Once More With Footnotes

a pretty good description of what's going to happen.
     
                  Dull, dull, dull. This stuff is all science fiction that has come true — Arthur C. Clarke is a keen and persuasive salesman for the benefits of satellite technology — and it has come true quietly and it has become humdrum. We hold in our hands a power that emperors dreamed of, and we say, "It was only £ 69.95 because Dixons had a sale on."
     
                  What's odd about the movie 2001 now? It's not "Pan Am" on the side of the spaceship. Companies come and go. It's not Leonard Rossiter wandering around the space station, or the '60s style, all black and white and cerise. It's the lack of keyboards.
     
                  Dr. Haywood Floyd is important enough to have a moon shuttle all to himself and he uses a pen? Where's the portable computer? Where's the handset? You mean he's not in constan t communication? Why isn't he shouting, "HELLO! I'M ON THE SHUTTLE!"? Why isn't he connected!"? The Bell videophone he uses in the movie? What? You mean they still have callboxes?
     
                  I'd have to stop and think before I could say how many computers we own, b ut the most amazing thing is that three ... no, four ... no, five of them, all miracles of technology by the standards of the '60s, lie unused in cupboards or stripped for parts because they are uselessly out of date. Like many other people, I suspect, I' v e got a few drawers full of cutting edge technology that got blunted really quickly. Even I, easily old enough to be a grandfather (I could say to the kids, "See that Moon up there? We used to go there"), used them more or less instinctively. I grew up re a ding about this stuff. I suffer from the other kind of future shock; I'm shocked that we still don't have reliable voice recognition as good as HAL's, for example.
     
                  Science fiction certainly predicted the age of computers. Sooner or later, if you burrow d eep enough in the piles of old magazines, you'll find it predicted more or less anything you want; if you fling a thousand darts at the board, some of them will hit the bull. There are even references to something that could be considered as the Net. But w hat took us by surprise was that the people using the computers were not, in fact, shiny new people, but the same dumb old human beings that there have always been. They didn't — much — want to use the technology to get educated. They wanted to look at porn, p lay games, steal things, and chat.
     
                  We're not doing it right. We get handed all this new technology and we're just not up to scratch. And that's just as well, because the dream as sold is pretty suspect, too. It's a world-wide community, provided you use American English. It's a wonderful tool for business, if you're the right kind of business — that is to say, one that doesn't make anything except losses. It brings people together, if your idea of social intercourse is an in-basket full of spam written by p eople with the social skills of pig dribble. It's a wonderful education tool, if what you want to learn is how to download other people's work straight into your essay.
     
                  What we are, in fact, are electronic apemen. We woke up just now in the electronic da wn and there, looming against the brightening sky, is this huge black rectangle. And we're reaching out and touching it and saying, "Is it WAP enabled? Can we have sex with it? Can you get it in a different colour? Is it being sold cheap because the Monol i th2 is being released next month and had a built-in PDA for the same price? Can we have sex with it? Look, it says here I can 'Make $$$ a Month by Sitting on my Butt'. Wow, can we use this for smashing pigs over the head? Hey, can we have sex with it?"
     
                  A nd like apemen trying out sticks and stones and fire for the first time, there's a lot of spearing ourselves in the foot, accidentally dropping rocks on the kids, acute problems in trying to have sex with fire, and so on. We have to learn to deal with it.
     
                  Where will it all take us? We don't know, because we're back to being apemen again. And if apemen try to second-guess the future, they'll dream of little more than killing bigger pigs.
     
                  We don't know what the new wave of technology is going to bring bec ause it's still