A Brief Historical Background.This Article Will Be of No Practical Use To
THIS ARTICLE WILL BE OF NO PRACTICAL USE TO YOU
Monthly Strategy Report October 2014
Rose Marie Bourdeguer Director of Research Department
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A S W A R D Monthly Strategy Report October 2014
This article will be of no practical use to you.
Its only purpose is to entertain (at least we hope so) and maybe to help you to reflect. It seeks to review, albeit not exhaustively, historical curiosities, to forget day-to-day issues for a while and think instead of the future, free from pressure and stress. Although they may not always be right, there is nonetheless a need for visionaries and people with imagination, people who ask impossible questions at the outset - questions which, with time, result in something real.
The discovery of fire and penicillin millennia later, the invention of the wheel, of the steam engine, of computers, mobile phones and video conferencing… all these technological and scientific advances have changed people’s lives over the centuries, for the better in the main.
The rate of innovation has accelerated in the 20th and 21st centuries, with the men and women behind the most important developments becoming real modern gurus. However, the mere fact that one is an expert in a given field is no guarantee of the success of all your predictions, as we will see later.
Not only experts make predictions. Writers have also foreseen major innovations, and have even predicted the date.
Biochemist and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov published an essay in 1964 predicting how the future would look in 50 years’ time. Today, in other words. Among many other works, Asimov had previously written a series of short stories about robots, in fact, he is regarded as the first person to use the term “robotic[s]”. In his famous essay, he predicted that in 2014, robots would not be in common use, but would nonetheless exist. Controlled by miniature computers, they would be able to pick up objects, handle artefacts and put them in order. He also made predictions regarding television, foreseeing that wall screens would replace the original apparatus, with transparent cubes that allowed three-dimensional vision.
Asimov forecast that communications would include images as well as sound. Jules Verne had already imagined video conferencing, which he described as a “phonotelephote” which would transmit images via sensitized mirrors connected by cables. Asimov, however, went further and predicted that the screen would also allow the user to study documents and photographs and make it possible to read books.
Today, all of this seems obvious. Perhaps we need to go back to 1964 to understand just what a visionary Asimov was. Although the only people to ever travel though time into the past and future were Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd in Steven Spielberg’s “Back to the Future” trilogy. The time-machine and the flying car are two of the most famous predictions which have yet to come true… so far that is.
We need to go back to 1949 in order to understand just how visionary the English writer Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote under the pseudonym George Orwell, really was. In his novel “1984”, through which he sought to condemn dictatorships of all kinds, Orwell portrayed a society in which Big Brother could control the people through a panoply of nightmare devices. The days of surveillance cameras, social media and internet search engines were still some way off.
Jules Verne, a genuine pioneer of the science-fiction genre, was adept at looking far into the future to see how societies would be. In his novel “From the Earth to the Moon” he foresaw a trip to the Moon inside a projectile fired from an enormous space cannon. In “Robur the Conqueror”, he describes a huge airship called the Albatross with mast-mounted rotors which spin thanks to internal machinery - something akin to the modern helicopter. Of course, Leonardo da Vinci had anticipated Verne in the Monthly Strategy Report October 2014
15th century with his drawings and descriptions of what he called an “Aerial Screw”.
In 1863, Jules Verne wrote the novel “Paris in the Twentieth Century” about a young man who lives in a world in which there are glass skyscrapers, high-speed trains, gas-powered cars, gigantic calculators and a telecommunications network that spanned the world. The novel has a pessimistic tone, so much so that his editor refused to publish it. The manuscript was discovered by his great-great-grandson in 1989 and finally published in 1994.
Jules Verne was a lawyer, and yet had a passion for science and technology. He surrounded himself with engineers and scientists and, as he explained in an interview in 1894, dedicated long hours to reading. “I may tell you that I am a great reader, and that I always read pencil in hand. I always carry a notebook about with me and immediately jot down... anything that interests me or may appear to be of possible use in my books. I have thus amassed many thousands of notes on all subjects, and to-date, at home, have at least twenty thousand notes which can be turned to advantage in my work, as yet unused. Some of these notes were taken after conversations with people. I love to hear people talk, provided they talk on subjects with which they are acquainted.”
A wise man listens to those who know the most. Although even these can sometimes be wrong.
In 1969, the physicist and engineer Werner von Braun estimated that by 2000 there would be considerable activity on the Moon, man would have landed on Mars and we would probably have sent manned missions to other planets as well. Von Braun was wrong, although this does not mean that his vision won’t be achievable one day.
Bill Gates, the creator of and brains behind the Windows operating system, was also somewhat optimistic in 2004 when he said that e-mail spam would be a thing of the past in two years’ time. Of course, this does not mean that a solution will never be found, or at least we must hope so.
As the 1990s drew to a close, experts warned of a possible IT apocalypse at midnight January 31 1999 as we entered the 21st century. This was the start of a race to avoid what popularly became known as the “Millennium” or “Y2K Bug”. The way that years tend to be reduced to just two digits would cause a spatio-temporal meltdown for computers as 00 arrived. This would cause planes to drop from the sky, train programming to shut down, traffic lights and medical apparatuses to stop working and all manner of other disasters to befall us. Nothing of the kind happened. Of course, this could be due to the enormous amount of work before the turn of the century that was put into preparing for and preventing these events from happening.
The future does not always turn out as thought. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was felt that by the year 2000 the space race would be at a very advanced stage and that perhaps our predictions regarding progress in the field of telecommunications were in fact going to come up short. Innovation sometimes happens so swiftly that however fast we run, we never catch up, whilst at other times it seems to unexpectedly grind to a halt, either due to budgetary restrictions, technical complexity or difficulties in applying or controlling the new developments.
The Rockwell X-30 is a good example of this. Hailed by no less than the President of the United States in 1986 as a vehicle which would be able to travel from Washington to Tokyo in just two hours, this was an extremely ambitious and expensive project which used compressed air injection engines to allow the plane to take off from a conventional runway and fly directly into orbit or within the atmosphere at incredible speeds. Such a development would revolutionize world transport on a global level and yet it was scrapped in 1993 as a result of budgetary cutbacks and technical difficulties.
However, it is not only a limited budget and technical problems that can halt progress. Through study of the human genome we can now treat diseases that had previously been incurable and better Monthly Strategy Report October 2014 understand what illnesses a person may suffer throughout their lifetime. Nonetheless, knowledge of this genetic code has opened up new ethical-moral conflicts. For example, people with genetic disadvantages might be discriminated against at work, by insurance companies or by the social system, among other concerns. It might even become possible to select the physical characteristics of our babies. The cost of understanding our genetic fate could, on occasions, far outweigh the benefits.
Inventions, such as pharmaceutical drugs, cannot be made available to the public without previous research which may detect, quantify and control the effects of their widespread use.
Perhaps we just have to accept that we will never travel in a time-machine.