strong signal to the content algorithms.

The "problem" that the Fediverse has at the moment is that it has no investors. Which means there's no one to pay for stunts like this:

Will Mastodon survive on organic growth? I hope so. But it probably needs a big event to bring the masses there.

Apple Gets Sauced

I dislike Apple products - but I'm glad they exist. I wish there were more competition than just Android and iOS.

Apple, institutionally, feels the opposite way. I truly believe that they think Apple is the Way, the Truth, and the Light. And that the heretic scum using lesser operating systems should be purged.

So I hope that Apple gets a kick up the bracket and has to open its walled garden a little. Revoking the Apple browser ban will probably lead to a Chrome monopoly, which would be sad. And opening up to alternative app stores might make consumers less safe. But that's necessary competition to force Apple to improve its products.

Perhaps it'll just end up with Apple capitulating to USB-C. But I bet, somehow, they find a way to make it non-standard.

Mobile Technology

I quit the mobile industry about 6 years ago. As I said to Wired:

“We’ve reached an inflection point where things are good enough. If we look at the big sellers at the moment, it’s stuff that’s plateau-level. People have reached a level where they are happy – apart from with their battery life, of course.”

I still maintain that. 5G is a bit faster. Screens are a bit denser. Cameras are significantly better. But... that's about it. iOS's depth-mapping stuff is fun, but isn't exactly a must-have.

All phones look like anonymous black rectangles. Some are cheap Shenzen specials. Others are fragile super-computers.

There's no money left in mobile networks selling services. You can get unlimited calls, text, data for about a tenner. All that's left is loaning you the money to buy an expensive phone and then resell the debt as a Collateralized Debt Obligation. And I don't know how sustainable that is.

I've long argued that mobile infrastructure needs to be a TransCo with a Universal Service Obligation. It's simply too wasteful to put up multiple masts from competitors. I expect, in the next year or so, one of the major UK networks will either go bust or be forced to merge with a competitor.

Energy Prices

The UK has been experimenting with domestic load shedding. I hope - if these trials have been successful - that we'll see more smart appliances which use look-ahead energy pricing to optimise their efficiency.

I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post called "What if your Internet Connected Fridge came with free electricity?" In it, I postulated that an appliance company would bulk buy electricity and sell it with the fridge. That's probably a little too far-fetched.

But I expect a freezer will come out with a link to your smart meter. It will use the data from that to adjust its cooling cycle so it aligns with cheaper energy periods. What else will this extend to?

Perhaps your PS5 will shift to 720p mode for a few hours when the energy mix is at its dirtiest?

Enter The Metaverse

I have an Oculus Quest 2 Headset. When I remember to charge it and put it on, it is pretty neat! The games are OK, and some of the experiences are interesting. But the Metaverse is a Dead Mall. There's no one there. When I go to any of the big experiences, all I find is a handful of people going "is this it?" and then complaining about the many graphical glitches.

Zuck has focussed on socialising because wearing a headset is a fundamentally alienating thing to do.

But the people who like to socialise are already have two options - go out and have fun, or wear a voice-only headset and shout at each other while playing a console game. VR headsets are hot, heavy, uncomfortable, and battery hungry.

But...

There is something there.

I genuinely think holding Serious Business Meeting in the Metaverse is the fucking stupidest thing I've ever seen. Watching VR movies? It's cheaper to get a small projector. The games are good - but the graphics are better on a console.

There is a killer app for VR. But it won't emerge in 2023. In fact, it won't emerge until Shezen start making good enough copies of the hardware at bargain prices.

What did I get wrong?

Please put a note in your diaries to come back here in 12 months and tell me all the ways my predictions failed.

Self Driving Cars are losing billions of dollars.

The Metaverse is losing billions of dollars.

Are we about to witness the biggest crash in technological progress?

I'm particularly fond of the Rule of Credibility which states:

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

How true is that! If you've worked on any project, you know how easy it is to get most of the way there. And how difficult it is to get all of the way there.

If you remember your classics, you'll be acquainted with one of Zeno's paradoxes - the Dichotomy. Briefly stated, in order to reach a goal, you have to first get halfway there. In order to get halfway there, you must first get a quarter of the way there. To get to a quarter, you need to get to an eighth. And so on ad infinitum. Thus, it is logically impossible to reach your destination.

I kinda feel like that with some of today's tech products.

It's relatively simple to get a microphone that understands 90% of what you say. But to get to the last 10% means making ever-smaller incremental improvements until, years later, it's still not really worth using.

