Mile
Zero

Of all the futurism scenarios, the one I like best is the "linear future" idea. You don't hear much about it, comparatively, because it's not as sexy as tech utopianism (we'll all have robot iPods!) and the singularity (we'll all be robot iPods!), but I think it leaves us better off in a quieter, less robotic way.

The idea of the linear future is briefly touched upon in a talk Charlie Stross gave to a tech consulting group, which he later posted up as "Shaping the Future." In that speech, he purposefully ignores a whole host of futurisms, like bioengineering or nanotech (the latter of which, of course, has so far been almost all smoke and mirrors), in order to talk about how we percieve technological progress:

Around 1950, everyone tended to look at what the future held in terms of improvements in transportation speed.

But as we know now, that wasn't where the big improvements were going to come from. The automation of information systems just weren't on the map, other than in the crudest sense - punched card sorting and collating machines and desktop calculators.

We can plot a graph of computing power against time that, prior to 1900, looks remarkably similar to the graph of maximum speed against time. Basically it's a flat line from prehistory up to the invention, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, of the first mechanical calculating machines. It gradually rises as mechanical calculators become more sophisticated, then in the late 1930s and 1940s it starts to rise steeply. From 1960 onwards, with the transition to solid state digital electronics, it's been necessary to switch to a logarithmic scale to even keep sight of this graph.

It's worth noting that the complexity of the problems we can solve with computers has not risen as rapidly as their performance would suggest to a naive bystander. This is largely because interesting problems tend to be complex, and computational complexity rarely scales linearly with the number of inputs; we haven't seen the same breakthroughs in the theory of algorithmics that we've seen in the engineering practicalities of building incrementally faster machines.

...

The cultural picture in computing today therefore looks much as it did in transportation technology in the 1930s - everything tomorrow is going to be wildly faster than it is today, let alone yesterday. And this progress has been running for long enough that it's seeped into the public consciousness. In the 1920s, boys often wanted to grow up to be steam locomotive engineers; politicians and publicists in the 1930s talked about "air-mindedness" as the key to future prosperity. In the 1990s it was software engineers and in the current decade it's the politics of internet governance.

All of this is irrelevant. Because computers and microprocessors aren't the future. They're yesterday's future, and tomorrow will be about something else.

Now, Stross is ambivalent about that future. He mentions the idea of the "end of progress," which he credits to Canadian writer Karl Schroeder. The end of progress is the idea that we'll one day answer all the big questions of science, and the rest will be either details or physically impossible to test. It's the anti-Singularity. On the other hand, Stross calls bioengineering the big elephant in the room, and clearly has high hopes for it as a revolutionary technology.

And he might be right about the latter. Still, I find it interesting that in the same discussion where he points out that the Singularity is not necessarily some sort of total paradigm shift, he still insists that we'll find it difficult to grasp the future. Stross is a science fiction writer and so he's got some investment in being able to pitch exciting, disorienting new worlds. But is the future really a dividing line that you can't understand until it's been crossed? I have my doubts.

The classic example of future shock is a medieval peasant confronted with an advanced artifact like an airplane or a computer. And we laugh at the idea of some filthy ape pawing at the controls, driving the plane off a cliff or cowering in fear when Youtube plays the Dramatic Chipmunk. This is, I'd submit, at best smug, and at worst bizarrely classist. It assumes that we are much smarter and more adaptable than our forebears, even though relatively few of us modern sophisticates can actually fly a plane or program a computer.

Being chauvinistic about our current moment in time is kind of comforting to us. It's the kind of rationalizing you do when you've got buyer's remorse over a slightly-underwhelming purchase, because you don't want to admit that it hasn't made you a better person. "2008 is awesome," you say weakly. "You primitive screwheads from 2006 couldn't even imagine how great we are in 2008. Don't even try!" And in turn, the same way that we lust after shiny products, we shop frantically for the biggest, best futures. "The Singularity is going to be awesome," we yell. "I mean, it's so good, you can't even imagine what it's like until you've got it. I can't wait!"

But maybe we are not as incomprehensible to previous eras as we think we are. I often feel that if you could actually bring a 16th century peasant into modern times, explain things carefully, and set them loose, they'd have a Facebook account and a Gmail address within the month. Within two, they'd be complaining about the iPhone App Store restrictions. Don't get me wrong--information technology and the cloud have been transformative technologies that have changed how we structure our society and our culture. But they are not, in and of themselves, mind-bogglingly hard to understand. If nothing else, this should be obvious from the metaphors we use to describe them: libraries, icons, highways, forums, etc.

