Technology And The Future – Part 1

Thinking about the future is a feeling that brings joy to people. Our hopes for the future connect us more deeply to life. Since ancient times, humans have been curious about what the future holds; they have tried to learn about it through sorcerers, fortune-tellers, and seers. These seers claimed to see the future by looking into crystal balls or the stars and made interpretations through dream analysis. Today’s fortune-telling, however, is undoubtedly done with the help of science and technology.

In my opinion, science and technology, together with our imagination and reasoning abilities, are the most crucial concepts that illuminate the future. In other words, “science is the most accurate guide in our lives”. (as M.Kemal Ataturk said)

I’ve been interested in technology and science fiction since childhood. Our generation grew up with Jules Verne’s novels like Journey to the Moon and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I believe our first encounter with artificial intelligence was the “Mirror” in the Snow White tale. Isn’t there a hint of technology in the voice-activated cave door in the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves or the flying carpet in Sinbad the Sailor ? 

My generation grew up in the science-fiction atmosphere of 70s and 80s bipolar world. Our childhood science fiction TV series such as “Star Trek”, “6 Million Dollar Man”, “Mission Impossible”, “Space 1999”, “The Jetsons” that we have found the chance to watch through a single channel Black & White TV entered in our homes, enhanced our imagination and also shaped our expectations about the future. Besides, Isaac Asimov, the legendary science-fiction writer, had a profound impact on our generation.

During middle and high school years, we were discussing and making predictions about what the world would be like in 2000s with our classmates. Almost every single one of us were “futuristic”. On those days, 2000s seemed to be very distant for us.

According to our predictions, technology and science would advance significantly in the new century: space stations, journeys to Mars, colonies on the Moon, and flying cars would become reality. We believed that with the technological advancements of the 2000s, the world would achieve prosperity, and problems like hunger, health, and shelter would be completely solved. We imagined that by the 2000s, the world’s population would grow significantly—from 4 billion to 10 billion. Population control would be achieved through methods like test-tube babies, and even family structures might change. We would live in densely populated cities filled with towering skyscrapers, with flying cars moving between them, and we’d sustain ourselves with food pills.

We were full of idealistic and optimistic thoughts back then. Most likely, the world would unite under a single government in the 21st century. On one hand, the positive aspect of this Federal World Government was that, a global peace environment would be achieved, on the other hand, advanced technologies controlled by one central authority could lead to a dystopian world. While optimistically considering technological progress would bring peace and equality, both the middle school English course book ‘Brave New World’ and the George Orwell’s classic novel “1984’ had enlightened us that, a totalitarian government could keep records of all the citizens in its own interest, and the reality, the media even history could be changed entirely for its own sake by using advanced technologies. I can say that, these books are the first examples of the ‘Black Mirror TV Series’ casting in Netflix today. The popular phrase of those years, “Big Brother is watching you” became a common saying among us.

The sic-fi movie ‘Terminator’ appeared in the mid-80s and the ‘Skynet’, mastermind computer of the enemy machines in that film, showed us one more time that there might be a dark side of technological progress. Skynet was the worst state of artificial intelligence. In 2001: A Space Odyssey; the best science fiction film of all time directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1968, the most advanced supercomputer of mankind named HAL was an enemy of humanity as well. (The 3 letters comprising HALs name come just before the letters I,B and M in the alphabet which symbolizes the largest IT and technology company named IBM at that time- despite Kubrick’s denying of any connection). Would advanced computers and robots which become smarter than humans destroy humanity?

One fear in the 2000s was the exhaustion of oil resources. Yes, what you’ve just read is not wrong. There were writings and discussions about oil running out, but we believed that by the 2000s, oil would no longer be necessary. In our vision, alternative energy sources, robots, androids and computers with artificial intelligence were the must-have developments for the new century.