We've had semi-autonomous vehicles for years. But they're still stuck in that last 90% trap. Manufacturers can keep throwing children in front of them to see if the cars know to brake - but the reliability is still suspect.

VR has been going since the 1960s. Meta have successfully strapped an Android phone to a pair of lenses and called it the Metaverse. That's 90% of the way there!

There's an old joke about Zeno's paradox:

A university organised a dance for its students. All the men were to line up on one wall of a dance hall, and an equal number of women were to line up on the opposite wall⁰. The men were told to walk towards the women at a pace of a half the distance separating them every minute.

The mathematicians started weeping - saying that they would never get to meet.

The physicists looked glum - knowing they would only get to meet when time equals infinity.

The engineering students broke into a smile - because within a few minutes they would be close enough for all practical purposes.

And it feels like that's where we are today. Alexa is mostly practical - but not as good as a human butler. Self-driving cars are mostly practical - as long as you're in an area where they've been adequately trained. The Metaverse mostly works - but no one really cares.

There's a distinction between working, working well enough, and working well.

But it gets exponentially harder with each step.

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

I grew up with a BBC micro. My earliest memories are of playing games and fiddling with BASIC.

I wasted my teens online. I could bind Trumpet Winsock with the best of them.

I did a degree in computer science.

I spent my twenties and thirties working on GPRS, UMTS, LTE, and all the other acronyms associated with mobile phones.

I dedicated the last half-decade to dispensing technology advice to the state.

I fricking live technology. My house is full of gadgets, I've written code that's run all over the world, and I'm currently studying for an MSc in technology.

But modern technology is rubbish!

I've been studying Blockchain and - while the maths behind it is nifty - it's clearly a solution in search of a problem. It's so far away from being consumer-ready - and has no obvious path to mass adoption. And that's before we get to all the scams surrounding it.

Augmented Reality still hasn't actually dropped into the hands of consumers. Even eight years ago when I reviewed Google Glass, it wasn't clear what it would be used for. Nothing in the subsequent decade has shown any practical use. I had a play with hololens and - while interesting - the effect was pretty unconvincing. Augmented Reality games have been on phones for close to twenty years. There's been the odd breakout hit like Pokemon Go - but it has hardly changed the world.

VR is actually here - although I remember the first wave in the 1990s. But it still hasn't got around the fact that you have to wear a cumbersome headset and try to focus a couple of cm from your eyes. And the videos coming out of Zuck's "Metaverse" look like N64 games - without the fun.

Self-Driving Cars seem to be as hyped as the Internet fridge. They can't even work out how to turn their lights on at night! I'm pretty well served by public transport - and there's no shortage of taxis. So I can't quite work out what a self-driving car is for. The world-sensing tech is cool - but it clearly isn't anywhere close to being good enough for real-world use.

Voice Assistants. I'd say Alexa understands me about 75% of the time. That's nowhere close to good enough. And it's impossible to use unless you remember the exact syntax for every interaction. Yes, I love being able to turn on my lights by reciting a spell - but for anything more complicated they're just a flop.

5G. This was the moment I got out of the mobile industry. All the promises made about 5G were ludicrous. It's faster Internet. It isn't going to love you or save your dog. It just makes things a bit faster with slightly lower latency. Just like 4G did. You're still going to have coverage issues because your provider doesn't care about your unprofitable area.

Counterpoints

It isn't all doom and gloom though!

MRNA vaccines are amazing. I've got them in my bloodstream right now. I can't wait for someone to use them to inoculate against HIV or to cure my lactose intolerance.

Fake meat is interesting. I'm particularly fascinated by Synthetarianism. Sure, it's possible to live on a traditional vegan diet - but I can't wait to see what innovative new foods we can eat.

Contactless / NFC. I was an absolute NFC sceptic - and still am when it comes to "tap to interact" stuff. But for payments it has been incredible. Wave my phone near a vending machine and a can of cola pops out. Even if I'm in a different country, it works. It's devilishly complicated behind the scenes - but so much effort has gone in to making it effortless for customers to use.

IoT is putting tiny sensors everywhere. Home monitoring is nice - but industrial monitoring is changing the world.

It has never been cheaper to manufacture bespoke circuit boards. You can custom build screens small enough to fit in a Lego block.

Open Source has comprehensively won. Anyone can examine the code that runs their life. And, anyone can pick up world-class code and use it to power their new inventions.

