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

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Keep a Plane in the Sky - Alex Davies ****

If there's one big gap in the science writing sphere, it's popular engineering (you can quibble over whether engineering is science, but where else would you put popular engineering?). Alex Davies does the field a real service with this insightful introduction to the world of test engineering. The concept is simple. If we build something and sell it, we need to test it to make sure that it won't fail in a way that's dangerous to the consumer. The most obvious example is airliners, which feature at some length, but this applies to everything from cuddly toys to hair straighteners: someone needs to predict what could go wrong and to put the product through its paces to see if it will survive under any reasonable circumstances. When Davies is telling a story of test engineering in action, the book is a delight. He opens with the way that real bears are used to test if bears can get into coolers and trash cans - and the impressive ways these animals can  circumvent human in...
Post a Comment
Read more

On the Equality of All Things - Carlo Rovelli ****

There is a wide gulf between the worldviews of physicists and philosophers. Many physicists present a rather sweetly naive, child-like view of the world, where philosophers bring a distinctly more adult, cynical tone. This being the case, it can be a little worrying when a physicist dips a toe into the philosophical mire. Infamously, in The Grand Design , Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow told us that philosophy was now dead because science could deal with anything it had previously been needed for. Thankfully, Carlo Rovelli is not trying to do away with philosophy, though it has to be said that when he veers into the topic that physicist's naivety can make it feel like the philosophising of an earnest eighteen-year-old. Take the opening paragraph, which tells us 'electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another. They are notions that illuminate each other'. I almost expected a Pink Floyd soundtr...
Post a Comment
Read more