Future-TENSE

Two things are on my mind right now: Alvin Toffler's Future Shock & an interview with an eminent city planner. 

Toffler talks about the need to perceive the future and be ready for it. He rightly talks about our education being backword looking in a world that is headed towards the future. He also talks of innovations happening in the world, and how they have affected the society. The planner whom I interviewed also talked about the need to see the future & build cities for the same.

I believe that the future can be predicted only by understanding the past. Rote learning is not the point, but understanding & dissecting events of the past can provide us with crucial insights into the future. Hence, I started with a list of inventions / discoveries that have changed the course of human society today morning. This is the rough list (incomplete):

Mechanization:

Division of labour factory (Ford) - part mechanized factory - automated factory (CNC systems)

Manual labour - supervision of machines - creation of supervisory machines & networks (Computers)

Communication:

Telegraph - telephone - internet (written communication - spoken communication - communication & illustration)

Telegraph - radio - cellular phone networks (recorded communication - one way live communication - interactive two / multi way communication) - satellite networks (non-importance of physical location)

Painting - Symbolics - writing - coding (binary)

Transportation:

Personal transport (cars) - public transport (planes, trains) - personalized public transport (rent-a-car, chartered jets)

Biology:

Darwin's theory of evolution - Discovery of DNA - cloning (human controlled evolution)

Organ Transplants - test tube babies - cloning

Philosophy:

Marx & Lenin - Ayn Rand & Ford - Chomsky 

(this sequence may be highly erratic as it is based on the limits / extents of my reading)

Construction & Habitat:

Structural grids - non-grid structures - self-evolving structures

Centenary structures - decadal structures - transient / temporary structures

Skyscrapers / ghettos - urbanization - urban + sub-urban

land cities - water cities - space colonies

The above is a mapping of the developments till now. Then, I proceeded to shortlist technologies that will affect the future: - 

Mechanization: shape memorizing materials (AI) & nanoscale robots (AI+scale / energy reduction)

Communication: telepathy (meaning mind to mind conversation here)

Transport: teleportation

Biology: artificial culture of body parts, regrowth / healing controllers in brain

Philosophy: True democracy (like the IDEA ad we see, ultimate participation / control) or personalized democracy (choice of one's own set of rules from a given set)

Construction & Habitat: non-cities

That is where i stopped. The word non-cities hit me & the pattern in my own set of choices for the future hit me. If we are able to achieve teleportation, the need to live together / nearby would cease to exist. Infrastructure would change dramatically. If teleportation becomes possible, we could teleport our needs to our home & send back the wastes to a recycling facility. We would not need ANY PHYSICAL CONNECTIONS!!!!

As planners how far into the future are we looking? 10 - 20 - 50 years? Most of our urban projects take about 20 years to accomplish. But within that time, the original calculations have gone wrong. & yet that is just a short-sighted example. At the macro level, the government is investing some hundred thousand crores of rupees in developing india wide highway / railway network, urban transport systems, airports, etc. All of these will take atleast 10-15 years to materialize. 

Imagine if, within that timeframe, say Tata is able to create a Nanoplane: a personal aircraft that runs 20 kms a litre (with partly air powered, partly solar powered) engine & that can also take off from rooftops. Imagine the lack of manpower in Air traffic control that would face us! & we are preventing aerospace use for SECURITY REASONS. One has to only imagine if aerospace is exploited for public use (not limited to chartered / public flights), one can form a 3 dimensional network of highways in the air without any substantial investment! The only large scale investment would be in form of ATC manpower! Any person desirous of using a car provides for the garage himself. The same will apply for landing facilities & maybe area / building wise ATC personnel. Even this would make our investments in highways & railways a joke! Because super-efficient engines are not too far away! (skeptics may use google to enlighten themselves) & I am still talking on a present scenario basis.

Now, imagine if teleportation is established in next 50 years! (Cellphones were established in 20 years. Teleportation of electricity within 1metre is possibly as of today) The immense investments that we made in next 20 years would be obsolete in just 30 more years! Not to say what a waste of land would be found, when physical transit would die off! 

In my earlier post I mentioned that we provide about 20-25% of our urban spaces to streets & connecting infrastructure. All that space in cities & the space between cities would be now utilized for better purposes! & I have still not reached the climax!!!

What cities???? Once everything is teleported, why should i live next door to my office, or to anyone for that matter? I can reach anywhere i want in a matter of seconds via teleportation! Ditto for material needs!!! If we are using communication to talk to people in space on a live basis, why is it so hard to imagine we can even go there in future on a live basis??? That, is the ultimate death of urbanization! People are capable of building spaces better than cities to congregate. Our stadia, our theatres, our plazas could be in more exotic locations; and yet just a jiffy or few jiffies away! (hey, in case you forgot congestion, your current call drop rate could bring you back to earth!!!)

So, as planners: provided with the responsibility of developing human environments for the future, are we even thinking of the future? or are we just reflecting on the present & trying to mend things, rather than evolving with them??? While I completely agreed with the talk of the planner i interviewed, I am unable to understand why, inspite of having studied so much history, we are still not into the business of future anticipation (not prediction) based on current pace of growth (be it technological, political, philosophical,etc etc) If we are unable to provide visions into the future as planners, and guide public opinion towards the same, I believe we fail somewhere as professionals.

PS: I'm just an amateur thinker & a blog is definitely a product of the BETA world. Hence, it contains a collection of my random & almost live stream of thoughts. More importantly, I may have (with my limitations of exposure / understanding) got the chronology of past developments & connected future perceptions wrong. But, I DEFINITELY HAVE NOT got the point wrong. We ARE too SHORTSIGHTED to see what's going to hit us in the next few decades. If a much-publicized (thanks to Star Trek) technological research is beyond our vision of the future, how can we claim to be the directors of future growth patterns? We don't even try to understand what these patterns will be based on!!! One has to only imagine the combined effect of many such technologies, and lament the futility of our so-called PLANNING.