Senga, despite her name, was well-educated. At 55 years old, she was slim to the point of being anorexic.
She was part of a group learning how to push a mouse and double click on an icon to open a word document. There were two problems for Senga: her hand trembled so much with fear that the little arrow on the desktop quavered and darted and left flashing after-images of its zig zag journey across the screen; she felt herself to be so sunk in a pit of self-deprecation that she was convinced there was no recovery and no joining the technological revolution that was happening around her.
Senga had techno-phobia. Her handwriting was such a spidery illegible scroll that the Principal teacher in her department had determined she should join the other oldies in the school and learn basic computer skills. Her tears streamed every time she looked at a computer.
I first felt the onslaught of the digital tsunami in my engineering days. My job as a toolmaker was to set up capstan lathes in a small factory in Glasgow that made bespoke accouterments for submarines, like salinometers, micro-valves and custom tools for cutting gears. Crockets was the name of the company, a label more akin to a shoe maker or a hardware store.
After two years of work there, the management decided to invest in machines that could be monitored by one man from a centrally situated hub and my services quickly became redundant, along with about 10% of the specialised workforce.
The quantum leap from analogue to digital had begun.
In 1981, after many years of working on a BBC computer and inking exam papers on a Banda machine for third-world use, I found myself in Toronto where I was helping to build a sauna with some Polish students in the district of Pape. The house was a late 19th century French colonial structure. The sauna was annexed to a bedroom on the top floor, the middle and ground sections provide living space and a kitchen respectively. In the basement was a service workshop for Apple computers, the first in the country I was told.
Tom and his wife Trudy, the owners of the house, left me in charge while they went for a two week vacation to Tobago. I was to sign myself in and out of the place, cook my food in the kitchen, and was allowed to play on the computers in the basement.
I don’t know how you feel about packman and on-screen table tennis, but don’t get involved, ever, with shooting alien craft out of the sky as they drop to earth with in ever-increasing numbers. I would spend more than 16 or more hours a day at the screen and walked about the house zapping everything in sight in my line of vision to the auditorially hallucinated tintinnabulated screeching of extra-terrestrial craft landing from the ceilings of the house.
Nowadays, while driving, I think of how my father would have wondered at the technology in cars these days. He drove a new car every year until he died in 1971. These included Vauxhall, Singer, MG, Morris Oxford, Triumph, Humber, Austin, and various other models. By the way, I also wonder how Leonardo da Vinci would react to television, helicopters and aeroplanes, and, well, just about anything in the modern world.
Now, microprocessors regulate the windows and the engine with on-board diagnostics. The engine control unit, for an example, is one of the many seeming miracles of vehicle technological developments. It balances the mixture of air and fuel that passes through the catalytic converter to remove pollutants from the car exhaust. And what would my father think of me speaking to someone on my hands free iPhone then switching to a GPS navigation system which can forecast my time of arrival at a destination by the shortest and least cumbersome route in real time?
Then, I have an old and redundant SLR Pentax in my cupboard with a detachable 185 mm lens, now replaced with a Nikon digital camera, a Cassio compact camera and an iPhone on which I can access What’s App, Viber, Face Time, send and receive texts and tweets, send an Instagram, listen to music on wireless digital headphones on Deezer or Sound Cloud, enter appointments in my calendar with one click, find the arrival of a bust near my home, carry plane, train, bus and theatre tickets in my digital wallet, make use of predictive text which suggests words I might wish to insert in a text field, prediction based on the context of other words in the message and the first letter typed…and take a pretty good photo with a selfie stick that someone gave me.
As for the future. Well, here are some of my predictions:
• Inter-dermal gossamer implants containing personal information such as passports, medical records and current terrestrial location
• Geo drones for the delivery of online-purchased goods.
• Holographic, omni-directional media systems for home use
• Rolls of highway applied to super-Velcro like surfaces
• Predictive Assessed Profiles (PAP) of criminal behaviour – think Tom Cruise’s Minority Report
• Smart wrist bands that send real time diverse health uploads to a central astro-physical diagnostic hub enabling advice on activities and diet
• Organic/biological prosthetics
• Neo-plastic neuron implants in designated intermodal pathways to facilitate the amelioration of harmful habits such as smoking
• Inter-spatial organic plateaus for the production and delivery of food to stations on earth
• Genetic applications of advantageous features in mammals applied to humans, such as amphibiotic gills, eidetic tableau memory platforms and stereoscopic vision.
• Biological, inter-gender robots with legalised human partner-paired capabilities
• And, of course, international exospheric battlement stations stocking nuclear payloads
In a billion years, let’s imagine that we’re still around, the difference between the human appearances now and then would be as different as the forms evolved by bacteria and a monkey.
But as Freddie Mercury said, Who Wants to Live Forever.
