The future is almost always more boring than visionary

In the technology realm, companies and enthusiasts alike like to talk about ‘the future of computing’. Typically, the companies that make such claims have just recently invented a ‘the future’ and it can be yours for a very steep price. The enthusiasts who claim to have found ‘the future’ typically just parrot the talking points of their favourite company.

Late stage capitalism, and so forth.

What I want to talk about however, is how the ACTUAL future of technology is almost always a boring quality-of-life increment over existing solutions. Rarely, is it actually the visionary new project that was just announced as the future. And this is a good thing!

To make my case, let’s look at some historical examples.

Writing is something we have done for a very; very long time. And for the majority of the time that we have been writing, we have either scratched away layers of a substrate, or added pigmented layers to said substrate. When you look at things like this, fountain pens evolve from styluses, cartridge-style pens from fountain pens, ballpoints from cartridges, etcetera.

These advancements have been really valuable, and they make writing easier, more accessible, cheaper, less fussy, etcetera. All of them are also boring increments on a proven concept. The big writing revolution comes with typewriters[1].

Typewriters completely change the game when it comes to writing. Typing becomes a skill that many people need to acquire because -- even though there is a lot of effort involved – writing using a typewriter comes with various benefits over handwriting. Of course, it is not a straight upgrade, which is why we still see handwriting have a major function today.

Then, mechanical typewriters become digital typewriters, digital typewriters become interfaces for teletypes, which become keyboards, and ultimately touch-screen approximations of keyboards. None of these developments are visionary or revolutionary, they are minor adjustments on technologies that have proven to work, and when you look at the start and end, it can become hard to see the connection.

Now, it is not as if people have not tried to revolutionize writing since. People have always attempted to invent different writing systems, alphabets, and shorthands. Few of them caught on. When the gramophone became popular, diction was going to be the ‘the future’ of writing. To this day, companies tout voice-typing (or similar) as ‘the future’ of human-machine interaction[2]. There are gesture-based keyboards available, where a given key requires two dimensions of movement, rather than just one[3]. Perhaps the future is in the past, and typing will (de)evolve into handwriting recognition.

Some of these developments have been useful, none of them have been ‘the future’.

Let me make one more example before making my case: personal transportation.

It starts as walking, and then carts. Carts get pulled by animals, and then by engines. Then they get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Swimming to canoes, to row boats, to sail boats, to engine boats. The only truly revolutionary addition is the aeroplane, which has since followed the trend of the automobile and grown bigger and bigger.

What then – I ask – is ‘the future’ of personal transportation. Some have said it is the ‘people mover’ or moving-sidewalk. Instead of having boxes moving across a stationary road, the road will move. It did not catch on. Some say it is flying cars, or hovercraft. I am still waiting for functioning public transport.

Now of course, companies selling you digital experiences will say the future is to not move at all, why move when you can use our proprietary video-conferencing software which projects a true-to-life™ avatar of yourself into a true-to-life™ replica of your grandmother’s house, with a – wait for it – true-to-life™ AI copy of your deceased grandmother. That’s what you want right?

Let me bring it back to personal computing. Recently, Apple unveiled ‘the vision pro’, their latest ‘the future’ which shifts the old desktop-paradigm to ‘spacial computing’. As far as I have been able to gather, it was a commercial flop, and nearly no-one liked it. I have heard positive things from people who used it to turn their car into a full office, but most people I spoke to saw it as a dystopian attempt to get yet more of our lives tied to a given device and company.

According to Microsofts 2030 vision[2], ‘the future’ will be voice-interaction with an AI-operator – akin to the 2013 movie ‘her’ I imagine. The mouse and keyboard will be completely removed. This will allow humans to “connect more with others’’ and focus on “creativity’’. Many people have since noted that this is such an incredibly out-of-touch comment (one among many coming from Microsoft lately) especially coming from a company that has spent the past decade trying to migrate the control panel to the settings app, and failed. How exactly is taking away my agency and giving it to an AI going to make me more creative? How is talking to an AI – instead of clicking buttons – going to free-up my time for more human interactions?

Microsoft’s vision of windows? AI. Of writing? AI. Of passwords? AI. We will “have infinite compute from quantum’’ (whatever that means) and what will we do with this power? Why AI of course.

I wrote recently that I believe that the team at Fyde has the right idea about what the future of technology is. You can read the whole post here [4], but the long-and short of it is that they combine desktop applications, mobile apps, and web-based-applications all in one system that treats all as first-class citizens and makes for smooth interoperability[5]. The veteran input methods are all there: keyboard, mouse, stylus, and finger, and (once again), they are all treated as first-class[5].

This solution is boring. It does not do anything new – basically just combining existing technologies – and it doesn’t really look or sound sexy. When apple launched the Iphone – which, one must admit: was revolutionary – it didn’t do anything truly new. To combined a mobile phone, with a PDA, took blackberry’s full-size keyboard and put it on a touch screen, and called it a day.

So many companies aim for revolution these days. And not just in the personal computing space either. I have seen advertisements for ‘the next generation of sleeping technology’ (it’s a mattress), the latest kitchen doohickey which replaces a single function of your trusty kitchen-knife, and do not get me started on water bottles.

Stop aiming for revolution, start making your products better.

Apple already found ‘the future’ of computing in the Ipad, which many people use as their primary computer, only they refuse to treat is as a first-class citizen alongside the mac-line and allow it to run desktop-garde applications. Even allowing users to use a mouse took years.

Samsung is showing that one can combine the smartphone with a tablet in the form of the recent tri-fold, only the software holds it back. Making it a decent phone, a poor tablet, and an essentially unusable laptop.

We don’t need your crypto coin to revolutionize banking, we need banks to get their acts together, provide solid digital-interfaces, good customer support, and tangible benefits.

The ‘the future’ of movies and tv was to be streaming, until streaming became just as bad as cable.

None of these problems require actual innovation.

Someone will respond to this post by citing the age-old story that “Socrates though books were a fad’’, and I agree with the sentiment that we shouldn’t always discount innovations; revolutionary or otherwise. All I am saying is that so many companies announce a new ‘the future’ every month, and so few of them actually succeed (or actually have any chance of doing so).

Discounting anything that is not an incremental improvement or a combination of existing technologies that make sense together (NO to a tablet built into the fridge, YES to a gaming handheld that also runs a full desktop OS) has proven to be a safe rule-of-thumb.

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