Sunday, May 31, 1998

Those scary predictions of the future

By Dale McFeatters

As a fan of futurist predictions, I take comfort in two thoughts: They're invariably wrong, and I won't be around for the few that come true.

Still, my June-July issue of The Futurist magazine had what I thought was a rather chilling headline: "65 Forecasts About Your Future Life." Dutifully, I shuffled into the magazine as the headline writer intended.

The authors, Marian Salzman and Ira Matathia, both work at New York ad agencies and from their photos seem like nice people. But their view of the future would have given George Orwell the willies and sent that sour futurist back to his typewriter to make "1984" a little less cheery.

Take their very first prediction: Company towns. Future corporations will build campus-like complexes with each house and apartment "wired to the workplace" and everything the workers need, from medical care to elder care, on site. At one time such complexes were called "plantations" and the workers were shackled, not wired, to the workplace.

Thanks to technology, the authors say with a certain breathless enthusiasm, people will be able to work all the time, and thus there will be a need for "community personal assistants" who do all the shopping, errands, house and yard work the homeowner no longer has the leisure to do.

At least some of the yard work will be done by "robotic lawn mowers," which makes another development essential, "granny minders," an electronic network that keeps track of the elderly so that granny doesn't wander in front of the robo-mower and get mulched.

And, the authors foresee in a forecast called "shopping for progeny," that "we'll see the rise of mail-order catalogs with details about the egg and sperm donors, so prospective parents can shop for genetics." That way, when a curious child asks, "Where did I come from?", the parents can truthfully answer, "The mailman."

Not that the kids will ask because they'll learn about the birds and the bees at school, through "cybersex." If the cybersex teachings give the little tikes funny ideas, the parents will be able to remotely administer a low-grade electric shock through an ankle or wrist monitor.

Such "house arrest" hardware, Salzman and Matathia say, will be popular with parents, who perhaps screwed up their catalog order, and "have given up on controlling their children with low-tech methods." By "low-tech" I presume they mean spanking, although it might just as easily be a cattle prod.

These child-rearing methods had better work because the authors say parents will increasingly be held liable for their kids' misconduct with penalties ranging from "fines to mandatory school attendance (cybersex class?) with the child to prison time."

In any case, insurance policies will be available to protect parents from their children's thuggish behavior, probably offered as a package with divorce insurance.

Appliances will be wired into everything else. "Intelligent refrigerators," for example, will keep track of the milk, butter, orange juice, etc., and automatically order from a home-delivery service when supplies run low. Presumably, medicine cabinets will do the same, plus gossip about their owners' repulsive medical problems with the other medicine cabinets in the neighborhood.

Not that your personal problems will remain personal. The authors say the loss of privacy, due to computers and the Internet, will be so great it "may turn many people into exhibitionists." As if we don't have enough of that now.

Salzman and Matathia don't claim to have a totally clear crystal ball. A few questions are left for the reader to mull, among them: "Will cloned children of today's geniuses dominate matriculating classes at top universities in the years ahead?"

I don't know. I suppose it depends which catalog the kids came from. I'm not sorry I won't be around to find out.

Scripps Howard News Service