FUTURE IMPERFECT

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 290/ 8th September 2018 08:44:43

For the sake of my health I walk on beautiful Hampstead Heath at least once a week, and I get there via the revamped London Overground train service. It’s clean, frequent and gets me there in less than 15 minutes. “So what?” you may be thinking, but the significance is I get there by train rather than by flying car.

“Where’s my flying car?” is one of those amusing/stupid tropes one sees pretty regularly online, and like many such tropes it contains a kernel of important truth. We don’t have flying cars yet, and almost certainly never will, and the reason has little to do with technology. YouTube is crammed with videos of workable flying cars, many of them good-looking, all of them too expensive (but of course that price could crash if they ever went into mass production). The reason they don’t go into mass production is of course social, which means also political. We live in a complex industrial society in which many resources have to be rationed and shared, urban space being one of them. On paper putting everyone into a flying car ought to economise on that space, since the ordinary motor car (or bus or train) needs roads laid out on an almost-flat 2D surface.

Flying cars would bring the third dimension into use - except that the third dimension is already in use by airlines. In mass use it would be impossible to police (traffic lights?) Fixed-wing or drone, a flying car is still subject to gravity and if two collide they’re likely end up falling through someone’s roof. The problems are endless and flying cars could only ever be tolerable in small numbers. Of course they already are - they’re called helicopters, and mostly used by soldiers and billionaires. The rest of us must share flying trains called airliners.

My point is that ‘futurists’ often get things hilariously wrong, not because they’re stupid, but because their expertise and experience is narrow: they may be brilliant in one technical field but nerdishly disconnected from normal society and shamefully ignorant of its basic requirements. A recent BBC 4 retrospective covered fifty years of Horizon programmes, in which revered sci-fi authors Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov made predictions about AI and robotics that now look quaintly naive, while Ray Kurzweil’s ‘grey goo’ warning looked frankly unhinged (even if Prince Charles did believe it…). The tendency to overestimate the effect of new technologies is not itself new.

One futurist that I do respect is Douglas Rushkoff, who just wrote an inflammatory piece with the snappy title “How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse” (on Medium, but reprinted by the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity) He was recently paid half his annual academic salary by five hedge-fund managers to talk about future technology, but it turned out they weren’t really interested in tech per se, but in the coming apocalypse it promised. They realised that armed guards would be required to protect their New Zealand or Alaskan bunkers from the angry mobs "but how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew”.

Enormous riches tempt people to believe their possessor must be very clever, but clever at what? Clever at designing social networks no more qualifies you to redesign society than being clever at property speculation qualifies you to be President. Enormous riches frequently accumulated through what economists call ‘network effects’: certain inventions, like railways, telephones, gramophone records, television, took off exponentially only once enough people had the means to use them, so as much through luck as technical superiority. But riches tempted their possessors to believe themselves invincible, and high-tech entrepreneurs are particularly prone to drawing their notions of invincibility from sci-fi, comics and video games. As Rushkoff put it, they consider human evolution to be “a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel … Zuckerberg?”

Transport For London (TfL), which regulates the capital’s bus, underground, overground and taxi services using a mixture of public and private suppliers, is a dull thing indeed compared to Elon Musk’s plan to fire us, inside tin cans, at supersonic speed though vacuum tubes, but it satisfactorily moves a lot of people each day using little in the way of sci-fi magic except for the Oyster card system (which renders transport cashless so effectively that we no longer notice). I’d feel far happier if TfL were running the world than Rushkoff’s humanicidal billionaires...