"Technology is a tool, and then again it is a key to the chest of the future, out of which may just as easily leap a Promethean heavenly fire to guide us, a jack-in-the-box Harlequin, or Pandora's nasty little secrets."
Hannu Linturi
In 1860, Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir had just designed the first working internal combustion engine. At around the same time, scientists were toying with the first tentative computers in the wake of Charles Babbage's "analytical engine", and mechanical mass transit systems were being developed with the opening of the Metropolitan District Railway under London. The fork and the chimney were still relatively rare items. Toilet paper did not yet exist. Jules Verne had just given up writing opera libretti, and had turned to fiction.
Nearly one hundred years later, after the Second World War, television was making its entrance in 1950, the flight from the land was picking up speed, and houses and apartments were being equipped in increasing numbers with such luxuries as WCs, bathtubs, and fitted showers.
In 1970 Alvin Toffler wrote his Future Shock, painting a picture of the revolution in microelectronics to come. Three years later, the microprocessor was in production, and the industries manufacturing mechanical calculators were laying off staff by the thousands. But it is worth remembering that the microwave oven, genetic engineering, artificial organs, data networks, and the ubiquitous mobile phone were still the stuff of science fiction in the 1970s. VCRs, photocopiers, telefax machines, and modems were extremely rarefied devices, regarded with something approaching awe. At least in Europe, politics was something that teenagers and students made, the electronic mass media were government-owned and duly played their tunes, and science was the province of the researchers. Industrialization swelled the cities, the spread of the automobile spawned the dormitory suburb and the supermarket. "Self-service" entered the vocabulary, as assortments and productivity increased. Verne's predictions had come of age. Toffler's are in the process of doing the same. We are racing headlong into the future.
Today in Finland, there is a mobile phone in the hands of every second man, woman, and child, and more than 25% of the population use the Internet on a regular basis. Data links are being forged at an accelerating pace, networking households as they go. Sheep are being cloned, and the first applications of genetic engineering are spreading around the world. Research data is passed on hundreds of times more quickly than back in the 1950s. In the developed countries, a record share of the national product today goes to research and product development. The sheer breadth, speed, and brushfire passage across national borders of information technology, biotechnology, and new scientific applications are all many times that of just one generation ago.
The blitzkrieg march of information technology shows no signs of battle fatigue. In 1977 a home computer could move just one pixel across the screen in real time. Now it thinks nothing of a million pixels. If we are to go by the current level of basic knowledge, by the year 2011 the computer in the home will be another one thousand times faster than the one on our desk today, and with a thousand times the memory capacity. Laboratory tests have also shown already that we can expect data transmission along telephone lines to be a further one thousand times faster than they are today.
In 2020 computer applications will be smart enough to learn as they go, and they will already have enough autodidactic faculties to exploit fully the exponentially increased power at their disposal. From there onwards, the future opens up only to those with a vivid imagination. From the beginning of the new century thousands of satellites will be launched into orbit to serve the data communications needs of households and companies. Satellite positioning systems, walking talking robots, and wireless media applications will fundamentally change our lives and behaviour patterns. Great changes will come with pattern recognition, with the mushrooming growth in memory capacity, and with a new generation of search engines and robots.
Genetic engineering is currently taking its first teetering steps. Technologies will develop rapidly, and by 2020 a large body of useful - and less useful - properties of plants and living organisms will have been harnessed for human application. The organic world offers a myriad of opportunities - plants and creatures that can detect and produce electricity, can change their skin colour, can breathe in water, shine in the dark, sense infra-red, polarized light, or the direction of magnetic fields, and produce an endless supply of chemicals and objects of hard and soft materials.
Materials sciences, nanotechnology and many other branches will develop astounding new applications just as the biotech and information sciences, but the most mindblowing changes will come out of cross-fertilization between the various disciplines. Technology will be developed above all to meet economic and societal needs. Hence it is also important to understand that the greatest impact of technical advance is a catalytic one. The structures of the economy and of the society - even of our individual values - will alter as a consequence of technological change.
Wars have always accelerated technological development, just as have great natural disasters. By the year 2020 the world's population will have almost doubled from the present figure. The pressing need for food and energy will direct and drive a sizeable share of what takes place. Water, too, is going to be in dangerously short supply in many parts of the world. Simultaneous study by large populations using the latest information technology equipment will reshape many of the things we take for granted today. The flood of information and spread of control and monitoring systems, together with increasingly addictive forms of virtual entertainment and other artificial drugs and stimulants - all these things will become increasingly familiar companions as we take our first steps in the next millennium.
Nevertheless, the future of our world will not be built solely on inventions, on the progressiveness of the scientific community, or on conglomerations and unions of states. The world, federal unions, nations, companies and individuals; how is one to draw the lines for their morals, ethics, freedom, equality, or responsibilities? There are many definitions of "good" and "evil" in our world. Whose definitions will be taken up, and how will the decision be reached? These issues are already more than ever a part of our future.
In this book, our image of the future is based greatly upon how we see man - and particularly Western man - right now. It may well be, however, that man is fast changing his spots. What may be coming is a creature that has only a few vestigial traces of what we take today as humanity. Or what may be about to emerge is a true Homo sapiens sapiens. In both of these scenarios the future will be different from the one which this book shapes out. Man - the individual mass man - is facing the greatest challenge in his entire history.
This book is dedicated to children, whose future it will be, and to the decision-makers, whose knowledge, skills, will, and wisdom - or the lack of these things - will shape the way it looks.
Hannula I. & Linturi R. 1998: 100 Phenomena.
Yritysmikrot Oy, Helsinki 1998. Copyright notices ISBN 952-9508-18-2