Technology filters into our lives in gradual, unexpected ways. In 2025, microchips under our skin will let us access data on the move, but we still won't be driving that flying vehicle, writes Karlin Lillington.
The future rarely changes in the ways we imagine, especially when it comes to technological advances. Perhaps because 2025 prompts thoughts of science fiction novels, comic book heroes and cheesy 1950s films, we tend to picture a Jetsons -like world of flying cars, personal robots, houses that look like space stations, and interplanetary travel. But take the 20-year increment that lies between today and 2025, and that which lay between 1985 and today, and you get a more realistic idea of where technology will take us.
Automobiles are a good starting point, since the pressures and obsessions of popular culture mean we tend to imagine them morphing into a Luke Skywalker-esque personal hovercraft by 2025. However, in the past 20 years, cars have simply changed subtly in design, with fairly mild technological developments geared more towards either saving fuel or finding elaborate ways of expending it (Smart Car versus the SUV).
Similarly, the house of today and its technological and electronic accoutrements (excepting computers, which I'll come back to) is not hugely different from the house of 1985 - or even 1965. Some differences? It is trendier now for stereos to be small rather than the hulking presences they were in 1985. Televisions have better large-screen technology than the old projector-types that were then on the market, and you can splurge on a flat screen TV now too. Today you can purchase a digital radio, but few have - most still find plain old AM, FM and short or long wave perfectly adequate (likewise, digital TV has made few inroads with consumers, to the extent that nations are having to mandate changeovers to digital viewing).
And in the kitchen, outside of digital displays on appliances, what else is new? Of course there have been technological improvements in dishwasher design, for example - today's machine is generally a lot quieter than its 1980s counterpart. But a gas or electrical range is still pretty much the same. Microwaves are more efficient. Kitchens have altered more in aesthetic design (we like large, we like granite countertops, we like Shaker-style cupboards), than in technological innovation.
All of which points towards this conclusion: that technology filters into our lives in gradual ways, not in Big Bang moments that totally transform a generation. Or, to put it another way, technology's transformative effect is subtle. It tends to worm its way into our lives in the places where it expands on our abilities to do things we already do - we just do them differently - faster, more efficiently. Those subtle alterations in turn make way for further gradual innovation, so that, for example, we find ourselves in 2005 sending very few letters, but billions of e-mails - the latter a form of communication limited to technology corporations, universities, government workers and researchers 20 years ago.
I remember the first time I showed my mother an e-mail, probably in 1986. I was a postgraduate student, my father was a university academic, and we both had e-mail accounts. I was out in my parents' California home, sending an e-mail back to a friend at Trinity College. "Is that all you do? But how does it get to someone in Ireland?" she asked. I explained it went over the phone wires from my account to their account. "When does it get there?" She looked dubious when I said it was already there. "How much does it cost to send?" She couldn't believe it was free. How could it be free? Who would send letters then? Well, exactly. And that is precisely why we all use e-mail now.
The process is as invisible to us as the journey of an individual letter posted from here to Australia. As with traditional mail, we don't really need to know the process by which it gets from A to B. Once Internet subscriptions became generally available to the public, e-mail - because it was cheap and instantaneous - became an easier and better way of doing something we were already doing. Electronic packets replaced the sorting machines, planes, trains and bicycles needed to move a paper letter about.
This is what makes predicting the technological future so tricky. A technologist can line up a vast list of what will be technologically possible by 2025 - just as they did 20 years ago, imagining the technological future - but how, and whether, they will be used, is anyone's guess.
Two things are definitely predictable, however. In accordance with Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's famous law, which generally states that computing power will double while costs halve every 18 months, we will have far greater power at our fingertips and at ever cheaper prices.
But look at what we have done with that power, and you can see what I mean about technology's advances being subtle and mostly transformative of things we already do, rather than introducing us to that weird Jetsons world. For example, a mobile phone today has more computing power and memory than the huge computers that ran the Apollo space programme in the 1960s and 1970s. A cut-price desktop computer with the lowest specifications on the market would now outperform the massive "Big Iron" super-computers of the 1970s, which costs hundreds of thousands - even millions - and required small teams of scientists to cater to them. But we don't run spacecraft or automated houses from our PCs. We play computer games, set up websites, buy airline tickets and send digital photos of the new baby to our grandmothers.
Yet this proliferation of computers and the banality of their usage is the base upon which truly revolutionary things will happen over the next 20 years, because computers are the perfect example of the low-key technological revolutions that happen when we aren't really watching very closely. We find we have gone from A to B and we don't really understand.
