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                                                                                SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 

THE CENTURY AHEAD, Page 39

Dream Machines


Technology watchers foresee a world filled with multisensual
media, smart roads and robots that are almost alive

BY PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT


    Try this sexual fantasy on for size: author Howard
Rheingold, who writes about the you-are-there technology known
as virtual reality, predicts that consenting adults in the not
too distant future will be able to enjoy sex over the
telephone. First they will slip into undergarments lined with
sensors and miniature actuators. Then they will dial their
partner and, while whispering endearments, fondle each other
over long-distance lines. For those who prefer something tamer,
Nobel physicist Arno Penzias believes that in the 21st century
it will be possible to play Ping-Pong (or any other sport) with
phantasms that look and talk like the celebrity of your choice.
And that's just the beginning. Someday, says visionary engineer
K. Eric Drexler, molecular-size machines will be able to
assemble objects one atom at a time. Using this method, they
could manufacture everything from prefabricated skyscrapers to
computers small enough to fit inside a living cell.

    When asked to close their eyes and imagine the shape of
technology in the 21st century, scientists and industrial
planners describe a world filled with intelligent machines,
multisensual media and artificial creatures so highly evolved
they will seem as alive as dogs and cats. If even their most
conservative projections come true, the next century may bring
advances no less momentous than the Bomb, the Pill and the
digital computer. Should the more radical predictions prove
correct, our descendants may encounter technological upheavals
that could make 20th century breakthroughs seem tame.

    For the first few decades of the next millennium, new
advances are likely to fit within familiar forms. People will
still drive cars to work, albeit lightweight cars running on
strange new fuels. Office workers will toil before computers,
although those machines will probably respond to commands that
are spoken or scribbled as well as typed. Families will gather
around TV sets with big, high-definition screens and a large
menu of interactive options. After a few decades, those
familiar forms will blend together and begin to lose their
distinct identities. TVs, vcrs, CD players, computers,
telephones, video games, newspapers and mail-order catalogs will
merge to create new products and services that can only be dimly
imagined today.

    Somewhere around the middle of the century, many scientists
predict, technology may enter a transitional phase, a shift in
the ground rules that will put what is now considered pure
science fiction well within society's reach. "We're at the knee
of a curve, after which all those intimations of the future may
actually come true," says John Holzrichter, director of
institutional research and development at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory. Among the scenarios he and his colleagues
anticipate:

    COMMUNICATIONS

    People in the 21st century will wear their telephones like
jewelry, with microphones hidden in necklaces or lapel pins and
miniature speakers tucked behind each ear, predicts Nobelist
Penzias, vice president of research at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
Every phone customer will have long since been issued a
personal number that follows him everywhere -- home, the office,
the beach. Thanks to a telecommunications system that will link
phone networks, cable-TV systems, satellite broadcasts and
multimedia libraries, getting connected to anything or anyone in
the most remote parts of the world will be a simple matter. This
easy access will spur the rapid growth of "virtual communities."
If picture phones finally become widely accepted, people will
begin to make network friends whom they may never meet in
person. These communities will flourish as the cost of
transmitting voices and images keeps falling.

    COMPUTERS

    The stand-alone machines that dominate office desktops today
will eventually insinuate themselves into the walls and
furniture, perhaps even into clothes. Exotic display devices
will serve as windows onto great, interconnected networks.
These windows could be as big as chalkboards or as small as
Post-it notes, according to scientists pursuing "ubiquitous
computing" technologies at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.
Computer screens could even be etched onto the lenses of
eyeglasses.

    The networks of the future will become increasingly
populated with new kinds of software entities known as personal
assistants, or "agents." These agents will monitor the outside
world, gleaning pertinent information, filtering out unwanted
clutter, tracking appointments and offering advice. A travel
"agent," for example, would be indispensable to a foreign
traveler by doing simultaneous translations or pointing out
sites of interest. A virtual lawyer could give expert legal
opinions, a Wall Street agent timely investment tips.

    HOME ENTERTAINMENT

    The shift to digital entertainment media, which began with
compact discs in the 1980s, will open up new dimensions in
leisure. Nicholas Negroponte, director of M.I.T.'s Media
Laboratory, predicts the availability, before the end of the
next century, of "full-color, large-scale, holographic TV with
force feedback and olfactory output," which is to say, home
movies that can be seen, felt and smelled. The trend will be
toward entertainment that is customized for the individual,
including do-it-yourself multimedia fantasies as well as
newspapers and magazines edited to suit each subcriber's
interests.

    As overpopulation makes the real world less congenial,
artificial realities will become more attractive. Fifty years
from now, the ability to put oneself in the shoes of another
character in another place -- Rambo rafting down the Orinoco,
say -- could be a metered commodity, like pay TV. Stewart
Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, thinks these
experiences might provide the kind of mind-expanding thrills
people once got from psychedelic drugs, but without the mental
and physical side effects.