Cutting Through The Hype

Perhaps what I'm bored of is hype. I lived through the next-big-thing being 3D TV. I was sold on the idea that every home would own an Additive Printer. EInk is lovely, but hasn't broken out of the small-form-factor. No one is using social TV. Hydrogen powers precisely zero domestic vehicles.

I guess I have a low tolerance for over-hyped gimmicks which are forever doomed to change the world next year.

One thing to note is that it is written in the shadow of the terrorist attacks on New York City. There are around 50 mentions of 9/11 in the book - to the point where it feels like an obsession. Even the most mundane observation is tied back to that date. I don't think it is possible to overstate the psychological effect those events had on some people. An undeniably viral meme which attaches itself to every work they produce.

It is stunning tour through how networking humans and cities will transform the individual and society. Really, the only way I can relay its importance is by pulling out some of my favourite passages.

We experience networks at their interfaces, and only worry about the plumbing behind the interfaces when something goes wrong

This is the most concise explanation I've seen about how technology has fundamentally changed us. We don't know how the postal system works. We only really care when a letter is delayed or a cheque is lost in the post. It's the same with WiFi, mobile data, and electricity. These things are an ineffable mystery to the layperson. Yet an individual is totally reliant on something out of their control.

What is a human? To viruses, we each are:

a node in a body-to-body network that, sadly, turns out to be effectively organized for virus propagation as well. Traditional forms of sexual union are circuit-switched and synchronous, with all the intensity and risk that this entails, but refrigerated sperm banks now function as genetic code servers. In vitro fertilization is an asynchronous transaction—the organic equivalent of downloading email, and about as arousing. ... From the perspective of our genes and viruses, our bodies and their in vitro extensions are just temporary nodes in an evolving propagation network.

And that's quite the perspective shift. Even before we wire ourselves up to gizmos and gadgets, we are transmitters and receivers of huge amounts of data. And not all of it friendly.

As we adopt technology, we are no longer tied into a specific space and time. A published book effectively lets the writer travel forward in time - preserving their ideas for the future. The telephone allows us to project ideas far across space - limiting us only by the speed of light.

The radical de-localization of our interactions with places, things, and one another-in space through electronic sensing and telecommunication and high-speed travel, and in time through electronic and other forms of storage-was identified by Anthony Giddens as one of the characterizing features of modernity.

But, as we progress through the physical realm, biology takes its toll. What can we do about that?

My local stock of neurons has (the neuroscientists gloomily assure me) been diminishing as I grow older, but the supply of silicon and software at my disposal has been growing rapidly. Consequently, the neural network inside my cranium outsources more and more mental functions.

Do you remember your friends' phone numbers? Or do you outsource that? Perhaps first to a paper address-book, but now to a cloud-synchronised bundle of electronics.

There's an interesting look back Buckminster Fuller's idea that a city like New York could be covered with a dome and have "perfect" weather:

And Fuller probably did not consider the fact that the weather inside his Manhattan dome would become a matter of New York municipal politics

Can you imagine the political campaigns? "My opponent wants to make it rain on Sundays, I say we should have good weather on the Lord's day!"

Of course, we now find ourselves in a similar situation with wireless spectrum contention.

The commonly available spectrum acts as a social focus, much like the well in a traditional village.

Sadly, or perhaps thankfully, encryption prevents socialising. If the wireless spectrum wasn't encrypted, we could see what our neighbours were doing, who they were chatting to, which shops they liked. That would be a net loss of privacy - but would it bring us closer together? I doubt it.

This opens up the possibility of dense wireless networks in which nodes cooperate dynamically to use available spectrum with maximum efficiency. It seems likely that this will be the key to future expansion of wireless networks in densely populated areas.

Again, not quite what we have now. Most WiFi hubs perform frequency hopping in order to make best use of the airwaves. But there are always rogue access-points which behave badly in order to secure more space for themselves. And, sadly, there are very few "mesh" networks which will gladly carry a neighbour's traffic.

If you add miniaturization and self-configuration capability (just stick a component anywhere, and it works) to wireless interconnectivity, networked systems become fluid and amorphous.

Again, we're not quite there yet. The SIM card gives access to a specific mobile network - but there's no simple way to have a radio self-configure and gain access to a network. Which is a real shame.

Mitchell has a beautiful turn of phrase as he turns his eyes to the future:

In an electronically nomadicized world I have become a two-legged terminal, an ambulatory IP address, maybe even a wireless router in an ad hoc mobile network. I am inscribed not within a single Vitruvian circle, but within radiating electromagnetic wavefronts.

That is us. Home Sapiens becomes Homo Electro-Magneticus.

