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The Long History of the Future - Nicole Kobie ****

We've all got a favourite bit of technology that has been 'coming soon' for decades. Nicole Kobie takes us through the historical journey to the present for a range of such technologies from flying cars to robots (more detail in a moment). In each case these technologies seemed achievable many decades earlier, but the reality has been that making the dream real proved much harder than most envisaged (especially the inventors and investors).

Kobie takes us through driverless cars, AI, robots, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), cyborgs and brain interfaces, flying cars, Hyperloops and smart cities. Many of these topics are much discussed, but it's really helpful seeing them all pulled together to get an overview of the way that we repeatedly get drawn into failed investments of time and money into a science fictional future without thinking enough about the practicalities of making it happen.

My least favourite section was smart cities - I think most people (once Hyperloop is explained) would recognise what was being attempted in most topics, but wouldn't have a clue what a smart city is - in fact, even after reading the chapter I'm not much the wiser, and Kobie concludes that they don't really exist. This makes it hard to get interested in the subject. Probably my favourite was the chapter on AR/VR - because it feels like the technology that is closest to being achievable while at the same time no one is really quite certain why we want it. This book makes a wonderful contrast with The Infinite Retina which, in 2020 was predicting we would all be wearing AR glasses by now instead of using smartphones. That book also seemed to think autonomous vehicles were about to take over, making the remarkable statement 'Electric vehicles are cheaper. Autonomous vehicles are too...', demonstrating how much the authors were in the kind of bubble that explains many of the continued investments in unlikely tech that Kobie describes.

For me there was one big omission here - nuclear fusion power stations - but there has been plenty written about those. There are broadly two approaches Kobie could have taken, each with their merits and demerits. She could have picked out key developments for each technology, giving a chance for more storytelling about them (and the stories are sometimes brilliant), or she could have mentioned a whole host of attempts, giving a more comprehensive history but less to enjoy. If I'm honest, for popular science like this I would prefer the first approach, but Kobe has gone for the second - rather than give us that depth, she does give footnotes to longer articles, but that doesn't provide the same narrative drive. Sometimes, there were just too many steps along the way without enough detail to make it interesting.

I will also throw in one specific moan on historical inaccuracy - Kobie perpetuates the myth of Ada Lovelace (strictly Ada King, Countess of Lovelace) as the 'inventor of computer programming'. It's arguable whether or not what was published were programs rather than algorithms, but what's certainly true is that Babbage wrote several before Lovelace made her contribution - so if you want to refer to this as the point in time we got the first programmer, it was Babbage, not Lovelace.

Although I personally would have preferred fewer bits of tech in each section with more storytelling, I ought to stress that Kobie's approach is great in giving us a picture of just how many attempts have been made along the way, and the difficult path there has been to attempt these innovative but not necessarily realistic technological developments. It's an excellent addition to the tech-lover's (or the tech-sceptic's) bookshelf.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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