Many years ago – it must have been the late 1990s – I ran into a freelance Irish Times colleague in the office. He had just returned from Cannes, where he had been attending the major annual mobile phone event known as the GSM World Congress.
Gradually it became the 3GSM Congress, and moved to Barcelona, where it’s now the GSMA Mobile World Congress (though a lot of people still call it the 3GSM, mostly those of us who remember when a smartphone came with a stylus).
Anyway, I asked him what was new in the mobile world.
“Cameras!” he replied. Handset makers were planning to put a camera function into mobiles.
I distinctly recall having a hearty laugh about this seemingly ridiculous notion. Why would anybody want a poor quality camera on a phone, of all things, when prices were dropping and quality fast rising on nifty little digital cameras that would fit in your pocket? Why, I had just bought one myself.
Oh, he added, and soon you would be able to buy things with your mobile – they demonstrated how you could pay for parking with your phone.
That, too, seemed farfetched in a world of pockets populated with spare change.
Now, a decade and a half later, most mobiles are probably used just as much for taking pictures as for making calls.
And one of my most-used phone apps lets me pay for and renew a parking spot. I cannot remember the last time I put a coin in a parking meter.
I’ve told this story many times to demonstrate just how hard it can be to look at a technology today and imagine the ways in which it may well become an incredibly mundane aspect of daily life. Journalists get it wrong all the time (but then so do futurologists).
You need to see such things in actual use. Typically, there’s that “oh, wow” moment. And then, surprisingly quickly, that shifts to “oh, ho hum” as what was initially jaw-dropping becomes a norm.
Driving tracks
That is surely the direction in which we are now heading with self-driving cars. I bet that most of you, like me, considered this to be one of the loonier ideas to come out of
(come on, guys, stick to the search stuff, I thought). The idea that autonomous, driverless cars would ever be introduced on the streets seemed so unlikely – at least not until there were designated driving tracks and some sort of safety technology built into the roads infrastructure as well as the cars.
But as we know from regular news updates it turns out Google has had very safe driverless cars on the roads – the public roads–- for some time now.
Yes, driverless cars. Since 2010, as a matter of fact.
Last month in San Francisco I heard author and Massachusetts Institute of Technology principal research scientist Andrew McAfee talk about how quickly that driverless car "oh, wow" becomes "ho hum".
As part of the research for his 2014 book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (written with Erik Brynjolfsson), McAfee persuaded Google to let him take a spin in one of the cars.
A Google engineer started driving the car in the normal way, he said (adding that the company always has someone sitting in the test car driver seat to keep other drivers from freaking out on the road). Once out on the highway the driver switched the car over to self-drive.
“And honestly, just as you imagine, there’s a big red button on the dashboard of the car,” said McAfee.
“The first reaction is abject terror because you’re hurtling down the road at 60 miles per hour. But then – you just feel boredom.” Because it’s like being in the back of a carefully-driven taxi, just without a driver. By the end of the trip McAfee said he had the feeling that he was in the middle of something about as exciting as those automated, driverless airport transport trams that take you from terminal to terminal.
Other drivers
Recently Google revealed its auto-driven cars had been involved in about a half dozen accidents since testing began. But it turned out that the accidents were generally caused by other drivers.
The company also said its prototype driverless pod car would be on California's streets and highways this summer, for test driving (in the past it has refitted Toyota and Lexus car models to drive on their own). About 70 driverless cars are on the roads today. By 2020 that is expected to rise to an actual market for about 180,000, according to analyst Frost & Sullivan.
By then I suspect the cars will be an “oh, wow” novelty everybody wants to check out, like those first cameraphones. And not long after I am betting they will slide into “ho hum” normality, proving my initial reaction to them to has been absolutely wrong (and making the serious problems of texting, handset-using, or drunk car drivers a distant memory).