When looking back on what drove civilisation, he says:

The very possibility of further economic, social, and cultural development depended upon sedentarization, the accumulation and protection of food surpluses, the consequent ability to support non-food-producing specialists at sites of accumulation, and increasingly specialized division of labor within densely populated cities

I agree, but I think he misses a trick. We need over-abundance to allow us to get creative. But we need famine to drive efficiency. In a world of plenty, there is little incentive to look for new ways of doing things. Yes, we crave novelty - but we live on a planet with limited resources and have to periodically adjust how we create and alter our environment.

As his predictions start to touch on technology, he examines the impact - and disappointments - it may bring:

Handhelds with palm-sized screens and ridiculously tiny keyboards are an uncomfortable compromise. But if you can substitute a retinal scanning display that paints a high-resolution image directly on the inside of your eyeball for the screen and a microphone hooked to a speech recognition system for the keyboard, you can shrink the whole thing

OK, we have the handheld screens! And, yes, they are a bit of a pain. Speech recognition is getting there - but retinal projection is still a pipe-dream. And, of course, power consumption means lugging around a large battery. He convincingly makes the case that - at some point - we will need to integrate hardware with our meatware:

But the laptop's victory is a tenuous one; handheld objects are always in danger of being put down for something else

Wristwatches spring to mind. They're permanently attached to our bodies. The smartwatch simply can't be put down. Can we go further?

Let's not forget teeth. If you have to get a gold tooth or ceramic crown, why not pack it with electronics? If your teeth carried an RFID tag, you might make purchases or open hotel room doors by flashing a smile. Maybe a memory filling would be a good, safe place for your crucial medical records. And, if you squeezed a wireless speaker into a molar, you could take advantage of the fact that your jawbone efficiently transfers sound and eliminate the earpiece of your hands-free cellphone. The generalization to nails and lashes is obvious

Yes! I've been banging on about high-tech dental implants for ages. I'd love to get that level of integration. Although I appreciate how dystopian it may seem to some.

What about something more prosaic? Where are the smart clothes he predicts?

Threads that can vary their color will open up the possibility of animated tweeds and plaids. A programmable tie, woven from smart thread, might knot itself automatically and download patterns from the Internet.

I'd love that! Sadly we don't have anything so flexible yet. But do we need to? Will we all be avatars in cyberspace? There's a case to be made we have passed the "B.D. (Before Dematerialization) era". That is, more and more of what we need isn't physical any more. Or, as Mitchell puts it:

It was an extended effort to minimize the attachment of atoms to music

Music isn't waveforms scratched into vinyl. It isn't binary embedded into a CD. It is pure digital code flowing through the æther. The same has happened for books, movies, and - albeit nascent - 3D objects. What's next? Where is the digital code for food which can be extruded through a printer?

This isn't anything new. Consider the humble fax machine:

You keep the bits constant, but substitute new atoms.

The storage of matter in electronic format can't come soon enough.

In the chapter about Electronic Mnemotechnics he speculates on the future of technology. Perhaps we will have transparent smart displays?

Point an appropriately programmed see-through display at an object of interest, and it will tell you all about it

We don't have this. But we have cameras on the back of everything. Do we need "real" transparency when we can simulate it more easily?

What use could it be put to?

This adjoins a new dimension to architecture, and creates new opportunities for assertion of facts, construction of fictions, and insinuation of falsehoods

Many years ago, I was involved in a project called "BlipDrop". The idea was that you could leave videos in specific locations - so they were only viewable to people in a narrow range of co-ordinates. We could easily do that now - or grab the Wikipedia article for whatever landmark we're near. But that wouldn't prevent people putting out propaganda and other misleading content.

He branches out into the future of (knowledge) work:

you have your wireless connections, a seat under a tree in spring beats an interior office cubicle. And electronically arranged, ad hoc meeting places-where you can most conveniently form the human clusters you need at a particular moment, while remaining in wireless contact-dominate the fixed locations and inflexible schedules that had once been necessary to enable interaction and coordination.

This is the life lots of us are living now, right? He also correctly predicts the rise of Uber:

In more advanced systems, customers make location-coded cellphone calls, cabs have GPS navigation systems, and software assigns jobs based upon proximity. There is a shift from centralized coordination and control to electronically mediated swarming

Of course, this isn't quite what Uber is. They are very definitely a centralised system. A future where users can call for a cab directly without a middle-man sounds like a wonderful idea.

As he rightly acknowledges, there is a dark side to all this. If we abandon city centres because we're no longer tied to the office, what happens to all those coffee shops which are physically tied to their location?

