To predict the future", wrote Arthur C. Clarke in 1962, "we need logic; but we also need faith and imagination, which can sometimes defy logic itself." That's what Wired is about: reporting with our hearts as well as our minds on the future - both the future to come, and the future already erupting around us. In this issue, we're looking at things to come: cultures and technologies, cars and medicines, space travel and life after death.
To start with, we looked at the future right under our noses. From biotech labs to London clubs, here's a list of ten good things about 1997 - real reasons to be cheerful. Here, we find out why Arthur C. Clarke's brainchild, the HAL 9000 computer, will not be ready for 2001 with an authoritative look at the state of the artifical intelligence art. We see what the future has brought for Clarke and HAL's other daddy, Stanley Kubric, here. We have a peek at Kubrick's next SF blockbuster, and the Brian Aldiss short story that inspired it. We have the virtual cars on which companies like Ford are taking multi-billion-pound gambles, and we interview the man building London's first totally wired medical school. To cap it all we have our Reality Check: a real timeline on the technologies you've often heard hyped, but have yet to see happen.
The most intriguing future is the closest. The harder we looked at 1997, the better the mood we found ourselves in. Despite the relentless negativity of our national press (the Internet is only for porn, the best thing for kids is the cane, culture can only be found in the past), 1997 is looking to be a watershed year for the UK and Europe, particularly when it comes to media, communications and connectivity. This is the year that the hype happens; the year that things finally get real. There may not yet be a computer on every desk, but there will soon be more Britons on the Net than in London; they'll have an exploded new media landscape to explore with their phone lines and cables and satellite dishes. We're redefining Europe, exploring Mars, decoding the genome - and we have a renaissance in movies, TV and new media to help us unwind.
In short, we took a long look at 1997, and liked what we saw. So much so that we are taking a defiantly risky leap of journalistic faith: we're reporting the good news up front.
About a third of people in Britain now own a personal computer. Well over half told MORI pollsters that they planned to have one by 2000 - and that was before network computers were launched at prices half those of the average PC. By the end of 1997 the number of British Internet users should have risen by 52%, and 35,000 British companies will have registered their domain names. Meanwhile, the number of Web pages is doubling every six months. Subscriber growth at major British Internet service providers is growing at an average of more than 500% a year. And the bandwidth ceiling looks to be finally breaking as well. Besides the advent of digital satellite broadcasting, Telewest and other British cable operators are rolling out cable modems that will enable people to surf the Net from home at Ethernet speeds. In 1997, the Net explodes.
In 1997 the space age gets brought back to robotic life. For the first time in 21 years, a spacecraft from Earth will land on alien soil, and there will be a human presence on another planet - in the form of pieces of technology which carry with them human ideals and aspirations.Spacecraft from America (but not, unfortunately, Russia) will land on the surface of Mars in the second half of the year as others go into orbit above them. Their arrival will establish the first-ever permanent datalink between the Earth and another planet.
The star of the show should be Sojourner, a tiny Tonka-toy of a machine that will drive around the American Pathfinder lander and peer at the soil with its spectroscope. Over the coming decades, Sojourner's descendants will wander all over the face of Mars, from the polar icecaps to equatorial volcanoes. As communications pipes get thicker, more and more data will come back, not just to scientists but to anyone on Earth with an interest and a modem. Thanks to these machine explorers, Mars will become a province of cyberspace - the first beyond the Earth, but not the last.
When the Union Jack is lowered over Hong Kong, the final shovel of earth will cover the grave of the British empire. For the first time in over a century Britons will look out at the world with neither a sense of ownership nor a sense of loss, but simply with a spirit of opportunity. While the first post-war generation had to live in the shadow of the empire, the second generation lives in a world where Empire is a movie magazine. First-time voters in 1997 will be people for whom Europe has always been a cultural reality as well as a political hot potato, for whom Asia is an economic engine rather than a provider of takeaway restaurants, for whom the borders of the United Kingdom are up for discussion. They will be better travelled, as a whole, than any previous peacetime generation was at their age, and they will see themselves as part of a global networked culture. They will spend their lives looking outwards more than inwards - building a place in the future rather than cherishing a loss in the past.
Channel Five sets the blue touch-paper smouldering; the rocket goes up in the autumn, when BSkyB launches 200 channels of digital satellite. Boom go the last remnants of Lord Reith's dream - that television should consist of a few channels, their content chosen by a wise elect. With that much bandwidth to fill there will be room for - and a demand for - television to reflect everybody's tastes. With near-video-on-demand and browser-style programming guides, the gap between the structure of the Net (many-to-many) and that of TV (one-to-many) is going to close. And there's going to be a relentless demand for cheap content. The falling prices of video cameras and PC-based pro-duction facilities will mean that the costs of making television will be lower than ever. Massive demand and low barriers to entry add up to a huge opportunity for whole new types of programming.
1997 will see the publication of a new sort of CD-ROM - one that contains whole organisms. In 1995 the first complete DNA analysis of all the genes in a bacterium (its genome sequence, in the jargon) was a milestone; in 1997 such achievements will be almost commonplace, with half a dozen new bacterial genomes added to the databases. These new digital archives will make it possible to compare the organisation and evolution of whole genomes, something which promises to revolutionise biology.Applying the same techniques to humans will bring a revolution in human health. The human genome's DNA sequence should be available in the early years of the next century; but by the end of 1997 half of the genes within it should have been identified and sequenced, and their positions "mapped" relative to other genes. Once genes are mapped, it becomes much easier to find out what they do, and what can go wrong with them.
This flood of genetic knowledge will trans-form medicine. It comes with risks - risks of inappropriate testing, of the poorly controlled use of data, of spurious oversimplification. But ignorance has risks too: risks that are sometimes far harder to discern. And new knowledge, unlike ignorance, brings opportunities - opportunities which outweigh the risks.
