"Dr. Memory?"
"Y-e-sss"
"Do you remember the future?"
"Yeesss"
"Well, forget it!"
---The Firesign Theatre: "I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus"


This past week, from July 12th to the 15th, a global Technology, Entertainment and Design conference was held in Oxford, England to consider the future, including the roles of politics, the environment and social issues in shaping 21st century life.

Among the more than 300 participating scientists, technologists, thinkers, designers, musicians and playwrights were Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis and Nokia director of design strategy Marko Ahtisaari.

From the fairly sparse reports (mostly from the BBC), this conference seems to represent the usual confusion of which futurism is heir to. There seem to be a lot of technologists plugging their products (as well as plugging them in, except for the wireless of course) and authors flogging their books. Every expert ignores the field of every other expert. And one biotechnologist extols the complexity of life while proposing to apply reductionist techniques to create more artificially.

Though held in Europe for the first time, this has been a high profile event in the U.S.: the first TED conference saw the unveiling of the Apple Macintosh, the Sony compact disc, and mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot's demonstration of mapping coastlines with his discovery of fractals. Bill Gates, architect Frank Behry and musician Herbie Hancock have been featured speakers.

In advance of the event, Oxford announced the formation of its 21st Century School, created from an endowment by computer pioneer James Martin, to study issues such as climate change, technology, disease and aging societies.

"Our century is very, very special, " Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, told the conference. "It is the first where humans can change themselves... Whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate in the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth."

In reviewing recent scientific achievements and challenges, such as genetics and biotechnology, and the conundrums of recent physics, Rees felt that the greatest challenge is posed by the science of complexity.

Rees, a cosmologist, has not been particularly optimistic about the human future. Playing on the Churchillian phrase 'our finest hour', his recent book is called "Our Final Hour." He warns that technology is creating "as escalating variety of potential disasters," from climate change to artificially created epidemics and in the far future, abuses of robotics and nanotechnology.

At the conference he emphasized the human potential. "If you represent the Earth's lifetime in a single year, the 21st Century would be a quarter of a second in June... We are not even halfway through our allotted time on Earth before the Sun itself burns out."

Another speaker, Craig Venter, described the sheer
amount of life on this planet of which we are utterly ignorant.
On an ocean voyage around the world Venter took a seawater sample every 200 miles, and found new species of life each time. In one place, a single barrel contained 1.3 million previously unknown genes, and 50,000 new species.

Yet the lesson Venter drew from this was not appreciation or preservation, but the need to try to create artificial life. "Only by trying to build it will we truly understand it," he says.

It seems Rees' fears are well founded.

According to reports, this year’s tech gadgets seemed to emphasize new uses of wireless technologies. But several speakers also emphasized that the silicon based lifestyle is exceeding the speed of life, and that the explosion of confusing, trivial if not meaningless choices of tech-enabled consumerism may not be all good. There are studies to back some of this up, such as those showing productivity dropping under the onslaught of email, and housework actually taking more time now than a century ago.

Asked about the digital media future, one expert predicted “fifty years of chaos.” With these folks, who could predict anything else?