The Future is here
William Gibson’s comment that “the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed”, seems increasingly open to question. Technologies that many of us might consider futurist or even science fiction, are already sufficiently well developed to become part of our daily lives.
Take Google and its plans for the digital house: its launched Google Home in a bid to match Amazon Echo, stimulating competition in creating new interfaces with the environment where we spend a large part of our time. While some people still think that Siri, Cortana, or Google Now are just playthings to amuse ourselves with, it turns out that the big tech companies are already designing a future in which most of the stuff we do at home, whether clearing up a doubt, playing music, turning the lights on and off or getting ready to go out, will all be done by interacting with a box in our living room
It has to be said, that even for me, watching somebody ask Amazon Echo to tell it to summon the Tesla out of the garage seems a little futuristic, but the truth is that the technology needed to do that is already well advanced. Others are still in the development phase: while taxi drivers continue to protest the arrival of Uber, in some places you can already use an app to request a Google Car to pick you up and take you somewhere, while an Uber project with a Ford Fusion is already driving round the streets of Pittsburgh. And in other cities, albeit on a trial basis, it is possible to use an interface to make a purchase on Amazon Prime Air that will be with you in less than half an hour.
And what about the impact of 5G? Faster internet speeds are one thing, but latency becomes even more important, since we will also have to get used to using all kinds of buttons, sensors, activators and devices as part of our everyday life.
When you talk about these concepts, which undoubtedly have a futuristic look like in “The Jetsons”, the conversation, for some reason, tend to lack seriousness. What we now need to focus on are the opportunities that all this is going to create for us, whether at the individual or business level. Objections to the pace of change tend to be surprisingly weak, and largely based on clichés, as though large companies were going to invest millions of dollars in a technology and attract the best talent only to “forget” something basic, or as though the spread of their technology was going to be suddenly halted because they had overlooked a problem that we could think of in a casual conversation.
I love science fiction. I’ve read a lot of it, and I know the difference between it and reality. What we need to remember today is that many things some people still consider science fiction and that they are only capable of understanding in terms of jokes or clichés, are now realities that are going to change the way we live. Now is the time to adjust our analysis tools, to stop dismissing people who talk about technology as either visionaries or mystics and start thinking about what technology can do for us. Everything evolves, even skepticism: healthy doubt is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as it’s questioning things on the basis of today’s reality, not that of the last century.
(En español, aquí)
