Why We'll Take Longer Baths in the Future

Comfortably numb

This obsession with 'busyness' can be seen in the way that the work ethic has invaded childhood. Children must be kept busy at all times. As a result, children are becoming over-scheduled, and we are creating a generation that cannot think for itself, a generation of passive citizens and comfortably numb consumers with almost no imagination or self-reliance.

In Japan the word 'benriya' loosely translates as convenience doers. These are people, usually older men, who fix leaking taps, change lightbulbs, remove cockroaches from sinks, and generally do things that require an ounce of commonsense. In other words, there is a section of Japanese society that is totally incapable of fending for itself.

Another obvious problem is that complex technologies fail. In the past, when things broke down they were relatively easy to fix. If your car wouldn't start there were only three or four things that could be wrong, each one easily fixable. These days breakdowns are more complex, and chances are you won't be able to fix it yourself. Moreover, as things become smarter and more networked, these failures will become even more catastrophic. The term 'cascading failure' refers to the failure of one element of a network being able to bring the entire network to its knees. If you lose your house keys today it's a problem, but hardly the end of the world. In the future, though, you won't have house keys; you'll have smartcard or biometric entry, and if your card gets lost or the fingerprint reader breaks down it really will be a headache because it will be linked to all the other devices inside your house. So you won't be able to switch on the central heating or make a cup of coffee because the central-heating settings and the coffee machine will have been personalized and linked to individual smartcards for each member of the household or the biometric door entry system.

People will therefore seek out older products with less technology or hack into new products to remove the unnecessary features. In the long term, technology may solve this complexity problem itself, but don't bet on it. A more likely scenario is that companies will keep inventing useless gadgets like Internet fridges -- and some deluded souls will even buy them -- but most of us will stick with what we know. Our lives are complicated enough already, and we won't buy into technological dreams like smart homes until it can be demonstrated that the new really is superior to the old. This means faster and cheaper, but it also means taking into account the bigger picture. 'Does this make my life easier?' as well as 'Does this make the world a better place?' After all, as a very old friend of mine, Douglas Slater, once reminded me: 'Old things become old because they are good. They are not bad simply because they are old.' Door keys, books, and bank notes have survived for centuries because they are extremely well designed for their purpose. Don't get me wrong here: keyless entry, e-books, and digital money are all coming, but most people will prefer to use the original tried and tested versions for a number of practical, historical, and emotional reasons.

Things cannot get faster or more complicated forever. Our minds (at least our current minds) won't be able to cope -- there is only so much information we can take on board. For example, there's a trend called too much information (TMI) that has a distant cousin called too much choice (TMC). In a nutshell, mankind is producing too much stuff. The amount of new information we now produce is estimated to be around 2 billion exabytes annually. That's (very roughly) 2 billion bytes or about twenty billion copies of this book. The average large corporation similarly experiences a doubling of the amount of information it produces annually.

It is no longer information that is power; it is capturing and maintaining a person's attention. The problem is so bad that the world's largest bank (Citibank) is testing something called Auditory Display Software as a way of delivering vital information to traders via music because visually based information just isn't getting through.

A Japanese company has already invented a way to move a cursor across a screen just by thinking about it, so ultimately we may be able to send and receive messages telepathically. Will such innovations make our lives better? It depends. Some people will rush to embrace these developments, while others will seek temporary or permanent solitude in everything from alcohol and country pursuits to memory-erasing pills (probable slogan: 'Take one to forget what happened to you today.') There will even be a boom in people buying remote real estate and islands to get away from it all. However, most of us will live somewhere in the middle, or will mentally commute between both extremes.

Hence there will not be a single future because we will all experience the future in different ways; there will be multiple, often contradictory, futures. The future will arrive faster if you live in a metropolis such as London, Sydney, or New York than if you live in a remote town or village. Equally, the level of change you will experience will vary according to your age, your income, and your occupation, although there will be exceptions everywhere.