Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

Click here for contact details, other articles and personal details

But will it work?

Ian Pearson, BTexact, March 2003

Written for BBCi Book of the Future

The future will be very exciting, but not always for the reasons we expect. In just a few years, chips will be everywhere. This will be a very mixed blessing. Imagine eating Jelly Babies in 2010, and supposing Bassetts have redesigned them with edible electronics embedded in them. When you bite the head off the first one, it will scream and send a distress message to its friends. They could launch a virus attack on your home PC, trashing its hard drive. So eating jelly babies becomes a blood sport, where the victims can fight back. There will be chips in packaging to replace today's barcodes, and our clothes will have chips that can be read by washing machines. All very well, but this means that products on supermarket shelves will be able to link to the shop's and manufacturer's web sites. The clothes shop will recognise the tags in your clothes, enabling snotty teenage assistants to be sarcastic about how long you've been wearing the same jumper. Bottles of Coke might refuse loudly to share a trolley with Pepsi, or the Tesco Finest might sneer condescendingly at the value orange juice you are buying. Shopping tantrums from kids are bad enough without stroppy products too. Even when you get it home, the gadgets in your home will all be networked. The bathroom will have a smart toilet, using the latest in bum recognition to identify you. It will track your health and weight. If it decides to put you on a diet, the fridge might refuse to open, or the microwave might refuse to cook your breakfast. Kitchen rage will be widespread.

Our social lives will improve though. Already, there are badges for people to use in night clubs to identify what sort of person they are looking for. In a few years, these badges will be able to hold all kinds of personal information, and you will be able to find someone both fully compatible and sufficiently desperate in the first minute. If they don't look as attractive as you hoped, you can use your new active contact lenses to digitally remove their face from the field of view and substitute an image of your favourite fantasy figure. A few years on from that, and you will be able to have chips in your skin. Some will be displays, active tattoos, or will control active make-up (applied in front of a digital bathroom mirror), video nail varnish, and context dependent perfume. Others will link to your nervous system, allowing you to record sensations onto your computer and replay them at will. You could send you partner an orgasm by email when you are away on a business trip Now imagine if it all goes wrong. And it will sometimes. However smart the technology becomes, it will sometimes fail. And the fancier the technology, the more spectacular will be the result of its failure.