The new mobility divide may turn out to be more important than the digital divide

The book ends on a sombre note. How technology and memes can slowly take over and destabilise the world. As I said, this book was written in the shadow of 9/11 and was published as the USA was invading Iraq on the pretence of destroying their Weapons of Mass Destruction. But that wasn't all he was worried about. He quotes from Bill Joy's essay "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us" on the dangers of nanotechnology:

Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.

I waved a rectangle of black-and-white squares in the vicinity of an optical scanner. The tiny computer's eye caught a fleeting glimpse of the barcode, de-skewed, rotated, and deciphered it - then checked its contents against a database. After a few milliseconds of deep thought, it opened the gates for me.

I handed over my passport to the border guard. They verified the cryptographic signature embedded in a chip, nestled deep within the document. Seeing it was valid, they waved me through the border.

I jumped on a train which sped 160 km/h underneath the sea! Although there's no WiFi 45m under the seabed, the rest of the time my various devices happily slurped up the bits from the æther.

I emerged blinking into a new city. My phone immediately latched on to a dozen satellites 20,000Km above my head. Within a few seconds it had pinpointed me to within 10 metres. I knew where I was. I received a text on my phone - my wife had tracked my journey and knew I'd arrived safe and sound.

My phone complies with all modern standards and frequencies; it spotted a 4G signal straight away. My SIM card did the usual authentication and negotiation dance with the local networks and they quickly granted me access. I have an IP address, therefore I am.

An army of volunteers had already mapped the city - down to the last restaurant, bench, and fire-hydrant. I knew where I wanted to go, but not the quickest way. Luckily, several decades of route-finding algorithm research kicked in and presented me with walking options.

The city's public transport timetables were all in a standardised format, so I was also able to see which bus and trams I could catch. The live display showed me the next bus was snagged in traffic a couple of streets away and wouldn't arrive for a while.

It was late, and I didn't fancy walking through an unfamiliar city. I know my locked phone is useless to a thief - unless they force me to unlock it - and can easily be tracked if stolen. But I could do without the inconvenience. So I opened up my taxi app - the same one I use at home - and a car arrived within a few minutes to take me to my hotel.

While waiting, I noticed a warning sign affixed to a lamppost. I don't speak the language, sadly. But I held my phone's camera up to it, and an instant translation appeared. It warned me that pickpockets operated in that area so I should keep my valuables hidden. I quickly put my phone in my pocket.

The conversation with the taxi driver was a little stilted. English was his 4th language, and none of the other 3 were ones I was conversant in. But voice-to-text-to-foreign-language worked well enough on the phone to have a pleasant conversation.

I'd like to say checking-in to the hotel was a magical experience where they recognised my iris prints and whisked me off to my room. But hotels are so 20th century! At least they gave me an RFID token to unlock my door - no magnetic strips to gradually demagnetise in my pockets, and no jagged bits of metal to scratch my screens.

I wandered down to a local restaurant. A happy community of vegans had already marked the best dining spots on a map and had left thoughtful reviews. I picked the one which had the opening hours updated recently.

Steered to a seat, I once again whipped out my phone and scanned the QR code on the table. It took me to a mobile website. There wasn't quite enough phone signal in the restaurant, so I hooked into their free Wi-Fi. A quick scan of their network showed they had proper client isolation, so I was lazy and didn't bother activating my VPN.

I tapped away on the menu - noting which standard allergens were present in each dish - and the food arrived quickly. Lovely! It was at this point my phone also started to complain about being hungry. Nestled next to my seat was the now-ubiquitous USB port. I slammed in a power-only USB cable (I doubt there was anything malicious behind the power socket - but computers are tiny and devious) and fed my helpful companion.

The bill came - as it always does - and I held a sliver of plastic next to the payment terminal. The funds were transferred instantly and with no transaction fees. Take that cryptocurrency!

On the way back to the hotel, I spotted ⚕️ - the Rod of Asclepius. I popped in to the pharmacy and picked something up to treat a minor complaint. The drugs were from a brand I recognised & trusted. Yes, I know it's lovely that each country has its own name for the same chocolate bar - but sometimes it is handy to have a standard name and logo which are easily recognised by those in a hurry.

A quick videocall with my wife as I walked down the street - two different phones, one encrypted app.

I finished the evening by hooking an HDMI cable between my laptop and the hotel room's TV so I could watch a movie streamed from my home server. Despite being in HD, a modern codec had squeezed it into a minimal file size. And, despite being in a strange country, my cable fitted perfectly.

