False Creek Geek: Miles’ Future

This week’s column from the Yaletown View is about my nephew, and his digital life 18 years in the future:

When I think about the future, I think of Miles. Miles is my eight-month-old nephew. As the speed of technological change increases, Miles’s generation will interact with the world like no other generation has. So, when I try to imagine what a computer or a phone will look like in the distant future, I begin with my nephew.

But the distant future is the realm of science-fiction authors and popcorn futurists. Let us imagine May 11, 2021, Miles’s eighteenth birthday.
Miles wakes to the sound his alarm clock, which not only announces the time and weather, but also reminds him of assignments due and appointments throughout the day. Most of the electrical appliances in Miles’s apartment are ‘aware’ in one way or another. Not only is the clock able to synthesize speech, but it also recognizes commands. So, when a groggy Miles mumbles “snooze”, it abides.

Later, Miles drives his electrical/internal combustion hybrid, the Honda Agitprop® to school. Miles’s car is used, and he can’t yet afford one of the fancy new hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles. Cars look pretty much the same as they do today—the automotive industry is resistant to change. There are no computerized drivers yet, but Miles’s car can park itself. Given that he’s inherited the family gene for lousy parallel parking, it’s a handy feature.

During first period, Miles checks his schedule on his Palm Wafer®. About the size of a credit card, the Wafer folds out into a sheet of 8.5” by 11” electronic paper, and is Miles’s window on the world. He can access his calendar, check his email, surf the Web and even listen to music through a headphone jack at the paper’s edge. None of this information is actually stored in the Wafer, it just has a wireless Internet connection to Miles’s home computer. In fact, the whole city is set up for wireless connectivity. Now, everyone leaves their data at home.

That evening, Miles’s friends take him out for dinner and karaoke. When he grabs the microphone to camp it up and sing Madonna’s “Like A Virgin”, the TV shows him in Madonna’s video. Madonna, in her fingerless gloves phase, sings along with him, adjusting to his pace and tone. His image is seamlessly integrated into the video, as he appears to steer Madonna’s gondola through Venice.

Back in May, 2003, When I first posted photos of Miles on my website, I asked the question “I wonder, in fifteen years, will he be able to find this page on the Web? Will he still call it the Web?” I doubt that he’ll call it the Web. Terms for rapidly-changing things tend to change with them. Refer to ‘cyberspace’ these days, and you’ll sound desperately 1996.

I’d bet, however, that Miles will be able to find that page on my site, even if http://www.darrenbarefoot.com has long drifted off into the Internet ether. Humans are deeply nostalgic creatures, and already movements are underway to ‘record’ the Internet. The Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/) already stores over 300 terabytes of data (if you copied the entire contents onto floppy disks and laid them end to end, they would stretch from New York, past Los Angeles and halfway to Hawaii), and by the time Miles can vote, should be wrestling with ten or a hundred times that.

The nice thing about predicting the future is that, unless you’re Nostradamus, people tend to forget what you said. I have to wait 17 and a half years to determine if I’m right, and by then, no one will remember.