Living in my future -- E Ink

[julesjones]

I've been playing with a Cybook ebook reader these last few days, and on Friday morning I was sitting on the bus to work, reading Charlie Stross's Accelerando. I'd just got to the bit where an AI phones the hero on a cheap supermarket pay-as-you-go phone, when a phone somewhere in my vicinity rang. And I blinked, as I had one of those "I'm living in my future" moments.

I'm in my early forties. I'm old enough to remember when mobile phones as we know them today didn't exist outside science fiction novels, when their conceptual equivalent in near real life was the car phone that was built into the car on the cop shows. The first mobile phone I personally used was a Nokia 5110, a device which at the time it came out was a major breakthrough in size, weight, and battery life. I wore it on my belt, because it was too big to fit in any of my pockets. And I didn't pay for it, because when I first got it it was still an expensive beast, both to buy and to run (though that changed shortly afterwards). My employer bought them for the emergency response team to replace our obsolete radio pagers, and we weren't allowed to use them for personal use that first year because the things were still so expensive and desirable as status symbols that Inland Revenue considered that personal use of a business phone turned it into a taxable perk.

I turned it in when I left the job, and I've owned another two phones since then, both Nokias, though a lot smaller and lighter than the first. The most recent one was indeed a semi-disposable PAYG, which cost me the grand total of twenty quid for the handset plus a tenner for some credit, since I already had a SIM.

Mobile phones were the stuff of fiction when I was a kid. There's that scene in Heinlein's Space Cadet, where casual use of what I'd call a mobile phone was a vision of the future. Now they're disposable technology. Electronic paper was the stuff of fiction as well. Now it's real, and while it's expensive *now*, I've seen that price curve as bleeding edge slowly becomes mass market. VCRs, CD players, mobile phones, modems, LCD monitors. That's the future I'm living in already. This could get interesting.

Still no AIs, though. Not yet, anyway...

Comments

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Mobile phones were the stuff of fiction when I was a kid. But not much fiction... what is fascinating in looking back at old science fiction and 'future speculation' is how few came up with the things that did eventuate, like them and PCs...

[julesjones]

Oh yes. But then it was never supposed to predict *the* future, just possible futures.

The really odd thing with the electronic paper is that it has been around in prototype form for a surprisingly long time, since at least the 70s. It's getting something useful out of it that's the new thing, and I think a major factor there is cheap solid state memory that makes it possible to fit a bookcase of text into something no bigger than a paperback. I need to buy an SD card for the Cybook so I can stick more books on it. A 2GB SD card will set me back a tenner...

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Murray Leinster's 1946 story "A Logic Named Joe" had something much like the Internet. I suspect he wouldn't have been able to sell it if it hadn't been a humorous story.

What Leinster, and just about everyone else, missed: Who would supply the information. It's not just big business, big government, and big nonprofits. An eleven-year-old could set up, for example, a political blog -- and if she were good enough, become a top name. No climbing the ladder, being endorsed by the leading experts, etc.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Some aspects of E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops (1909) suggest the internet, eg Vashti knowing several thousand people through the Machine, even if we aren't physically dependent on it as Forster imagined. And I can imagine the lecture about a future generation "which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine" transferred to an internet context.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is, the mobile phone itself is largely shaped by cultural expectations. Technologically, its already obsolescent - you could do an awful lot more if you could only bend people's expectations of what the device should do and how it should be used. We're still stuck at the "horseless carriage" phase at the moment, but it will be interesting to see how things change.