It has taken 20 years for us to see computers and digital networks - the public Internet and the many private networks that run cordoned-off from it - as normal, as something that we should own and use. The next step will be the disappearance of the computer and the network - so that it becomes a ubiquitous element of our home, work and public environment. We are at the threshold of that moment, with microchips now so tiny that they can already be inserted beneath our skin (indeed, pets are now routinely micro-chipped for identification). Sensors, which can read microchips and specialised RFID tags (radio frequency identification, a kind of electronic barcode) and the information they broadcast from a distance, are growing smaller, dropping in price, and becoming more accurate. Computers are shrinking, with the same functionality now available in tiny handheld devices that might also be mobile phones and music players. Microchips and RFID tags are increasingly in appliances, in cars, in watches, on products we buy from the supermarket.
All of this will create real innovation in the household. It will alter household security, with locks secured by swipe cards and biometric scans taken of their owners which verify the identity of the person trying to gain access to the front door - or start the family car.
By 2025 it is likely we ourselves will have chips embedded beneath our skin that will uniquely identify us, and allow us to gain access to vast amounts of stored information we might find useful throughout the day. Today, we keep growing amounts of such digital data on our work and home PCs. But there's no reason any longer to keep such information on a physical medium like a PC when it can be held out on a network like the Internet by 2025, accessed immediately by our personal devices or embedded chips.
Likewise our houses, workplaces and public places will have information - access to our networks and data - at our chip-embedded, device operating, fingertips. Why will we want this? Because it will enable us to do mundane but useful things, like scan a face and bring up a name from the network, so we aren't desperately trying to recall someone at a party. Or, because you could allow some information to be publicly available to others, it would make a singles' party fun as you search for someone of similar interests.
Entertainment is already converging in the home because increasingly films, music and images are digital. In 2025, huge digital networks can deliver what we want, when we want it, into our homes and cars. Kitchens can track the products we use and re-order when necessary. Cookers will know how to cook the food because they can be chipped to tell them what to do.
Though this may sound like a bit of fun, we will also have lots of choices - and moral issues - to face because of such innovations. Digital and electronic networks make it easy to keep track of people - and to spy on them. Who do we allow to control the networks? How will we secure the places we store our information - and secure our own identities from tampering?
Though we may not have those wondrous flying cars, by 2025 technology will certainly have brought us much that challenges us, and much more that we will have to learn about how, in an increasingly automated world, we want to be human.
ON THE WAY
Personal microchips and sensors These will be embedded under our skin, enabling us to unlock our house, access personal data storage, match a name with a face, or share sensory experiences. They will perform constant diagnostics on our bodies, sensing potential health problems.
The home robot: Honda says it will have one on the market by 2010. By 2025, most middle-class homes will have a robot that can perform basic tasks, while they will also look after the infirm, elderly and disabled. Many homes will opt for robot pets; so much easier than real-world animals.
Sensu-round contact lenses: Entering and exiting virtual reality will be easy, with lightweight contact lenses that connect directly to the Internet and other networks flowing around you. No need to watch a box or screen across the room when these let you immerse yourself in 3D entertainment, travel, and enhanced reality.
Personal avatars: You don't need to go out to work daily, since everything you need can be accessed from home via ultra-high-speed networks. But you do need to attend online conferences and meetings. Yes, you could appear holographically, but why not interact via an individualised, virtual representation of yourself in any form you like - an avatar - then hang out in your pyjamas in the real world.
The personal cloaking device: In other words, a body firewall. With all those embedded sensors in your wired body, the last thing you want is some cyberpunk hacking your body networks. Block access and make yourself digitally invisible with one of these.
ON THE WAY OUT
The desktop computer: No one needs a big stationary hunk of digital machinery when computers are part of our living and working environment - with smart chips and sensors embedded in walls, cars, furniture, appliances and roads. Tiny ultra-lightweight portable laptops will be useful, though, for viewing of data or films.
The house key: That there was ever a single, easily duplicated item that gave access to your entire house will seem like a shocking security risk in 2025, when housecodes can be changed daily (like hotel rooms today) and doors will open only when you've waved the microchip embedded in your hand before a reader, which will confirm identity through a DNA scan.
CD and DVD players: In 2005, the CD is already growing obsolete due to the superior storage capacity of the DVD, but by 2025 personal storage needs - what you will want access to each day - will have long surpassed the DVD. Storage will be virtual - held out in the 'cloud' of the Internet - and accessible anywhere, from small devices or your own body network.
Condoms: Unreliable barrier methods will be frowned upon when the male contraceptive implant is reliable and has so few side effects.
Phone handsets: No one wants to carry such bulky things around when a tiny earphone does the job.