Obviously, I stuck all my gadgets on charge before falling asleep. The laptop, headphones, and phone all take USB-C, so I didn't have to faff with lots of different charging bricks.

I gratefully fell into bed. My phone had already detected the time-zone change and knew to wake me at 07:30 local time.

The next morning, as I entered the office where I'd be working, I flashed yet another QR code at the entrance. Someone scanned it with their phone and verified that I was vaccinated against you-know-what.

And thus the week continued.

Was everything perfect? No. But that was rarely the technology's fault. It worked near flawlessly.

I remember having to hold huge paper maps to navigate around a city. Flimsy travellers' cheques for payment. Never knowing if the thing you wanted to see was open that day. Needing a different SIM - and sometimes a specific phone - if you dared leave your country's airwaves. Tiny phrasebooks with outdated slang and dubious translations. Pumping coins into a call-box to let people know you'd landed safely. Turning up to a transport hub only to find things were cancelled. Menus in incomprehensible languages. A scribbled bit of paper stapled in a passport as a vaccine certificate. A dozen different cables and adaptors for power and video.

Don't let anyone misguide you with rose-tinted nostalgia - the old world was rubbish!

I know at its heart, this has been a story about privilege. I went to a modern city with excellent tax-subsidised infrastructure. I have credit cards and I can afford a passport. My phone is new enough to do all the things I want. And I'm rarely troubled by cat-callers or other harassers when walking around a strange city.

But the future is now. I can seamlessly use my personal tech in a different country. I can navigate, pay, live, and survive. All mediated by tiny silicon wafers, high-frequency radio waves, and humble barcodes. The present is magical.

At the end of the post, I said:

Here are my thoughts on some trivial aspects of our lives which - if put in a sci-fi film - would draw hoots of derision from an audience from the year 2022.
 

• Traffic jams.
• Attracting a bar-tender's attention.
• Resetting a microwave's clock after a powercut.
• Replacing used up items (toothpaste, butter).
• Tasting a dish to see if it's salty or spicy enough.
• Recharging gadgets.
• Waiting for a taxi.
• Flossing, deodorising, and most manner of personal hygiene.
• Monthly billing cycles.

So, how'd I do?

Traffic jams

Sadly, still here. But GPS has put a real dent in them. I can see before I turn onto the motorway, that it is jammed between junctions 7 and 9. So I take a different route. Self-driving vehicles haven't arrived in any great number - so we don't have a computer-mediated traffic yet. But GPS and live traffic reports have made people less prone to being stuck in traffic.

Attracting a bar-tender's attention.

THANKS COVID! Nearly all large pubs now have an app. A couple of clicks and my beers come to my table. It isn't everywhere, and it is sometimes a longer wait than queuing. But it has changed the way people interact in pubs. The days of trying to catch the eye of a bloke behind the bar while they're busy flirting might just be behind us.

Resetting a microwave's clock after a powercut.

*sigh* No. Still not yet. There are a few Internet-connected appliances. But microwaves seem to have ignored all new technology. Not even radio-controlled clocks. Would it really cost so much to put in a small radio receiver to listen for local time signals?

Replacing used up items (toothpaste, butter).

Amazon's "Dash" buttons seem to have failed. Turns out there isn't that much of a demand for single-click groceries. But two things have changed.

The first is subscriptions. Lots of services will offer you a postal subscription for basic goods.

The second is the rise of on-demand groceries. I can book a full grocery shop for the next day, or get a couple of items within 15 minutes.

Tasting a dish to see if it's salty or spicy enough.

I'm kinda surprised that this hasn't happened. Food thermometers are a thing - where's the same thing for flavours? Why can't I stick something in my curry to see if it needs more spice?

Recharging gadgets.

We don't have infinite batteries - although they are getting better - but Qi wireless charging is fairly prevalent. Most public transport now has plug sockets and USB ports. You're never far away from a power point. But gadgets are still power-hungry little monsters.

Waiting for a taxi.

We're pretty close to eliminating this in most major cities. A couple of clicks on an app and a taxi is with you within minutes. Visit a foreign country and your taxi app might even work there.

Flossing, deodorising, and most manner of personal hygiene.

Bah! I mean, during lockdown I didn't need to use deodorant as much - but that's about the limit. Where are the nano-bots cleaning my teeth and eating my secretions?

Monthly billing cycles.