The past is just a foreign country, and we are Ugly Americans. When it comes to the future, we simply switch roles and are filled with envy for the land of opportunity across the ocean of time.

So let's say we put aside our prejudices and our rationalizations, and we assume that the future--while possibly structured culturally with larger or smaller degrees of openness--is going to be technologically about the same (i.e., it will at least be recognizable). The implications of this futurism are, to me, a lot more interesting than ones that have nanotech teleporters and warp drives, because they are implications we can more directly act on today. Anticipation of a future where there are magic fuel sources and unforeseen computational trends, for example, has been highly detrimental to taking action on climate change. We don't need to worry about the consequences of our technology, the argument goes, because we will invent something to solve those problems before they kill us. This theory is silent on what those technologies are or what they will do, because in a paradigm-based view of the future, it's conceptually impossible to predict them until they get here. Needless to say, such an approach is unhelpful.

We don't need a futurism model that both promises the world and denies that we can see a pathway there. We need a model that recognizes that the problems we face today aren't going to vanish tomorrow in a blaze of digital deus ex machina. So that's why I like this idea that technology ten or a hundred years from now will be largely the same as it is today, with a few tweaks. Far from being depressing, it gives us hope and direction: how do we make this the best possible present, and thus the best possible future? Imagine that your cell phone and your computer will be slightly more powerful, but will never be substantially different or able to solve radically different problems. If they won't be improved beyond a certain set of features, why not concentrate on their sustainability or their equality of distribution, both of which could stand to see some serious improvement?

I think we are starting to see aspects of linear future thinking emerge. Sites like Etsy and Make represent a growing craft/DIY movement based around improving and adapting what you've already got, instead of racing to invent something new. The One Laptop Per Child program may be a grave misstep educationally, but some of the ideas behind its technological innovation--a laptop that's durable, easily servicable, and less ecologically hazardous--are similar. All of these are a practical, hacky kind of futurism. They say "I'm not waiting around for the future. I already live there, and I always have."

For the past three years I carried an iPaq PocketPC in my messenger bag. It served as a mobile copy of my recent e-mail, an address book, ebook, and game machine. In a pinch, I'd even written and filed stories on the go with a folding keyboard (DORK!). But I noticed lately that it was staying in the back most of the time, and that the phone numbers that it shared with Outlook were losing sync with my actual phone. So I bit the bullet and bought a Nokia smartphone running Symbian, thus sating this month's consumerist urges.

One of Nokia's many cool little applets that can be added to the phone is Energy Profiler, which is meant for developers so they can keep their apps from devouring the battery whole. But it's also kind of useful, on a phone that does as much as this one does, to figure out which activities will send you scurrying for the charger first. So similar to Jeff Atwood's post about laptop power consumption, here's a rundown of power usage for the Nokia E51 in common (for me) usage situations. I'll list the average wattage being pulled, as well as the Energy Profiler's estimate of total possible battery life.

• Standby mode: .05W, 93:27
• Voice call (tested with voicemail): .56W, 8:09
• Surfing the Web on EDGE: .94W, 4:50
• Gameboy emulator: .52W, 8:52
• Mucking around in Python: .2W, 23:16
• Writing this post via SSH: .72W, 6:20

All in all, about what you'd expect. Using the cell radio is the biggest power consumer, with data transmission hitting it particularly hard. If this were an American phone and could get onto AT&T's 3G towers, that would probably be even more true. The only surprise is that I figured the Python numbers would be higher, since that includes Bluetooth keyboard communication. Apparently the Stowaway is quite frugal.

But while it's fun gathering this data, learning more about battery tech (isn't that how you want to spend your weekends?) implies that it's functionally useless. Like almost all consumer electronics these days, my phone uses a lithium-ion battery. Unlike old rechargable batteries, it doesn't have a "memory": you don't have to run the battery all the way down before recharging it. In fact, since partial charges don't count as full cycles, in theory you should charge these devices every chance you get and leave them plugged in whenever possible. So in theory the amount of juice any particular application uses is basically irrelevant unless it drains the battery instantly.

On the other hand, I'm naturally forgetful and regrettably sane, meaning it's unlikely that I'm going to carry a phone charger around and make sure it's plugged in every chance I get. Considering that, it's probably good for me to know that I can Python until the cows come home, but I'll only get 1/6th as much time out of the web browser.

Home fabrication machines are now possible for around $2400. Congratulations, we're now one small step closer to post-scarcity.

When I saw this, I immediately thought two things. The first, since the article says the machine can be loaded with chocolate, was "I could make my own chocolate bunnies." The second was to remember how, a few years back and using one of the commercial fabricators, one engineer designed a working pellet gun straight out of the machine.