Beyond
Digital
Sometimes defining the spirit of an age can be as simple as a single word.
You may remember, for instance, the succinct (if somewhat cryptic) career
advice given to young Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, in the
1967 film The Graduate:
"Plastics."
"Exactly how do you mean?" asked Ben.
"There's a great future in plastics," replied Mr. McGuire. "Think about
it. Will you think about it?"
Now that we're in that future, of course, plastics are no big deal. Is digital destined
for the same banality? Certainly. Its literal form, the technology, is already
beginning to be taken for granted, and its connotation will become tomorrow's
commercial and cultural compost for new ideas. Like air and drinking water,
being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence.
The decades ahead will be a period of comprehending biotech, mastering
nature, and realizing extraterrestrial travel, with DNA computers, microrobots,
and nanotechnologies the main characters on the technological stage. Computers
as we know them today will a) be boring, and b) disappear into things that
are first and foremost something else: smart nails, self-cleaning shirts,
driverless cars, therapeutic Barbie dolls, intelligent doorknobs that let
the Federal Express man in and Fido out, but not 10 other dogs back in. Computers
will be a sweeping yet invisible part of our everyday lives: We'll live in
them, wear them, even eat them. A computer a day will keep the doctor away....
Consider the term "horseless carriage." Blindered by what came before
them, the inventors of the automobile could not see the huge change it would
have on how we work and play, how we build and use cities, or how we derive
new business models and create new derivative businesses. It was hard, in
other words, to imagine a concept such as no-fault insurance in the days
of the horse and buggy.
We have a similar blindness today, because we just cannot imagine a world
in which our sense of identity and community truly cohabitates the real and
virtual realms. We know that the higher we climb, the thinner the air, but
we haven't experienced it - we're not even at digital base camp....
6:37:41 AM 
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