PREDICTING the future is always fun. By the time anyone can prove you were
wrong, it鈥檚 too late. If you鈥檙e really lucky鈥攁nd many psychics
are鈥攑eople only remember the hits and forget the misses. Peter Cochrane,
Britain鈥檚 answer to the cofounder of Wired magazine, Nicholas
Negroponte, seems to be particularly fond of making wild predictions. Cochrane,
who is head of BT鈥檚 research labs, made news last year by announcing he had a
team working on downloading an entire human onto a silicon chip he called a
鈥淪oul Catcher鈥�.
In Tips for Time Travellers (Orion, 拢14.99, ISBN 0752813498),
a compilation of the weekly columns he writes for the Daily
Telegraph鈥檚 鈥淐onnected鈥� section, Cochrane rambles through the technological
landscape to consider the symbiosis that develops between computers and their
humans (why does a fellow BT staffer crash his computers when he, Cochrane,
doesn鈥檛?), the consequences of everyone setting their software to download their
e-mail automatically at the same times, and the importance of being analogue.
Warning: there is one mathematical equation in this book.
By contrast鈥攁nd unusually鈥擣rances Cairncross, a journalist at
The Economist, surveys the future from a platform of solid research and
careful reporting. Most basic ideas in The Death of Distance (Orion,
拢18.99, ISBN 0752812505) have been covered elsewhere: small and large
businesses will compete on a more even footing, distance will no longer
determine the cost of communications, the boundaries between home and office
will blur, and ideas will propagate across the world at record speeds.
Cairncross believes that one consequence of all this will be a decline in power
of the nation state and, just possibly, a growth in peace and prosperity because
humans will be less susceptible to propaganda.
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Whether that last is true or not, Cairncross鈥檚 book is a valuable resource
for anyone trying to figure out why a good many technofuturists think this
way鈥攎ost don鈥檛 bother with the documentation. One of Cairncross鈥檚 ideas is
that the bonds between diverse people with common interests will
strengthen鈥攁s indeed they do, if they have online spaces in which to meet
and benefit from the exchange of common experiences.
Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab鈥檚 Rosalind
Picard believes that if we want computers to be more than frustrating,
bureaucratic machines, we must teach them to sense and respond to human
emotions. In Affective Computing (MIT Press,
拢23.50/$22.50, ISBN 0062515330), Picard goes into the physiological
and psychological background to that work. (One discovery is that Doom players
are more aroused by software failure than by any of the game鈥檚 violent events.)
This is a dense book, but one that covers valuable new ground.
All these futures, though, are optimistic. Let鈥檚 stop assuming for one moment
that the Net will change the human race. What happens when someone challenges
the digital media鈥檚 goofy assumption that anyone who uses the Net to break
traditional rules has to be a good guy? In Signal to Noise by Carla
Spinner (Harper, $22.50, ISBN 0062515330) ambitious, driven, repressed Jim
Knight, the features editor at San Francisco-based Signal magazine,
finds out when a drug-hazed group of lesser beings (they work on `zines, for
God鈥檚 sake) take over his house one night and manage to run him up a $200
000 tab at an Internet casino. Oops. In one swell foop Knight鈥檚 life
disintegrates鈥攈is girlfriend dumps him, his bosses throw him out, and
thugs stake out his house.
The one good thing is that his stomach has stopped churning: life is less
stressful being chased around by men with guns than working in a company that
won鈥檛 give its employees pens and where the top editor feels free to cancel
months of work at the drop of an electron (aspiring Wiredwriters, take
note). Yes, this is a roman 脿 clef, but you stop trying to map
fiction to fact after about 30 pages, lean back, and enjoy the ride.