[illustration by Kimberly Kulers]
2048 has arrived. I am Mark Lucente, Ph.D., 84 years of age. I'm talking to you from the upstream end of Lake Avalon, nestled in the morningside of the southern Appalachians.
Fifty years ago, in 1998, I was asked to comment on a prediction paper written before I was born. In 1962, Franz Tank had written "Some Thoughts on the State of the Technical Science in 2012" in which he briefly and lucidly described where we had been and where we might be going, particularly in the realm of electronics and communications. As 1998 was early in my career, I felt a sophomoric urge to take the car by the wheel and lay down some predictions of my own, looking forward 50 years -- to 2048. After I completed my prediction paper, I asked it to ping me in 50 years so that I might evaluate my own powers of foresight. (At the time, when information did not yet possess behavior, this ping request was an interesting technical challenge in itself.) Right on schedule, my words from 1998, along with a copy of Franz Tank's words, have come knocking upon my virtual door. Suffice to say that my own predictions have weathered the first half of the twenty-first century with mixed results. The words of Franz Tank, however, are fraught with wisdom, prescience, and the fading echoes of the twentieth century.
Perhaps it is appropriate if not inevitable that these old words came to me while sitting on a placid lake on a warm pre-summer morning. Call me old fashioned, but I still like the occasional interruption -- when it comes from a party whom I favor, my twentieth-century self included. What an interesting contrast: in 2048, information comes to me; in 1998, I had to go to it. I recall that I actually generated those words by "typing" them, one letter at a time, hunched over an array of mechanical buttons, sitting at a desk, in front of a cathode ray tube (cousin of the "TV set" common at the time). These days, I much prefer gabbing away, as I am now, my baggies having morphed into a soft but rigid floatation seat that actively suspends me, balanced and buoyed up to my bellypatch in water. Easier to concentrate, easier to think, easier to recollect....
Back in 1998, the big buzz in information technology was connecting it all together. Bits were shuttled from my big electronic "computer" to another one and to another, still in a predetermined backbone or centralized scheme. Then, it seemed, everything got connected so fast. Now one assumes that anything (wall, table, clothing, vehicle, etc.) is or can be connected. I'm not even sure where my words are going right now, but I imagine that a patch of fabric in my clothing is relaying what I say to a nearby node, and on from there into the net. It's all academic, really, this maze of invisible bit conduits that connects nearly everything. All I know is that, when I need to remember what I said or share with others, my words are available to me -- anytime, anyplace, anyway I want them. Ah, yes... perhaps that small flock of birds overhead has an imposter amidst its ranks. Yes, that's probably it -- aneems make great relay nodes. This one is probably powered by eating kudzu, makes bird sounds, and generally blends into the natural scene (with the added bonus that it knows not to defecate on bathers!). Far better to have moving, animal-like relays, flocking to where they are needed, rather than the static wireless repeaters of 1998 that looked like metal trees (or often just metal!).
Information technology is not the only technology that has changed greatly. Materials and engineering advances have caused revolutions in biological sciences, construction, clothing, transportation, education, energy. Smartglass keeps windows clean indefinitely. Bandages are microscopic M.A.S.H. units capable of diagnosing and repairing damaged skin, relaying information to a personal medical database. Buildings made of cheap lightweight material defy gravity and allow for an explosion of human habitats that are more suitable to each human's need and whimsy. As I see it in hindsight, there were two reasons why information technology was the first major technological singularity of the past 50 years. First, bits of information transcend any particular physical embodiment. Second, information is what humans do best -- we are born communicators, arguably the most communication-enabled species. Even though we don't really think about it so much anymore, the creation, exchange, and understanding of information made possible and is made possible by all of our modern technologies.
Enough about "nowadays." Let's take a look at the words of Professor Tank from the world of 1962, right around the time of the first laser light. "The maser principle," as he wrote before "laser" was in common usage, was to have found wide applications. Right he was, and double bonus: not only did lasers become cheap, robust, and in widespread use by 2012, but the same principle of coherently building up waves -- applied to matter waves in recent times -- is the basis of every multimill (cranking out everything from hats to diamond jewelry) as well as the heart of our a-grav engines (in the newer air and space vehicles).
"Raw materials...will be rare," wrote Professor Tank. Yes, in 1998, 2012, and 2048, raw materials are rare in the twentieth-century sense: there is only so much water, air, organics. We now understand that the cost of each human creation -- homes, vehicles, clothing, containers, infrastructure, machines -- is measured by the currency of atoms. Indeed, it was right around 2012 that this scarcity led to the creation of the first primitive z-bar, which has all but displaced twentieth-century metals, glasses, concretes, and plastics. The earliest z-bar was fabricated in the expensive wasteful twentieth-century manner (from the outside in, rather than from the inside out), often in sheets or actual "bars", but was nevertheless extremely strong and, of course, literally light as air. Now our modern millimills extrude z-bar in countless forms, and allow us to populate our world with creations that use atoms sparingly, and to make that stuff look and feel like something that we like to look at and touch and have around. Weight -- mass -- is just another design variable, included only where necessary for optimal function, in the same way that a fine fountain pen or tennis racket was designed in 1998 for optimal feel and performance.
