"The Future Is Coming After All"

Since 2001 arrived without Stanley Kubrick's vision of what it would
be like -- and, indeed, without Kubrick himself -- I've found myself
thinking about the future I was expecting, and the details that made
up that imagined future.  In the words of the title of the first
program item at Boskone last month, "I Was Promised Flying Cars! What
Happened to the Flying Cars?"  I missed that discussion, but I know
perfectly well why we don't have most of the technologies like that:
they were either impractical or inherently bad ideas, or (like flying
cars), both.  The converse of those gadgets-that-never-happened -- the
transformative technologies we *weren't* expecting -- is obvious as
well.  Nonetheless, it has often seemed very disappointing that the
world hadn't changed more.

Until, that is, a couple of things struck me in fairly short
succession.  One was walking out my front door and following the small
light of a new space station across the night sky.  It may not be a
Hilton hotel, and I may not be able to go there for my next vacation,
but when I think about it, the fact that all the spacefaring nations
cooperated in its construction is impressive enough to make up for the
fact that it took all of the spacefaring nations, working together, to
build a cramped space barely big enough for its handful of crew.

The other thing that struck me was buying a cell phone.  Not doing
that in itself -- after all, I'd held out so long that not only had
cell phones become passe, but complaining about *other* people talking
on cell phones has started to become passe.  The fact that the phone
actually *looks* like a Star Trek communicator was part of it, I
suppose, but mostly what got to me was realizing that the service was
cheaper by half than the first phone I ever got.

What's the lesson from all of this?  I suppose it's that the future
sneaks up quietly.  Which is, I guess, as it should be.  As Alfred
North Whitehead said, "Civilization advances by extending the number
of important operations which we can perform without thinking about
them."  Maybe some day the things I work on will advance civilization,
but by that standard, the Internet hasn't done so yet.