Chasing the future

Everyone has their own vision of the future – and yet few of those visions actually align very closely with what reality eventually looks like.

Take the flying car as an example. It’s been a popular idea for most of the past 100 years – making appearances in every era. Not only did comic books and science fiction stories of the 1930s and 1940s often feature a flying car, but they were a staple mode of fictional transportation thereafter in everything from The Jetsons to Star Wars to Harry Potter.

And yet, it’s not something that we as a species have seen fit to put a lot of energy into. While there are lots of examples of real life flying cars (see this YouTube video and all the associated ones on this page), none has ever provided a compelling reason for consumers to go buy them in massive numbers.

There are lots of other reasons for this – including the additional skills required to “drive” in three dimensions and the often questionable safety and durability of the many prototype flying cars that have been produced throughout the last 100 years. And, of course, none of them have been particularly cheap or manufactured by mainstream car makers.

But you get the idea. The same could be said of the “videophone” – once a ubiquitous part of any writer’s vision of the future, but now merely an add-on to what the average consumer can do with their smartphone, laptop, desktop computer or even videogame console. But it’s not a replacement for the ‘phone in the way that futurologists of 30 or 40 years ago had once envisioned.

Thirty years ago, it was – and certainly formed a major part of how telecommunications companies saw their future. I remember attending a major industry conference in Geneva in 1988 where there was much excitement about the idea that the videophone was just around the corner.

Only the corner was a lot further down the track than those companies (many of whom were full or quasi-monopolies that have long since been broken up by legislation or as the result of poor management). And the eventual form by which the functions of a videophone became popular were free applications such as Skype and FaceTime that merely enhanced the attractiveness of the platforms on which they were offered.

So while video calling is now a popular part of our culture, it didn’t become so out of a massive demand by customers for a dedicated video calling device – but rather as a result of cheap, easy-to-use software that provided a “nice to have” option for consumers.

None of that is to discount the huge importance of advances such as videoconferencing for learning, medical and business applications, but rather to just underscore that predicting the form and application within which an “obvious” future technology might become successful is a hard thing.

To my mind, that’s one of the struggles facing the 3-D printing business right now. While 3-D printing is doubtless a ground-breaking and rule-changing technology that can fill in a vast number of niches, it is not yet clear what its dominant application will eventually be.

 

So I was intrigued to see the recent release of a new cars for which many of the parts have been 3-D printed - this one from the “microfactory” of Phoenix-based Local Motors. Local Motors is clearly trying something pretty bold and ambitious with its car (including a price tag of $53,000), but as a project to dip an inventive toe into the churning waters of the future, it's hard not to be impressed.

It seems unlikely that this company will give Tesla anything to worry about, but it does provide hope that there are still keen entrepreneurs and inventors out there willing to take a chance on their vision of the future in the hope that others will share it.