Dream Machines

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.