Skip to main content

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.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune )   underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more

E=mc2: A biography of the world’s most famous equation – David Bodanis *****

David Bodanis is a storyteller, and he fulfils this role with flair in E=mc2. The premise of the book is simple – Einstein himself has been biographed (biographised?) to death, but no one has picked out this most famous of equations, dusted it down and told us what it means, where it comes from and what it has delivered. Allegedly, Bodanis was inspired to write the book after hearing see an interview with actress Cameron Diaz in which she commented that she’d really like to know what that famous collection of letters was all about. Although the book had been around for a while already when this review was written (September 2005), it seemed a very apt moment to cover it, as the equation is, as I write, exactly 100 years old. So when better to have a biography? Bodanis starts off by telling us about the individual elements of the equation. What the different letters mean, where the equal sign comes from and so on. This is entertaining, though he seems to tire of the approach on...
Post a Comment
Read more