The Tomorrow Project Anthology Copyright © 2012 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. The copyrights for individual stories and chapters are owned by their respective authors. Fictitious names of companies, products, people, characters, and/or data mentioned herein are not intended to represent any real individual, company, product, or event. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. First Printing: September 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Imagining the Future and Building It Brian David Johnson 1 Photographic Memory Madeline Ashby 10 Click Kathleen Maher 26 Hostile Memories Rob Enderle 38 Be Careful What You Wish For Jon Peddie 84 Incipient Marsupial Roger Kay 94 DreamWeaver Rob Enderle 126 v Table of Contents After Science Karl Schroeder 142 Vintage Tomorrows Preview: A Futurist and a Cultural Historian Walk into a Bar James H. Carrott & Brian David Johnson 01 vi 1 IMAGINING THE FUTURE AND BUILDING IT by Brian David Johnson “ Science and technology have progressed to the point where what we build is only constrained by the limits of our own imaginations.“ —Justin Rattner, Intel CTO This quote gives me goose bumps. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Over the last year I’ve spoken all over the world and presented Justin’s quote to tens of thousands of people. I call it my geek test. If you are a geek, when you read this quote you get chills. I’ve even heard some people in the audience give a quick intake of breath when they read it. It’s a big deal. Why is it such a big deal? Well, first you have to look at who said it. Justin Rattner is the Chief Technology Officer of the Intel Corporation—one of the largest technology companies in the world and the company where I’m the resident futurist. Intel manufactures the intelligence and computing platforms that power everything from the Internet to smartphones to Curiosity, the Mars Rover that has captured the imagination of the world with its breathtaking HD pictures of the surface of Mars. Being the CTO of 1 Introduction Intel means he’s the head geek. He’s the lead geek of thousands of geeks. The Uber geek. So, when Intel’s chief geek says that the only thing limiting our development is our imagination, that’s a really powerful statement. Justin is an engineer and comes out of supercomputing so he knows what he’s talking about. So, for Intel’s CTO to say that we can build pretty much anything just as long as we can imagine it…well that just gives me goose bumps. What will it feel like to be a human in 2020? What makes Justin’s vision all the more important is because of where our technological future is headed. Over the last few years in our futurecasting lab we’ve been exploring what it will feel like to be a human in the years 2020 to 2025. The models we build are experience-based models that we derive from social science, technical research, statistical data, hundreds of hours of interviews and even a little science fiction. These effects-based models give Intel the specifications we need to outline the capabilities that are needed for our platforms. As I write this we are working on the 2019 model. So what does 2020 look like? As we look out to 2020 something really remarkable happens. As we pass 2020 the size of meaningful computational power approaches zero. (By the way this is another geek test… If you have goose bumps right now you are a geek. If you don’t have goose bumps don’t sweat it. You’re going to have a wonderful life, a great social life and you might even get outside to see this thing they have called the sun. For the rest of us geeks… We have goose bumps.) Gadi Singer, my colleague at Intel, explained to me that as we continue making the chips smaller and faster the size of meaningful computational power approaches zero by volume. That’s so small that it’s nearly invisible. 2 Introduction Wow! The reason this is such a big deal is because for decades we’ve been asking ourselves can we do it. Can we make a workstation small enough to fit in a desktop? Can we make a desktop computer small enough to fit in your lap? Can we make a laptop small enough to fit in your pocket? Can we do it? That was the question. But when the size of meaningful computational power approaches zero something really wonderful happens. We don’t have to ask ourselves can we do it anymore. We have to ask ourselves what. What do we want to do? When you get intelligence that small you can turn anything into a computer. You could turn a table into a computer. All of a sudden, it’s possible to turn your shirt, your chair, even your own body into a computer. That’s why we have to ask what do we want to do with all that intelligence? If you turned your shirt into a computational device that would be cool but what would you do with it? This is the pragmatic side of futurecasting. What is the problem we are solving? How would we make people’s lives better? And as we near 2020 we are going to be able to do a lot. Maybe even touch the lives of every person on the planet and make their lives better. It’s an audacious goal but one I think is worth taking on. The next thing we’ve seen as we look out to 2020 is that for people it will feel like data has taken on a life of its own. That’s what it will feel like to live in the coming age of big data. It will be as if there is a secret life of data. And the truth is that that’s right. We are creating massive amounts of data every day: information about our web searches, our financial data, our media information, our preferences, and our social network activity. This will only increase as we move into the next decade. We’ll be spewing out information like we’re using fire hoses—massive hydrants of data. All this data will flow into the Cloud. We’ll have algorithms 3 Introduction talking to algorithms, machines talking to machines, more algorithms talking to algorithms—all processing and making sense of our patterns. Data will have a secret life. This is a good thing. It will make us more efficient, more productive, healthier and our world more sustainable. So as we look to 2020 we see computing moving to zero size and data having a secret life. Now, you might be asking yourself: How do we design for that? How do we come up with the capabilities and specifications so that we can build this future? The answer is simple. We use our imagination. This is why Justin’s quote is so powerful. Technology has progressed to the point that we must develop our imaginations just as much as, if not more than, our science and engineering. To design the next generation of amazing technology we need to explore the stories and narratives we are imagining our future to be. Science Fiction Stories Can Change the Future. Over the past year one of the most interesting and challenging pieces of thinking that I’ve heard came from another colleague at Intel—Dr. Genevieve Bell (By the way, if you have your smartphone handy, tweet Dr. Bell, she’s @feraldata, and tell her that @IntelFuturist is doing a great job giving an overview of her research. Thanks!) Dr. Bell is a cultural anthropologist who has fundamentally changed how social science and computer engineering work together. She wanted to understand how our relationships with technology had changed and evolved throughout history. She was specifically looking at how we as humans understood and then lived with new technologies. When she told me the story, she started in France in 1739. The inventor Jacques de Vaucanson came up with an ingenious little device. It was an 4 Introduction amazing piece of technology that astounded the world. It was so amazing, so earth-shakingly good that the renowned historian and philosopher Voltaire said that seeing de Vaucanson’s device would remind you of the glory that is France. So what was this amazing piece of technology? A duck. A mechanical duck. Made up of over 400 parts, this little duck did what all ducks do. It waddled along, it flapped its beak, it ate, and finally, like all real ducks…it pooed. Yes— the duck went to the bathroom. This duck freaked people out. It was too real. Here was a piece of technology that could do all the things a living duck could do but it was a machine. Next we move forward 77 years to the summer of 1816. A nineteen-year-old teenager is spending her vacation by Lake Geneva with her newlywed husband and their friends. The bad weather makes it a terrible summer season. To pass the gloom, the friends make up ghost stories to amuse each other. One of these stories led to the first science fiction novel of all time, Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley. Shelley had lived her entire life on the cusp of technological and cultural change. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an early feminist and her father William Godwin was a well-known political philosopher of the day.