    ROBOTICS

    Long predicted but slow to arrive, robots may finally have
their day. Within decades, says M.I.T. robot designer Rodney
Brooks, the world could be filled with small, single-purpose,
semi-intelligent creatures. He describes, for example, tiny
insect-like vacuum cleaners that will hang out in dusty
corners, scooping dirt into their bellies. When they hear the
big vacuum robot coming, they will scurry to the center of the
room, empty their innards and run back under the sofa.

    Robots will eventually learn a human trait: reproduction.
And the smart ones will be able to improve on the original
pattern with each new copy. Self-replicating devices that are
mobile, can find their own sources of energy and evolve from
one generation to another could satisfy many of the criteria
that have come to be associated with living things, says Steven
Levy, author of a new book called Artificial Life. In the next
century, says Levy, "we'll relate to our machines as we now
relate to domestic animals."

    The most important self-replicating machines, says Eric
Drexler, will be microscopic atom-stacking factories, or
"assemblers." Drexler, the author of Engines of Creation,
believes that within the next few decades, armies of assemblers
will be programmed to turn out a wide range of consumer goods,
from featherweight spacecraft to paper-thin television screens.
"Many of the things we can expect to see in the next 100 years
will resemble the wild ideas of the 1950s and 1960s," he says.

    TRANSPORTATION

    The future's lightweight, superefficient cars will still be
equipped with conventional steering and accelerators for
knocking around the neighborhood and countryside. But highways
will be embedded with electronics to monitor and control speed
and traffic patterns, so that driving on the most heavily
traveled freeways will become increasingly effortless.
Commuters in the latter half of the century will simply get on
the freeway, punch in their destination and let the electronic
control systems take over. Collision-avoidance software could
speed cars along at 200 km/h (120 m.p.h.) with no more than a
few feet between each vehicle.

    For medium-distance travel, new forms of mass transit are
likely to dominate. Magnetically levitated locomotives will zip
along at up to 500 km/h (300 m.p.h.). Lightweight materials
will enable aircraft to carry as much as three times the
passenger load of today's jumbo jets. For those who can afford
the tickets, a few airlines might even offer services on a
supersonic, suborbital Orient Express that would hop from Los
Angeles to Tokyo in only two hours.

    ENERGY

    Fuel sources will probably change as dramatically in the
coming century as they have in the current one. Scientists may
find that the environmental effects of carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gas emissions are far worse than expected, which
would prompt a virtual ban on the burning of hydrocarbons, says
Livermore's Holzrichter. But what's next? Some experts believe
so-called inherently safe reactors will have progressed so much
by that time that the environmental movement will embrace
nuclear fission. Others see a mix of solar, geothermal, tidal
and wind power. By the end of the century, the big industrial
nations may begin to rely on fusion, a safer form of nuclear
energy that creates far less radioactive waste.

    These varied sources would produce electricity for local
consumption and clean-burning hydrogen for distribution via
pipelines. According to one estimate, a single solar-cell farm
covering roughly one-quarter the area of New Mexico could
supply enough electrically produced hydrogen to replace all the
fossil fuels consumed in the U.S. If the necessary real estate
can't be found on the planet's surface, the solar collectors
could be parked in orbit, beaming energy to earth via
high-power microwaves.

    WARFARE

    The weapons of the future will look like they came straight
out of Star Wars or RoboCop: everything from hand-held laser
swords to autonomous robots programmed to kill. The long-term
trend, as demonstrated in the Persian Gulf last year, is toward
short battles conducted at long distance by increasingly
intelligent machines. Defense experts predict that the next arms
race will be to develop the smartest, stealthiest and most
accurate weapons and to demonstrate their superiority
convincingly enough in advance to avoid risking lives and
expensive hardware on the battlefield.

    The biggest problem will be proliferation, not only of
nuclear fuel and arms but also of poison gases, biological
toxins and other awful things no one has yet dreamed up. If
tin-pot dictators and drug cartels get hold of the technology,
they will become increasingly troublesome. Even a cheap,
radio-controlled model airplane can do a lot of damage if, say,
it is carrying a genetically engineered anthrax spore.

    As a rule of thumb, says Bell Labs' Penzias, technology will
provide for people of the future what only the wealthiest can
buy today. Where the rich now hire chauffeurs to drive them to
work, for example, the working stiff of the future will be
transported to work in his robocar. None of these advances are
without their costs and risks. Drexler's assemblers, for
example, could create bounties of goods and services -- or they
could unleash artificial pests of unimaginable destructiveness.
One nightmare creature from Drexler's book: an omnivorous
bacteria-size robot that spreads like blowing pollen,
replicates swiftly and reduces the biosphere to dust in a matter
of days.

    None of this, of course, is etched in stone -- or in
silicon. In the end, what propels science and technology
forward is not just what can be done but also what society
chooses to do. As the brief history of the nuclear age has
taught, powerful technologies are hard to rein in once they've
been loosed on the world. Is humankind mature enough to handle
the possibilities of intelligent robots, self-replicating
machines and virtual sex? Fantastic new opportunities are sure
to come. The hard part will be deciding which ones to pursue and
which to bypass.