In recent weeks I've been thinking a lot about the future, which is sort of surprising when the world's politicians are conspiring to make us wonder whether there'll even be one. It feels to me as though a bunch of technologies that we once thought revolutionary, then took for granted, are all at once maturing so as to deliver on their original promise.
It started as I was reviewing Greg Milner's book "Pinpoint", about the history of the GPS system. An excellent read, it tells you about those non-obvious applications for which GPS is used most, beyond the sat-nav on the dash of your car: agriculture, transport logistics, timing (and of course delivering smart bombs, for which is was originally invented). I concluded that, unlike the telescope or telephone, GPS actually enhances the planet rather than our senses. Its signals are just there, for anyone who chooses to capture them and hence discover exactly where they are and when.
Next I visited a Virtual Reality show called Future Tech Now at Islington's Design Centre. I've been writing about VR for 25 years now, and know all the jokes about how this years is... but it feels as though this year really is. It was a small show, of small firms, with VR kit that worked, was cheap and did interesting, fun or useful stuff. Learning how to suture a surgical incision from another continent (Medical Realities and Global Health Informatics); a thrilling and bone-shaking augmented VR ride from the top of the Shard to ground level down a huge twisty-loopy slide (Happy Finish); and a tiny drone with sub-match-box-sized camera that delivers full VR to your phone via Google Cardboard, for under £100 (Microdrone/Extreme Fliers).
Perhaps most provoking of all was the Teslasuit, which has nothing to do with Elon Musk (I do hope they have a good IP lawyer). It's a gaming/simulation accessory developed by a firm based in the UK and Belarus, which provides all-body haptic feedback and motion-capture, in a very interesting way. I'd followed this sort of application through 20 years-worth of CeBITs, watching electric motors, pneumatics and hydraulics all come and go, rejected as too dangerous in case of failure. The Teslasuit uses transdermal stimulation, tiny electrical voltages applied to pads in its lining that affect your touch and temperature sensitive nerve ends to fool you into feeling an external force - without the risk of breaking your arm with actual forces.
Next, Jennifer Doudna's "A Crack in Creation", the book I wrote about last month, has the nowadays-compulsory lengthy subtitle which I forgot to mention, "Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution". Note well that "unthinkable". Doudna explains that the CRISPR/Cas 9 system she pioneered makes it possible to assemble a gene-editing kit for around $2000, which anyone who's prepared to do a lot of homework could employ in their kitchen or bathroom. You no longer need a million-dollar DNA sequencer, nor to send off, wait months and pay $50,000 to have a string of custom DNA made. You can buy capsids - small rings of RNA that encode CRISPR and Cas 9 - off the internet for more like £100. With my background, if I ever get bored writing Python programs I could maybe buy a shetland pony and start designing a unicorn.
The final prod to my imagination came via a story in Nature about solar geoengineering, injecting aerosol particles into the stratosphere to reflect away sunlight and combat global warming. A group of scientists from those developing nations who have most to lose are in favour. No-one can know what unwanted effects it might have, but if you're going to be underwater in 20 years anyway, it might seem worth a shot.
There is a common thread linking all these phenomena, and it's the same old idea I've been flogging to death in this column for ever, the difference between atoms and bits. VR technologies are getting good enough to build wholly convincing worlds in the realm of bits, that is, inside our heads. Meanwhile GPS, geoengineering and gene editing will enable people, both good and bad, to modify the real world of atoms in ways that are potentially terrifying and devastating. It's hard to say which road is the more risky.
One could be optimistic and hope that with judicious control over their use, some combination of both approaches would make for an incredible new world. On the other hand a bunch of CRISPR-capable terrorists might cook up the bug that will eradicate all of us (or just the ones they don't like). What's certain is that our current generation of leaders are utterly incompetent to make the necessary decisions.
[Being a boy, Dick Pountain isn't all that into unicorns and would really prefer a flying monkey]
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