Where is my hoverboard?

Where is my hoverboard? Come on, where the fuck is my hoverboard? I’ve seen Back to the Future Part II and guess what? No fucking hoverboard. The film was set in 2015, and it’s way past then.

Instead of gliding over pavements like Marty McFly, but cooler obviously, we’ve got electric scooters that spontaneously combust like napalm piñatas, Cybertrucks that would cut you in half if they so much as clipped you, and electric cars that only the rich (and pretentious) can afford to own and run. Wrapped up in rebrands and marketing bullshit no fucker understands. OMG, WTF, LOL, JLR.

The wet dreams of the new oligarchs

We were promised hoverboards for fuck’s sake. Yet all we got was tech conjured up via the wet dreams of the new oligarchs. Those data oil barons who pulled high-tech rabbits from hats such as surveillance doorbells, robot dogs that should scare the shit out of you, AI-controlled machine-gun-assassins and smart fridges that grass you up to Amazon when you are running low on oat milk or plant protein burgers. You think you are trying to save the planet, but you have more tech on standby than the NSA. Think of the fucking penguins. Who the fuck needs a smart fucking fridge or toaster or, for that matter, a smart fucking coffee machine?

The uneven distribution of the future

When William Gibson said, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed” was he taking the piss? How come the rich got all the good things while the poor merely got to deliver the stuff? But that’s the thing with futurologists. They never seem to see things from the perspective of poverty. I think it’s because they lack real vision and the empathy to put themselves in the saddle of some gig economy wage slave.

“Cybertrucks that would cut you in half if they so much as clipped you”

Futurologists: pointing out the obvious

Who are futurologists kidding anyway? Any old fool who’s seen a few episodes of Star Trek on cable could have foreseen a device like the Communicator coming to life on the streets of a town near you. But then you say YOU “predicted” the Iphone? You are having a giraffe. It’s one thing to point out the bleeding obvious, but another to predict the future.

The unpredictable way we use technology

The device was one thing, but what we did with it was another. From what I can tell, predicting how we will actually use the technology in our hands is almost impossible. What techno-soothsayers saw Friends Reunited, Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok coming and not just the devices, sites or Apps, but the digital behaviour behind them? And I don’t mean those who, with the benefit of hindsight and Google, claim that E.M. Forster may have predicted the internet or that Ray Bradbury did the same. Yet no one hit that fucking nail on the head did they. Only their thumbs.

1984 and mass surveillance

And while George Orwell’s 1984 predicted mass surveillance, it was through the prism of the 1940s. More to the point, he foresaw systems and ideologies rather than technologies. He never even considered bad actors using AI and big data to sift the digital pocket litter of our lives, like store loyalty cards, power usage, and our virtual shopping carts for suspicious activity. Let alone facial recognition and omnipresent CCTV.

Privacy: dead and buried

1984 was a message of hope, but it’s far too late for that to sink in, as the concept of privacy will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history. You will find it in the soil next to liberty and freedom. We all cast the first dirt that covered those bin bags when we ticked the terms and conditions with Apple, Meta, and whoever you use to indiscriminately, share and like.

Alien teenagers and tech

There is a joke that goes that teenagers are like aliens, now, if there is some truth in the mad conspiracy theories that Area 51 is drip feeding alien technology to big tech. Does that mean that all over the cosmos, teenage aliens in their alien bedrooms are dodging exasperated alien mums and dads concerned that the kids are glued to their devices for far too long?

Are those the same alien youths being exposed to all kinds of torment as they are doxxed or groomed? Are alien algorithms feeding them a diet of dieting videos? Are they falling foul of stupid alien TikTok pranks? Or are they turning to the alien dark web for suicide kits? Come on, you’d have thought aliens would have worked out how to keep the kids safe by now.

“Area 51 is drip feeding alien technology to big tech”

Digital poverty: the invisible divide

No, no one saw any of that coming. Whoever predicted that the internet would become so embedded in our lives and that being connected would become such a critical life support system, we would have to invent a new term to label those denied access. Digital poverty, who’d have guessed? As if real world poverty is not bad enough. We come up with another way to torment the poor. And if you think I’m joking, try getting JSA, Job Seekers Allowance, without a connection to the web. It’s no joke.

War, tech, and unintended consequences

I think I know why it’s so difficult being a futurologist, and why it’s so tough calling out what future tech will be, let alone what we, the users, will do with it. What buttons we chimpanzees will press, and what buttons it will press in us.

Sadly, war is always a good incubator of tech. Some have said that without the technological advances of the Second World War, you would have had to wait an extra twenty years for the likes of dehydrated mashed potato, instant coffee and the microwave. Some might say that the wait was a win for humanity.

