Idyillic Nightmares

Norman Rockwell, Whispering Sweepstakes (1963)

Connectivity benefits everyone. Those who have none will have some, and those who have a lot will have even more. To demonstrate that, imagine you are a young urban professional living in an American city a few decades from now. (…) Your apartment is an electronic orchestra, and you are the conductor. With simple flicks of the wrist and spoken instructions, you can control temperature, humidity, ambient music and lighting. You are able to skim through the day’s news on translucent screens while a freshly cleaned suit is retrieved from your automated closet because your calendar indicates an important meeting today. (…) You take another sip of coffee, feeling confident that you’ll impress your clients. You already feel as if you know them, though you’ve never met in person, since your meetings have been conducted in a virtual-reality interface. (…) There’s a bit of time left before you need to leave for work – which you’ll get to by driverless car, of course. Your car knows what time you need to be in the office each morning based on your calendar and, after factoring in traffic data, it communicates with your wristwatch to give you a sixty-minute countdown to when you need to leave the house. (…) You think about having another cup of coffee, but then a haptic device (“haptic” refers to technology that involves touch and feeling) that is embedded in the heel of your shoe gives you a gentle pinch – a signal that you’ll be late for your morning meeting if you linger any longer.

This amazing look at our bright future was described in The new digital age: reshaping the future of people, nations and business (pp. 28-30), a 2013 bestseller penned by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Bill Clinton praised it, and Richard Branson described it as “a brilliant guidebook for the next century”. Schmidt and Cohen do love the Digital Age. Unfortunately, their judgement may be slightly biased by the fact that they both work for Google. The former is currently the Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc., the multibillionaire corporation parenting Google, while the latter is the CEO of Jigsaw, a technology incubator created by… Google. This implies that the future “of people, nations and business” they present in the book may be heavily influenced by the business plans of their own company.