Living in my future -- E Ink
Aug. 24th, 2008 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julesjonesI'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...
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...