In the 1980s, when it came to electronic and technological advancements, the first thing that came to mind was the Japanese. Sony and its products were leading the way. For us Turks, everything technological was a Japanese invention. If there were to be intelligent robots, surely the Japanese would create them. There was no way we were alone in space. Aliens were advanced beings, and they were kind; they could further advance our civilization. How could we ever forget Steven Spielberg’s charming E.T. ?

By the time we reached the 90s, the Nostradamus phenomenon surfaced. This man who lived in 1500s accurately predicted all the important events of the 20th century years ago. The Eastern Bloc gave up and our bipolar world finally ended, new concepts such as globalization emerged. During 90s, ‘the Six Million Dollar Man’ evolved to ‘the Robocop‘. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates introduced the idea of ​​a personal computer that would completely change our lives, and in a very short period of time, the computer was no longer a large, unreachable device and entered into our homes. The fast-growing world wide web (www) emerged in those years would change everything in the future. Even if we have foreseen the developments, we were not fully aware of what would happen. Steve Jobs, I’ve watched his ‘missing interview’ later in internet, was quite aware of this coming future. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRZAJY23xio).

With the arrival of mobile phones in our lives in the ’90s, things started to change further. They were called “cell phones,” and it was predicted that they would shrink to the size of a watch, pen, or even a lighter. SMS, or short message service, was invented in the ’90s. The movie “Back to the Future Part II,” which I watched in London, attempted to predict the year 2015 from the perspective of 1985. By the ’90s, the year 2000 was approaching ever closer. Towards the end of the ’90s, as web technologies advanced, the concept of the virtual world emerged. However, the most impactful strike came just before 2000 with “The Matrix” film. This movie merged philosophy with technology, stretching our imagination to the idea of life being a simulation. A false world—what if the world we live in isn’t real ?

Futurist writers like Peter F. Drucker and George Friedman introduced new concepts for the upcoming 21st century, such as the “Information Age” and “Information Society.” From reading their books to see what they predicted for the coming century, a common theme emerged: “The future is unpredictable!”

To cut a long story short, the arrival of that distant year 2000, which we thought would never come during our childhood, turned out to be a complete disappointment for our generation that grew up with high expectations of technological advancements. The futurist writers were right: the future cannot be accurately predicted.

That distant and magnificent new century had finally arrived, yet we hadn’t set foot on Mars or established “Moonbase Alpha” from the series Space: 1999. Sure, we had Mr. Spock’s communicator-like cell phone since the 1990s, but video calls were still not at the level we had hoped for. The fear of a Third World War in the ’80s had dissipated, but instead of bringing peace and prosperity through globalization and technological advancements, the early 2000s were marked by the tragic events of the Twin Towers. Despite the rising number of skyscrapers in our densely populated megacities, the flying cars that were supposed to glide between them were still nowhere to be found.

By the year 2000, social and societal issues like hunger, inequality, and injustice remained unsolved—in fact, they had worsened. Terrorism had globalized, developing countries were still struggling, climate change was on the horizon, and even greater environmental issues emerged, causing our world to regress in some areas. Terms like “carbon footprint” and “sustainable living” entered our lives. On the other hand, advancements in health and biology were surprisingly beyond our expectations. Cloning, stem cell treatments, and the unraveling of DNA were significant breakthroughs, yet the fight against cancer continued. We weren’t taking pills as meals, but we had deciphered the harms and benefits of food. Who would have thought that the Coca-Cola we loved as kids was so harmful?

Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope and probes sent to our solar system, we came to know the universe much more closely. The sad news was that galaxies were moving away from each other at an accelerating pace. The immense gap between the lifespan of our finite human lives and the vast age and scale of the universe greatly reduced the odds of encountering intelligent extraterrestrials within the same timeframe. As we grew older, we realized that advanced aliens could not possibly be “benevolent.” History had shown us that advanced civilizations tend to eradicate the less developed ones (I highly recommend reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel). By the 2000s, oil had not run out. But alternative and clean energy sources were gaining more traction.