In the workplace, business negotiations and client introductions “will be recorded, processed, and analyzed [and] … [e]ach party to the communications might receive a real-time report on when the other people are likely lying …”
Probably not. We’ve had voice stress analysis for a long time, and we’re not using that. It’s sort of like the Organ Banks Problem in Niven’s stories - it’s an interesting thought experiment, but it easy to see we’re not actually going down that path. Niven himself said as much, if it were a likely future, we’d already be doing involuntary blood donations from death row criminals.
At the supermarket, “[y]our shopping cart will use GPS to track your moves through the store, including which aisles you visit most often.”
This guy has never tried to use a GPS indoors. Never mind that, grocery stores are not going to spend the money on this, particularly since shopping carts are exposed to weather and get stolen. If we see anything remotely like this, it will be purchased by the consumer, for the consumer’s benefit.
Even there the acceptance rate is slow. I use an iPod to organize my grocery shopping, and the resulting list is sorted by aisle, giving me most of what he’s predicting, and yet I’ve never seen another shopper doing it. Most people are just more comfortable with paper lists.
As for our personal lives, “[a] woman might consult a pocket device in the ladies’ room during a date that tells her how much she really likes the guy. The machine could register her pulse, breathing, tone of voice … or whichever biological features prove to have predictive power.”
Apparently he doesn’t know any women. Ignoring the sort of awkward sensor hookup this would require, women do not like machinery telling them who or what they like. They might discuss a date with friends, but that’s a social thing.
Cowen’s not talking about flying cars
On the contrary, all of the examples in the book review are in the “flying car” category. Half of being a futurist isn’t determining what’s possible, it’s determining what’s likely to be accepted, and he’s failing miserably in that regard.
Accurately predicting dramatic future changes, even near-future ones, is damned hard. RIM’s business depended on predicting what consumers wanted in smartphones, and they laughed off the iPhone as a nonthreat. If you look at today vs. 1980, the one dramatic thing that most people did not predict was the Internet, and the accompanying proliferation of small computers. In broad terms, life is actually very much the same as it was then. Almost all of the dramatic things people imagined didn’t come to pass.
The future is almost always far more boring than people expect. Unless we finally get fusion (which has been “30 years away” my entire life), in which case all bets are off. Cheap energy would turn the world upside down.