Anyway, it’s like playing a huge game of Jenga over a load of dominos waiting to fall. You pull one bit and it falls. Setting in motion a chain reaction that, who knows where, will end. And what dominoes are toppled in the process. That microwave that gave you the inspired (not) instant burger was a byproduct of British RADAR boffins research and gifted to those pesky ungrateful Americans.

Batteries: the silent power behind tech

So you’re at a dinner party, or more likely in my case a BBQ, and things as they invariably do come around to job. Saying I’m in batteries could, I’ll wager, make you sound dull as dishwater. But in reality, you are as homely and deadly as Ming the Merciless. You own this mess. Well you and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Without batteries, we would still have had miniaturisation, but without them, most of what we now take for granted in the way of gadgets and gizmos just wouldn’t be portable and certainly not mobile in the way we expect until boffins broke the bonds of cables.

The first mobile phone: a brick in your hand

I remember the first time I saw a mobile telephone (about 1986) when it rang as a highly paid, highly celebrated stock photographer of the time delivered a lecture at my college. It was a revelation that rang our bells. You have no idea of the device’s impact on technologically innocent and impressionable souls in an era where greed was good and its ringtone was a call to arms.

Not that it’s important, but I think it was a Nokia Mobira Talkman, but looking back, it was a calculated act of Yuppie one-upmanship. Boy, did it work. Simple things, please simple minds, for in comparison to my smartphone, it was a toy, a mobile in name only, as the beast weighed in at eleven pounds. Think of a brick-phone handset attached to a box containing a big fucking car battery.

“It was a revelation that rang our bells”

The domino effect of tech

So, so many falling dominoes, colliding and making random connections. Take miniaturisation, hitting batteries, fold in GPS, the brainchild of the Department of Defense, developed so that outgoing missiles would hit their targets and mix in the internet, that, as the myth goes, was invented so computers could still communicate with each other, after the other teams incoming missiles had blown the world to bits.

Shake vigorously and wait.

Who among us would have bet that, after brewing for years, we’d end up with legions of human delivery drones dropping off Korean fried chicken with an accuracy Dr. Strangelove would have killed for? And with about as much compensation and compassion for the workers as he would have shown. Is it just me, or does Elon Musk remind you of him? I can almost hear him saying, “Mein Führer, I can walk!” And I suppose we now have to recast Slim Pickens’ role as Major T. J. “King” Kong with Mark Zuckerberg. I can just see him riding the bomb.

Or that we would have delivery drivers throwing parcels over the wall with somewhat less accuracy since the algorithms behind the Active Transport Management System (ATMS) and real-time tracking through telematics and fleet management platforms do not allow them enough time to go for a piss, let alone drop off your order. And that we would have women giving birth in the same Fulfilment Centre that dispatched your paper clips. You know, the ones that you simply had to have the next day.

All on minimum wage and zero-hour contracts. Trying to service debts with Klarna, BNPL, or perhaps that should be BNPFIL (Buy Now Pay For It Later). With just enough left at the end of the month to invest in crypto. Don’t worry, this time next year we’ll all be billionaires. But you won’t.

This time next year, AI will be doing your job. Will it do it better than you? Who gives a fuck it’s cheaper. It never sleeps. Or eats. So no more jamming the GPS just so that you can go for a shit. No more humans in the loop. No more call centre survivors listening to you drone on why your parcel missed it’s slot and that you simply MUST have those fucking paperclips.

Again, is it just me, or does Jeff Bezos also remind you of Dr. Strangelove? Mind you, so do all the bros.

Consumed by our devices

It’s all about the laws of unintended consequences and the union of unintended and unexpected technological combinations with the unexpected bastards it births. When the iPad hit the streets, I’m ashamed to say I had to have one. But I was writing Tech at Metro, so perhaps I can be forgiven. I, for one, saw the iPad for what it was, not a toy we could use to create. But a device with which to consume. I just did not know it was going to consume us.

A futurologist’s prediction

So, to put my futurologist hat (a nice green Borsalino trilby by the way) on again, I predict that being poor in the future will exactly be like it is now. Shit. Only in the future it will be worse. Indeed shittier.

Imagine living in a Hollywood dystopian hell. Scripted by Aldous Huxley. Directed by Fritz Lang. And available on Netflix. Wait long enough and you won’t have to watch it. You’ll be an extra.

Yet, like global warming, if we do something about it now, and distribute wealth and end digital poverty, perhaps a utopian heaven awaits us all. But we won’t. Of course we fucking wont.

So, just like all futurologists, I’m destined to get it wrong.
Now, just where is that fucking hoverboard? At this rate by the time it arrives I’ll be too fucking old to use it.