Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

2025 really is science fiction

Recently my sleep patterns have been all over the place.

Parkinson's wreaks havoc on your ability to catch more than a few hours of sleep at a time so I often find myself trying *really* hard to get to sleep in the small hours of the night. More often than not it's a futile attempt but it does give me time to ponder things while I try to steal just an extra hour from morpheus.

One state of mind at such times is something I refer to as "buzzy brain". This is when your body is tired and you really want to get some sleep but your mind is racing -- almost as if you'd taken some kind of amphetamine or other stimulant.

It's not a great state to be in but it does allow for some deep thinking and last night I marveled at just how technology has changed since I was a kid.

As the quintessential "geek", my childhood was spent soaking up as much information as I could on science and technology. I could almost recite some of the science books found in our local library verbatim thanks to the number of times I'd read them.

I was also an avid fan of science fiction, reading anything and everything I could get my hands on whilst anxiously waiting for the next episode of Dr Who or The Thunderbirds to be shown on the new TV set that my parents had just bought.

It was great fun to fantasise about what life would be like in the 21st century.

Would it be just like the world portrayed in The Jetsons, with flying cars, robot servants and vid-screen communicators?

Well now it's 2025 and I don't have to fantasise any longer. We're quarter of the way through the 21st century so it's time to do a comparison between what we were promised and what we've actually ended up with.

First... those flying cars.

Yeah, that's still not a thing. Despite it being a regular prediction of scifi writers and forward-looking periodicals such as Popular Science, the flying car remains stillborn, for quite a few very good reasons. Although I see regular press releases and news stories from companies claiming to have developed a flying car I can safely predict that such a craft will not become the norm for many, many decades -- if ever.

What about laser guns -- they were also ubiquitous in scifi material from the 1950s and '60s, when I was a kid.

Well again, I'm sorry to say that they don't exist. The best we have to offer right now are big and expensive laser canons that are being tried out as a method of shooting down missiles or drones. They seem to work but are not widely deployed. As for a laser side-arm... forget it. We just don't have that technology available yet.

How about those humanoid robots that were also part of many scifi novels and movies?

Despite the best efforts of Mr Musk, useful, general-purpose humanoid robots are still a long way off. Boston Dynamics have done a pretty good job of creating the mechanics to deliver such a device but the programming is still beyond us at this stage. We've also since discovered that many menial tasks are better performed by purpose-built robotic systems anyway.

However, what about the things that did become a reality?

Video-screen-based communications is a great one. Just about every scifi story, TV series or movie had people communicationg with such devices. Being able to actually see the person you were talking with appeared to be very important back then.

Well there are plenty of apps you can get for your smartphone that will turn it into a video communications device and lots of people use them. This really is scifi turned reality.

While on the subject of video-comms, what about flat-screen TVs?

I recall when the first true flat-screen TV set was announced. I think it was a Philips product built using a Fujitsu plasma panel. The price was (from memory) about US$22,000 and it was incredibly heavy, as well as about four-inches thick. Still, it ticked the box and flat-screen TVs are now everywhere in LCD and OLED format.

Another huge change in tech since I was a young geek is home communications.

I recall when we had our first telephone installed. What a day that was!

A wire was run from a nearby pole to the house and, after a great deal of discussion, my parents finally decided where the phone itself was to be placed. Positioning was important because all our telephoning activity would be within a few metres of this point... given that the device was tethered by a thick cable to the wall.

The thrill of being able to contact my friends simply by spinning a dial with my finger to enter their 5-digit phone number. So clever.

Today of course, there's a slender fibre of glass connecting my house to the world and most of the devices using that connectivity are wireless -- no longer physically constrained by a cumbersome length of wire.

What's more, instead of being constrained to talking with my friends across town, I can exchange voice, documents, pictures, video or almost any other type of data with virtually anyone, anywhere on the planet and do so at speeds that boggle the mind. We are now truly a global village.

The latest, and perhaps greatest, piece of scifi to become a reality in the 21st century however, surely must be artificial intelligence.

Just as predicted by so many of the great scifi writers of last century, we can now converse with a computer brain that has all the answers.

Voice recognition, voice synthesis and large language AI models are delivering the ultimate science-fiction reality -- right now.

The world truly has changed in the slightly more than 70 years I've been around. I can only imagine how it will look in another 70 years as today's science fiction becomes tomorrow's reality.

In fact... the future looks so exciting I think I'll spend the rest of my life there.

Carpe Diem folks!

Please visit the sponsor!

Here is a PERMANENT link to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font