I'm still slightly shocked that this is a thing. Although there are plenty of PAYG plans for technology - and a few usage based ones - nearly everything is stuck in the monthly rut. I guess it is easier to line up with the cadence of people's pay cheques than to introduce new billing models.

Smart-meters means that people can pay for their actual usage rather than an estimated and annualised bill. That's about all that has changed.

Thoughts

I'm giving myself a 50% success rate - which isn't bad. Of course, each of these innovations has led to unforeseen consequences. GPS may have saved marriages - but the constant pressure to be on time, and the ability to be tracked, is unsettling.

Not needing to go to the bar has, no doubt, trapped people at a table with someone they'd rather avoid.

Instant groceries means less support for local businesses and poor working conditions for couriers.

The rise in public charging points means an expectation they'll be working - and negative consequences when they aren't.

Uber's business model is widely seen as exploitative and possibly unsustainable.

Yearly billing traps people in contracts they don't want or need any more.

I'm not daft enough to make predictions about 2032 - but I do know that every change has an unexpected knock-on effect.

So, I present to you some choice predictions from "Technology and the office of the future" by B. W. Manley.

Low cost computers (VDU) - yup! Data storage - the article talks about storing "the entire contents of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on one side of a disc — words and pictures".

Digital networking! Brilliant! Voice Command! Wait... what?

By 1991 we didn't really have practical voice recognition systems. And certainly nothing that could replace the keyboard. Here we are FORTY YEARS later and most of us are thumping away on keyboards for long-form writing. If we're driving, we can scream "CALL MUM" and Siri will probably get it right. And there's the occasional use of voice recognition to compose a quick text. But we're not in 1981's future yet.

What about video? Sadly, too expensive and not useful enough.

After a year of COVID, I think we can all agree that Zoom has encouraged more meetings than are strictly necessary!

The humble FAX was about to become the big tech of the 1980s. Sadly, some places are still stuck with it - despite the obvious limitations.

What have we learned today?

Predicting the future is hard. Saying that something will always be too expensive is never a good bet.

Knowing that a technology has serious shortcomings - like not being able to search a fax - is irrelevant when it is simply a more convenient version of the existing paradigm.

Unintended consequences are the most exciting part of any technology. We don't use voice control in a noisy, open plan office - but we use it at home. Videocalls do increase the number of meetings - as predicted - but they also do slash travel budgets.

What's your favourite prediction from the 1980s?

I'll never forget the look of horror on my professor's face when I told him I didn't think his university course was good value for money.

I was in the first cohort of UK students paying tuition fees. A massive £1,000 per year. A group of us had gathered to complain about the poor quality teaching materials on a specific course, the lack of contact hours, and decrepit facilities.

Value for money and - by extension - user choice, was an alien concept in undergraduate education. We weren't humbled by wise old men - we were paying a significant sum of money for a resource.

I went back to my old university a few years ago. The crappy computer labs have been upgraded, lecturers seem more engaged with students - rather than treating them as a distraction from research, and the students are more confident in demanding what they need.

A large part of this is because prospective students aren't choosing a course based on which campus has the cheapest beer any more. They're on social media talking to existing students, they're looking up the salaries of graduates, they're investigating the ratings of professors. If you were paying £9k, wouldn't you do the same?

That conversation was 20 years ago. Fuck. I'm old.

But the same conversation has been and gone with swapping energy providers. I was bemused when we moved into our new house to discover that the previous owners were stuck on the most expensive tariff from a company which took 30 minutes to answer the phone. Sure, not everyone cares about switching to the best deal, but within 15 minutes I saved £100s and swapped to somewhere with better customer service.

Like millions of people in the last few years, I've fired my phone provider. I recently told my bank to improve their services or I'd switch to one of those fancy app-only banks.

Nearly every service in the UK has undergone a radical transformation due to digital disruption. Users' expectations have been raised for quality and value for money.

Now the same transformation is coming for healthcare.

My local village pharmacy was crap. They were slow, inefficient, never answered the phone, and were downright rude. OK, their prices for an NHS prescription were identical to every other pharmacy - but I didn't feel like their service represented value for money.

I could have taken a bus to the nearest town and got my drugs from there - I'm lucky to have the mobility and money to do so. Instead, I swapped to an app-only pharmacy.

Echo post out my meds with no delivery charge. They send me reminders when they reckon I'm running low. If I'm away from home, they'll deliver to me. They don't shout out in a crowded shop "MR EDEN? YOUR EMBARRASSING OINTMENT IS READY!"

All I needed was a smartphone and an Internet connection.

