I am starting to get used to the idea that we are getting to the point where we can really make whatever world we want and simply walk into it together. It’s the fantasy of the Star Trek Holodeck, except we are really going to be able to do it.
Of course there is always a difference between the fantasy version of a technology and the reality that actually gets developed. Let’s take an example.
In Star Trek, everyone had a communicator. Decades later, everybody has a SmartPhone. Yet there was no sense in the world of Star Trek of the things that actually follow from having such a technology.
In the universe of Star Trek, there was no sense that there were equivalents to Uber or Lyft or Airbnb. There was no Instagram or Twitter or other form of communicator-based social media.
This leads me to think about the coming years, when something akin to the Holodeck will become a normal part of our everyday lives. I suspect that other things will end up happening as well.
We may not be able to predict what those things are, any more than in 2006 we could have predicted Uber or Twitter. But we can be sure that they will be interesting, and that they will have a large impact on our lives.
Uber and their ilk might not be permanent fixtures – they’re still losing vast amounts of money, a process the pandemic accelerates. It’s a race between bankruptcy court and self-driving cars, and the court might get there first.
It may yet fade into one of those wistful tech memories, like Napster (remember when you had access to *everybody’s* music collection?)
[Netflix won a similar race between widespread broadband deployment and the cost of shipping DVD’s, but I digress]