Visions 21: Technology and You

Growing up in New York City in the 1960s, nothing gave me greater pleasure than visiting the World's Fair in Flushing Meadow, where a kid could have the run of the place for a quarter. The best exhibits were those that offered up visions of tomorrowland--a world of monorails, moving sidewalks and picture telephones where everything in the future seemed destined to be made of either Formica or Fiberglas.

For the past few months, I and many of my colleagues have lived in our own version of tomorrowland, exploring what life might be like in 2025. In our fifth and last Visions issue, we examine how technology will change our life. Trust me, Formica is not a major player.

What we've discovered doing this series is that while not every futurist is optimistic, most of the fun ones are. Michio Kaku, a physicist who discusses what will replace silicon chips in powering computers (try DNA), can't wait for the day when "objects will be animate and intelligent, and they'll talk to us. It'll be like a Disney movie. Our grandchildren will be incredulous that we lived way back when things didn't answer when you spoke to them."

Giving Kaku a run in the enthusiasm sweepstakes is Nicholas Negroponte, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, who predicts a ubiquitous computing world sooner rather than later, a world in which refrigerators will know when your milk has gone bad and will order a fresh bottle. Novelist William Gibson, who coined the word cyberspace, even imagines a world in which your fridge (and your car and your toothbrush...) will be as smart as you.

John and Nana Naisbitt agree that high tech will only get higher, but they make the pessimistic point that simulation is also here to stay, with a kid playing his snowboarding video far more times than he actually whizzes down a mountain. This does not bother Chris Taylor, our San Francisco correspondent, in the least; answering the question Will I still be addicted to video games?, he happily predicts being plugged into a bioport, the star of his own virtual-reality show, at the age of 80.

I wish I could say Joel Stein had a happier experience handling Will Cybersex Be Better Than Real Sex?, but at least he got to talk with a woman who starred in Porn-0-Matic 2000.

"What surprised me about this issue was how far out on a limb some of our contributors were willing to go," says Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who edited three of our Visions installments. "We've got M.I.T. professors confidently making predictions--of computers' gaining consciousness or robots' throwing off their chains--that go farther than anything William Gibson has written."

None of our other experts has predicted the future quite the way Caleb Carr does in his novel Killing Time, which we commissioned for the series and which will be published in full later this year by Random House. Though the adventures of Dr. Gideon Wolfe will be expanded in the book, readers have got enough of a taste to know Carr is not quite the optimist Kaku is. "I don't mean to say these things will happen, since things can go any one of 10 ways in the future," says Carr. "But I do worry if all these technologies are allowed to run wild." That said, Carr is a lot of fun to work with, thus disproving our rule about optimistic futurists.