MediaNet 15, the superfast fibre-optic network that connects many of Soho's production studios, will be tied into Hollywood this year, allowing British special-effects houses to build on their big reputation in Tinseltown. And not only are the virtual studios booming: the real ones are, too. All of Britain's major studio facilities are fully booked for the entire year, and the three Star Wars prequels, too big for any of them, will get under way at Leavesden Aerodrome near Watford. TV companies are spending ever more on film, and there's £156 million of lottery money coming the industry's way, much of which will be distributed for actual production. Audiences are up and according to Nik Powell, producer of The Crying Game and Mona Lisa, the number of films made in the UK in the '90s may well be twice that made in the '80s. It's not just Trainspotting, white linen and 007; it's a world-class industry.
Everything's melting. 1997 is going to be the year of the consumer computing revolution, in which the grey box on your desk and the black box under your television finally mate to produce fantastic new technological hybrids. Low-latency online gaming networks like BT's Wireplay are the first step towards truly interactive online home entertainment. Mass-market online entertainment services should start to appear by the end of the year, backed up by systems like @Home and Sony's WebTV and the advent of trustable payment systems like Visa's Secure Electronic Commerce technology.In twelve months' time the typical way of getting online won't necessarily be to buy a PC. Four or more network computers - cheap and cheerful terminals from which one can access the computing power stored up in networks - will be launched in 1997, as well as games machines that can expand into much the same sort of thing. This competition to the PC will drive a massive reduction in price/performance. And the technologies that accompany it - technologies which make the boundaries between browser and desktop, machine and network, all but imperceptible - will change the sort of people that use computers and the sort of things that they do forever. 1997 will be the year in which computers break their bounds.
In back streets from Shoreditch to Stockwell, small enclaves of smart, sassy twentysomethings have been moulding digital media into startling new forms of unprecedented quality. Through growing mailing lists such as (Haddock) and gatherings such as Obsolete's monthly socials (www.backspace.org), these pockets of new media talent are connecting to exchange ideas and swap experiences. A healthy DIY attitude and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh ideas has fermented into a heady scene, emitting the intoxicating whiff of take-on-the-whole-fucking-world confidence and looking to do just that in the next year. Here are just a few of the players in the capital's digital renaissance.26-year-old Mike Bennett is Managing Director of cross-media design consultancy Sunbather because his partner William Julien popped off to the loo while they were filling in the forms at Companies House. Sunbather has expanded from Web design (the Radio 1 site) into CD-ROMs (the inspirational AudioRom) and interactive art installations. Future plans? "A New York office, mate..."
Olaf Wendt, 29, is a founding director of TripMedia, an interactive film and games developer. Responsible for the twisted tech-noir visuals on Burn: Cycle, the much respected action/adventure game, he's currently tweaking TripMedia's Virtual Nightclub CD-ROM prior to its release in Spring.
Since flogging Business and Technology magazine to Dennis Publishing for a cheeky sum, Rob Lewis, 27, has turned his attention to supplying IT news through his B&T Online venture. Targeted at the top 50,000 IT professionals, analysts and journalists in the UK, B&T flourishes on charging a premium rate for mission-critical content.
In the 15 months since 29-year-old Lorraine Barclay founded Fusion New Media she has succeeded in blending the skills of new design graduates with those of ultra-talented teenage software geeks. Her company is currently being courted by all the big players in the online content business.
Rachel Reynard, 28, became Head of Internet Production at AMX Digital after being the first employee at Webmedia (a Web media company, m'lud). Now she's turned to broadcast, fronting shows for Radio 1 and Sky's Computer Channel. Her current projects include The Geek Show, a Channel 4 venture she describes as "Bart Simpson meets Nicholas Negroponte."
The choice between a tired bunch of Tories and a Labour Party trying its hardest not to be radical may not look like much of a reason to be cheerful. But one way or another, 1997 will break the political status quo. Ask not who wins: ask who loses, and what you can do in the aftermath.A Tory win would destroy the process of modernisation in the Labour Party, leaving it open to all manner of change. Part of the fall-out would be radical acceleration in well-organised protest politics, local community activism and single-issue pressure groups, already the fastest growing and most accessible parts of the political scene. A Labour win could well dash the Tory party to pieces on the rocks of Europe. It would also crack the cement binding England, Wales and Scotland. Most intriguingly, and it's not all that unlikely a prospect, a hung parliament in which everyone loses might lead to real electoral reform, a break-up of the present parties and a subsequent election with some real choice.
Whoever loses, there is now a consensus that government should use technology to deliver services directly to citizens. This is a process that politicians and civil servants think will be under their control. But with an increasingly organised and networked activist community, it shouldn't be. Once citizens are wired, it will not take long for them to realise that they can talk back. The nature of public service will begin to change; we can serve ourselves better than the civil servants or quangoistas will ever believe. In 1997, we'll get the tools.
If none of this excites you, feel free to give 1997 a miss. In 1996, trend watchers were already celebrating the 1994 revival. 1994, you will remember, saw the late '80s revival, and 1992 saw the early '80s back in style. The time between event and revival is clearly approaching zero. Projecting this exciting trend into the future, 1997 will see the 1996 revival, allowing the timorous and retrograde an excuse to carry on as they have been doing for the past twelve months. Be warned that the second half of 1997 will see the beginning of the 1998 revival, meaning that by the time 1998 does at last come round, it will be rather out of date.Well, maybe it won't play out quite like that. But there's no doubting that cultural change is accelerating into a blur. In 1997, "now" will be a more complex, richer concept than ever before - which is the best news of all.