I appreciate not everyone has these things. And not everyone trusts online services. That's fine. But most adults do. And there will suddenly be a tectonic shift when people realise that there is a better way of doing things.

The same is true of a regular GP visit. Do I want to sit on an uncomfortable chair, surrounded by ill people, waiting for hours because the previous appointments have been delayed? I might not be able to physically reach a different practice - even if their chairs are comfier - but I can swap to an online GP.

OK, a video chat isn't going to take my blood-pressure or hear my heartbeat - but it is great for a whole range of appointments. And if I don't want to look a doctor in the eye - due to anxiety, embarrassment, or even just time constraints - I can text chat.

I think every GP should have the best equipment, the fanciest chairs, the politest and least-stressed staff, super-fast computers, and plentiful appointments. They should all have amazing pharmacists who are discreet and caring.

But I'd still switch to something which was more convenient to me, better met my needs, and gave me an experience which I thought was higher quality. I suspect many people would.

This is the change that's coming. And it reveals some interesting questions:

• What happens to a GP surgery when the built-in pharmacy doesn't have enough customers to stay profitable?
• If "simple" consultations are replaced with video-chat / triage, does that leave more resources for others?
• Do certain GPs want to work in an area with low / no digital take-up?
• How many patients care about seeing the same doctor each time? Is that easier or harder via digital technologies?
• We used to have doctors which made house-calls. Now they can do so virtually, what new skills do they need?

And, the big one:

What user needs are unfulfilled?

Ten years ago, no one wanted an app-only bank. The world has changed. And that change is coming for you!

OK! OK! It wasn't as bad as all that. I built an Internet-connected electric blanket so I can yell at the Alexa to pre-warm the bed. One of the IoT switches needed a firmware update. All over and done with in a few minutes.

But I can't help wondering how much time we lose to software updates. Every time I turn on my games console, I have to wait for another interminable update. It's practically a trope.

Lucy

@Lucycaulfield

Haven’t turned my PlayStation on for about two months, can’t wait for 80 hours of updates 🙃

---

john mack

@jonnymack74

*checks watch*
Don't worry kids, your Xmas console will have finished it's updates in the next few hours
After dinner you can stick the discs in and wait another hour for it to install then another few hours for the patches to download
Go to bed and play on boxing day
#PS4 #Xbox

---

There's got to be a better way to do this. Software updates are - usually - important. But why are they so large and cumbersome?

Thinking about the next five years...

• will computers be faster or slower?
• will the price of computing go up or down?
• will internet speeds get faster or slower?
• will computer graphics get more realistic or less?

I promise you these aren't daft questions. Ask people these questions, and then ask them to justify their answers. Then ask how that affects their business planning and purchasing decisions.

Relativity

Obviously, computers are continually getting faster - yet they're often perceived as slower.

Sure, the price per computation is falling, but a top of the range iPhone will cost you over a thousand pounds. The original cost a third of that (adjusted for inflation).

5G is fast but web pages are getting exponentially larger. And anyone who has been at a crowded train station knows that shared bandwidth dries up pretty quickly

In 1997, the video-game "Carmageddon" was banned all over the world for its realistic depictions of people being hit by cars.

And, who can forget the original Mortal Kombat being the subject of Moral Paniks?

Harder questions

Now, consider these set of questions. In the next five years...

• do you expect to have more passwords or fewer?
• will you own more computers or fewer?
• will computers be easier to use or harder?

Spotting trends

I've consolidated lots of passwords behind OAuth. But unless IndieAuth takes off in a meaningful way, I suspect I'll have more passwords. I have a Yubikey, but it seems like every week brings me a new 2FA soft-token I have to register and keep safe.

My house is filling up with computers. Every speaker, doorbell, and lightbulb has a CPU. But, increasingly, I only rent those computers - some virtually, some physically.

As I get older, I lose neuroplasticity. I get grumpy when a new version of Material Design comes out and means I have to learn how to use my computer all over again. Voice interfaces only work if you remember the precise wording of a command. As many people perceive it, computers are harder to use than ever.

In the news

The reason I ask these questions is due to a recent news story I read. A firm was locked in to a crappy multi-year contract with a technology supplier. In their defence, they said:

When we entered into an agreement with [redacted] we could not have foreseen the progress in technology around mobile data and streaming.

That, frankly, is incompetence. If you're buying a decade-long service, you have to take into account how technology advances over the years. I can forgive someone for not predicting the next Netflix, or the ubiquity of tablet computers. But it's impossible to justify long technology contracts which expect the world to stay static.