The Future Past

The interesting thing about futurism is that the future never turns out quite the way the futurists predicted it would. They are often close, sometimes to an astonishing degree, but there is always an enabling technology or two which the smug prognosticators didn't see coming. Those factors subtly twist reality away from the predictions while still providing the foretold results. They are, in effect, correct while still being ever-so-subtly wrong. For example, as have many people over the past few weeks, I've had quite a few Zoom meetings on my iPhone while sitting at my desk. It didn't look quite like this, of course...



...but the essence of the prediction is substantially correct while still being wrong. This businessman is meeting remotely via a videolink as I have been, but the differences just below the surface are profound. For one thing, his dedicated CRT and camera hooked up to a whopping huge hard line have been replaced by a pocket-sized supercomputer connected via radio signals to a worldwide computer network. Functionally, they can both accomplish the task predicted, but the reality is far, far more capable than the prediction.

Almost universally, transistor miniaturization is responsible for this difference between predictions and reality. Even when the futurists got very close with their predictions, as in this 1978 Starlog article by Norman Spinrad, they failed to anticipate the almost logarithmic pace of transistor miniaturization. Whether the field is communications or automobiles or information access or entertainment, you'll nearly always find a super-tiny, super-powerful computer at the heart of it. They simply had no frame of reference upon which to base such a wild supposition as "a supercomputer will fit in your pocket in 2020." It was utter nonsense. Everyone knew that powerful computers must forever occupy entire rooms and cost oodles of money, and that's just The Way It Is. Making such a preposterous claim would only get you and your ridiculous predictions laughed out of the room.

Historians often talk about the impact of gunpowder, automobiles, or nuclear weapons on human history, but all of those things pale in comparison to the miniature transistor as an enabling technology. The impact of widely available transistor chips on our day-to-day lives since the 1970s is staggering, and it's worth stopping for a moment to reflect on how you lived in 1978 and compare it to how you live today. It is quite astonishing.

So here's a prediction of my own: In a thousand years, historians will consider the rapid development and mass production of the miniaturized transistor to be the most important technology since organized agriculture. It really is having that big an impact on human civilization, and this trend continues to accelerate every year with no end in sight.

I'm certain I'll be ever-so-subtly wrong, of course. Because there's another enabling technology even now brewing in a lab somewhere, of which I and everyone else but a handful of whitecoats are totally ignorant.