If you want to get some sense of what life will be like in the 1990s, one good place to look is inside the research and development laboratories of corporations and universities across the world. The Japanese, for example, are developing a washing process will require no soap and take no more than a few minutes to complete a load.
On our side of the Pacific, Nolan Bushnell, the genius behind the Atari company, is working on a robot that may be able to handle such household chores as vacuuming and dusting. Among the other items already in development are an ultrathin television set that mounts on the wall like a huge framed picture, a machine that automatically translates from one language into another, and a high-powered computer that weights less than two pounds and is smaller than a videocassette.
These products, though, seem almost ordinary compared to what scientists are dreaming of for beyond the 1990s. A peek inside MIT's Media Lab offers some breathtaking visions of the coming decades. There, for example, a scientist lays out his vision of tomorrow's movies. They will not be anything like today's movies, flat and projected on a screen, he explains, but will be lifelike presentations that seem to be taking place in your living room.
If you like classical music, you can have the New York Philharmonic play Beethoven's Fifth in your parlor; or if you prefer, invite Katherine Hepburn in to perform Eugene O'Neill for your dinner guests. Of course, explains the scientist, neither Hepburn nor Leonard Bernstein will actually be in your living room, but it sure will look that way. What you'll be seeing is a holographic representation of the original event.
That may be a long way off, explains the scientist as he cranks up his machinery, but some of the basic tools for the process already exist. As if to underscore his words, his machine flashes a hologram in the center of the room. Looking for all the world like a real figure actually in the room, a young woman floats in midair, staring into space while red, green, blue, and orange snakes hover around her head. It's an eerie sight.
MIT's Media Lab is an incubation center for the communication technology of the coming decades. Nicholas P. Negroponte, chief of the Media Lab, likes to refer to its mission as "inventing the future," and it does seem to be doing just that. Here, scientists are working to create personalized newspapers, printed over your computer's printer, that publish only those stories pre-selected to your particular interests. They are developing computerized musical instruments to accompany a live performer. They are also trying to create a system of holography that will display the human body in a kind of three-dimensional X ray, so surgeons can see problems before attempting an operation.
"Nothing endures but change," said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus about twenty-five hundred years ago. But even Heraclitus would probably be staggered by the dizzying pace of change in the last half of the twentieth century. So fast does the body of scientific information change that it is estimated an electrical engineer's education is outdated eight years after having graduated from school, and a doctor's in five years.
Our century began with the horse as the primary
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