“The future is big data, anti-heroes, and bedrooms on the freeway,” says Wayne Batty.
It is a bird, it is a plane; no, it is Superman. Delivered with giddy levels of 1978 Hollywood melodrama, you can feel the optimism.
Superman, with its message of justice and hope, resonated with an audience looking for a hero. Contrast that with the two taglines accompanying this release of Venom by Marvel this month: The world has enough superheroes. Embrace your inner anti-hero.
As Dylan said, “The times they are a changin‘”. Soon we will be living in a cashless society, trading digital currencies for virtual services algorithmically selected for us by Einstein-besting AI bots. Sustenance will be by drone-dropped ‘food equivalents’.
On those rare occasions when you are forced to leave your life cube, a driverless pod will whisk you silently to the nearest Home Affairs office where you will queue for a new ID because they will still be stuck in the 1980s. But I have a hunch that people would not mind that much, savouring those few moments of real human interaction instead.
This insatiable drive to connect everyone digitally through increasingly pervasive technology is slowly isolating us from physical reality.
There are benefits, absolutely. The ability to order Asian takeout via an app, bank from your bathtub, and confidently book a great room in the flat of a nice old lady in Bogata has made life undeniably easier.
But what is the end-game? The real money-printing genius of Facebook, Amazon, and Google is not the ability to spy on former girlfriends, order organic kelp crisps from Yokohama, or give sensible answers for ‘How to remove NikNaks from the ear of your child. No, the ability to collect user-data is what makes them invaluable to everyone from advertisers to politicians and clandestine intelligence agencies.
Not just for targeted advertising, big data will help computers do better jobs than we can. If human-to-machine interface is killing human-to-human interaction, where will the machine-to-machine revolution leave us? Under the desirable guise of connected convenience, our humanity is being reduced to a brontobyte-sized pile of ones and zeros – we are being calculated out of the equation.
The next battlefield is in our cars. Already more technologically advanced than a moon mission, every car maker is ramping up digital capacity
and connectivity while systematically removing all things analogue, all in the name of autonomy. Sure, full go-anywhere Level-five autonomy may be decades away, but already many of the car-concepts of today resemble rooms on wheels.
At the Geneva show this year, Renault displayed the EZ-GO imagine a wonky garden greenhouse with subway train seating. More recently Volvo released images of its 360c concept – a bland, fully autonomous capsule, extolling the virtues of lie-flat seating.
I do not know about you, but I am not attracted to a car because it has a liquid gel mattress covered in bio-sensitive electronic fibres that pulse every time a stranger wants to connect with me on social. Awful to look at and literally impossible to drive (they have no steering wheels), these are the anti-heroes of the car world.
I still salivate over an Alfa Carabo, get goose bumps listening to a V12 at full chat, and get clammy hands carving up a favourite section of tarmac in anything more dynamic than my 2010 Scenic. Real cars connect with you; they do not try to connect you with others.
They are the heroes of the automotive age