THE HOUSE OF TOMORROW
This blog is not about my personal beliefs or predictions of the future.
This is merely an extension of those efforts that are on the drawing board of scientists. When the motor car was first invented there were rules and conditions on how it should be used. One had to stop the car as soon as one saw a human being on the road 30 feet away and wait till he passed before resuming driving. Such was the paranoia. A pastoral idyllic world would surely shun the one we live in with the same horror that we view a robot driven world but change is inevitable and all it takes is one spinning jenny to conquer and one mushroom cloud to dominate one set of binary numbers to shrink the world. We cannot see the house of tomorrow, or know what lies in store, which breakthrough will be responsible for what changes. We can only speculate. That is what I have done. But, it is not an improbable speculation. Whether it strikes awe or fear it could well be a distinct possibility. For better or worse.
All those who saw ‘I Robot’ know what I mean when I talk of the Robot Revolution.
Even as all inventions were scoffed and rejected and jeered at by the disbelievers in the past, and nearly as many inventers suffered the humiliation of being laughed at and some had their heads rolled by the skeptics, inventiveness that resilient and maverick human trait has always endured, unabashed and unabated.
If one thinks that Copernicus and Da Vinci were paranoid because they lived in Ages of superstition and darkness where the Church held greedy sway on lands and royalty and were petrified of any intelligentsia that promised an easier life to the commoners, then think again.
Science has always been looked upon with suspicion; with the eyes of a usurer who was afraid that the miserable borrowers might not only get a glimpse of his hoarding but also thwart his business as their own fortunes burgeoned.
The old misers of the Church have lost their teeth but the paranoia of human nature persists. Bush has resisted stem cell technology and retarded its progress. The fear of science has always gone hand in hand with its fascination. Those with a paradise scenario have always been cheek and jowl with those warning of nightmare future conditions.
So what is going to happen in the House of Tomorrow? Which we may never enter but which we may speculate on based on our experiments, findings and their extrapolations. If we were to look at the diaries of Verne and Mary Shelly, it would amaze us as to how many parts are accurate. Their predictions and their speculations make us wonder if they had indeed indulged in a Faustian kind of necromancy.
Da Vinci himself evokes awe that is close to the miracles of the pyramids and nazca lines in his uncanny grasp of the human anatomy at a time when they were stealing corpses to study the body.
So let us leave aside our cynical reservations and sally forth to have a peep then at some of the stuff on the anvil of today for the House of Tomorrow
If one were to think of all the dangerous or hitherto difficult jobs that could be done by robots it would make an amazing list. From making cars, to fighting chemical fires, to manning deep sea submersibles and spacecrafts too dangerous for humans, they would be everywhere. Robot watchdogs? petrol bunk attendants? security guards ? volcano inspectors?
Robots would man cars that adjust to speed limits and run on solar energy on autobahns that were super efficient, speedy and economical. Centrally controlled, accidents would be a thing of the past. Robot cops would ensure totally bribe free and corruption safe service and hunt down dangerous criminals. Robot soldiers would fight the wars and Robot doctors and surgeons who are already in business would be into the most complex of microsurgeries. And that is only where the nanobot vaccines that are inside the body cannot predict problems and repair it.
Oh Brave New World !!!
New Age children would wonder what people did before Robots just as we wonder how we spent time before the net and the tv.
Robots would do all of it from domestic work, to helping the infirm, to putting the baby to sleep and helping with junior’s homework.. and that is if the implanted chip in his little head had some minor malfunction and he couldn’t download his geometry.
Scientists are already looking at how to improve prosthetic /robotic arms and legs by sending thought waves to activate them with greater natural ease and the monkey employed to sent thought waves through pavlovian conditioning was in the news recently.
The business of getting Robots to recognize people’s moods and ex-pressions, their emotions and humour is perhaps the most challenging task. And though we are awed by the super efficiency of machines that seem to calculate at superhuman speeds, we are stunned to hear that it would take reams of programming to train a robot to say hahaha for a joke that a two year old would spontaneously smile at.
Our human complexity is further heightened by our emotions of envy, sadness, contempt, malice, anxiety… all of which would be almost impossible to programme in its interdependent interlacing, thus rendering the robot always sub human in many respects.
Scientists have always mimed nature. The super sharp eyes and sensors would be part of robotics from the vast array of creatures to be used as models for perfection for their superior individual parts.
Of course there is always the danger of the baddies being in step with the conveniences of new inventions.. there would be robot killers and spies for whom the new technology would be a boon in the same way as when the importance of nuclear energy was being talked about and explored, the evils began to shape up as the nuclear bomb.
Mutations are happening all the time. Imperceptibly. It is said that Sherpa lungs have changed from the normal to cope with the rare air. People living in underground caves would develop better eyes. If the ice caps melt people may grow gills and too much carbon dioxide in the air would create mutations of larger lungs to take in the little oxygen left. Weak gravity may necessitate bigger feet to hold on to terra firma
In zero gravity people would have less bulk to allow them to float and fly. Under water breathing may be possible by altering chemical composition of blood to allow us to hold oxygen longer, for example crocodile blood soaks up oxygen better. If animal and human genetic splicing were possible then the genes could be transferred to enable all of this to happen without waiting endlessly for mutations.
Alice stepped through the glass and found another world Is it possible that in the future there might be more than one dimension to live in? Would we need a dimension visa? Considering that there are 46 odd dimensions all we need is a breakthrough and a portal to cross over.
Virtual Reality or VR is already in the business of creating 3D computer generated environment in which users can move about in and interact with, in parallel lives. If human personalities can be stored on a chip then whole cities can be created for use and entertainment. Is it possible that people will be stored after death
and live on virtually? Jeepers Creepers !!!!
Vactors are VR actors would be created. These stars could be so popular that they might need virtual managers to handle their business like real pop stars Virtual book where the reader can have a role and virtual movies where the viewer can interact with the characters.
One could lead many parallel lives with many avatars and fill emotional areas with rich colours of possibility. Again folks will wonder how these ancients lived in one dimension… poor things. and I believe they fought wars and worried about fuel emissions.. how droll.. a scenario folks please ….please don’t turn a horrible shade of purple.
And yet if you were to time travel back to the 1800s and tell the dude there that we would in the next 200 years…. air a match being played half way across the world while sitting décolleté and munching chips on a bean bag or even flying in the air and watch the sweat run down the players cheek, and we would talk to people over the air and see their faces and hear them like they were next to us and soon we might even touch them using a helmet like headgear.. they would have slapped their thighs and laughed uproariously or stepped back in fear and had us arrested and sent to the deep dark gallows or shrunk back in horror and accused us of witchcraft, hung a heavy stone around our necks and drowned us for sorcery.