To better understand the words of Professor Tank, remember that it was the tail-end of the Industrial Revolution, with all of its inelegance and brute-force folly. The twentieth century reduced both muscle-power and mind-power to electricity. "Computing" was done electronically, by discrete logic switches. Electronic current circuits were the rage in the twentieth century. The use of quantum states to process information was only being discussed, at places like IBM and MIT. The photon was relegated to the task of communications infrastructure, and the rather comical task of reading and writing bits on moving pieces of plastic or magnetic material -- the "disks" that passed for "storage" in the day. Micromachines were not yet used for infotech, and were still measured in units of length (not atoms!). Energy generation was largely centralized, not generated where it is needed as it is nowadays. Now action, force, motion and propulsion are often generated directly rather than by a motor powered by an external source. Consider our modern farming vehicle, which consumes biological farm waste (e.g., chaff, weeds) and converts this into chemical power in self-contained enzymatic reaction modules. This power feeds millions of micromachines that propel the vehicle and articulate its appendages. Waste from this feeding process is designed to replenish nitrogen compounds in the soil.
Miniaturization was an essential theme of Professor Tank's predictions: various technological devices "will have gained a 'final form,'" he wrote. By 2012, his predictions were true, but then fringe technologies began to wash it all along to yet another final form, and then another. Only now, many years later, is it clear that FORM was not the driving force at all, but instead function -- function vis-a-vis each individual human. He was right, however, to state that we live in a time when "final form" can be considered. Back in the twentieth century, I despised the ugly boxes that passed for technology. By 2012, many designers and builders were already creating high-tech infrastructure that was invisible except for its occasional function. Just as electric lights and air conditioning improved living environments in the last century, the early ethers of the twenty-first century became increasingly common, allowing your information to come seamlessly to you. The naturalness that had been obscured by industrialized civilization became THE important marketing factor. As luxury, beauty, and status began to be assigned to highly functional minimally invasive systems, the Sentic Age had begun -- the thoughts and feelings and personal realities of every human became the the driving force, the measure of success. We have a long way to go, of course, but these words from the twentieth century do remind us of how far we have come.
Professor Tank states that the real contribution of science in "modern times" (an old term apparently used to refer to the age when reason and scientific method were thought to possess complete and inexorable truths) is not simply the myriad discoveries, technologies, machines, and tools, but "was wholly intellectual" -- the scientific method itself. It was the recognition that by means of experiments basic laws of nature could be found, could be expressed and ruled theoretically, i.e., by logical process." Furthermore, he exalts, that it "freed men from incorrect superstitions." This is an ironic insight into the world of my youth -- the twentieth century -- where memories of the medieval madness (that had largely been given life and breath by unsubstantiated superstitions) led to a sort of tyranny of logic in which BY DEFAULT ideas and phenomena did NOT exist outside of provable rational knowledge. The people of the "modern" age did just fine, of course, pursuing the enormous space of knowledge that was indeed uncovered logically at a rapid rate. The only problem was that this tyranny excluded most of the wisdom of millenia past, and blinded twentieth-century scientists from the very insights that could have helped them in that age of poverty, destruction, inequity, and ecological poisoning.
As a twist on a twist, Professor Tank seemed to sense that there was more to the future that just rational thought. Just as interesting as his predictions were his predictions on predicting the future. He logics that accurate prediction is not possible, stating that "life possesses uncountable elements of significant importance, removed from the power of rational thinking.... In these fields, phantasy, feeling, and intuition are an invaluable help."
So there it is, a belief stated by a twentieth-century intellectual, the idea that there is more to understanding life than just "rational thinking". This belief was a dominant philosophy throughout our ancient past, perhaps too dominant in the Middle Ages. Of course, nowadays we take this belief for granted. Indeed, to hear my grandchildren's perception of the world around them, one might think that the pendulum has swung back a little too far from the logical and into the chthonian realm. Those kids even make fun of me when I complain that life is too much fun and that I have too much free time.
Professor Tank was enlightened, as further demonstrated in his belief about the future of humans: "He will turn to other things more important to him and perhaps more needed for his maintenance." As he states, "we always come come back to the well-known experience that the human being is a measure of the things." Surely, this twentieth century scientist would have appreciated the dawning of the Sentic Age, in which humans apply their will, imagination, and creativity toward the molding of the function, feel, personality of machines. Perhaps because he was involved with the early telecommunications technologies, he instinctively knew that a large part of these other "things" -- certainly the largest tool in the toolbelt -- was human-to-human communications. Perhaps he could sense that he and his cronies were continuing a process of linking the minds of humans in such a way that we could enhance our creative and expressive capabilities, and to allow us to enter the Sentic Age.
The words of Professor Tank were the words of a scientist, an academic, a great believer in basic research. He stressed that the 50 years from "1862 to 1912 were extremely rich with basic discovery" and that the next 50 years until his present time of 1962 were characterized by "the extension of the gained knowledge and the technical application thereof." Indeed, this process had only begun. During my early days at IBM Research at the tail end of the twentieth century, it seemed to me that the playroom shelves were jammed packed full of toys to play with and put together in new and interesting ways. Science and basic research had given us those toys, and we were only beginning to put them all together.
[illustration by Kimberly Kulers]