The future is now

The DaVinci Institute is hosting a conference on the future of money in Colorado in October. In preparation for this, it has released a report on the top 10 financial innovations of the last 100 years. It makes for fascinating reading.

Credit cards, ATMs, electronic tills, barcodes, smart cards, armoured vehicles, spreadsheets and encryption all made this list, while slot machines, vending machines and travellers cheques were dismissed, having been invented over 100 years ago.

A lot of the technologies mentioned in the report didn`t take off until later inventions enabled them. For instance, the first ATMs were offline machines, not drawing money directly from an account, which meant that ATM cards were only issued to trusted credit card clients. It was only later, when bank accounts were connected to ATMs by a computer network, that it became possible for the general public to make use of this simple technology we take for granted today.

This got me thinking. We all have visions of the future, where we drive around in bubble cars, teleport to overseas holiday destinations, eat nutritious food contained in a gelatine capsule and talk to our friends over visual interfaces on our wristwatches. But if our cash-touting great grandparents were to have a look at our world today, they would find our lifestyles to be very much like science fiction.

So, as a sister piece to the report on the innovations in the last 100 years of money, here is my list of general technologies that have made a big difference in our everyday lives in the last century.

If our cash-touting great grandparents were to have a look at our world today, they would find our lifestyles to be very much like science fiction.

Georgi Guedes, Journalist, ITWeb

This is an astonishing piece of technology, first developed as a carphone in the late 1960s. While we haven`t made any decent inroads into teleportation, the fact that these little handheld electronic devices can carry our voices half way around the world in an instant, allowing us to talk to anyone else holding a similar device, is a particularly astonishing achievement.

Of course, cellphones couldn`t have existed without the presence of satellites. The first artificial satellite was Sputnik, launched into space in 1957 by the Russians. It was the size of a basketball and took 98 minutes to orbit the earth. Today, there are 7 500 satellites in orbit around our planet, and all their invisible signals flowing past us and through us every second of our lives will continue to enable better and greater things. Telecommunications could become completely wireless in the future, but even right now, satellites enable television broadcasts, Internet access and of course, the use of cellphones.

Not satisfied with chucking unmanned chunks of metal into space, we started sending people up there as well. The first manned spacecraft was Vostok 1, carrying Yury Gagarin, launched by the Russians in 1961. Space travel remains pretty mind-blowing for the general masses, but at the beginning of this month, the first private spacecraft was launched, paving the way for future space travel for everyday people. The SpaceShipOne is expected to carry two passengers into orbit within the next two weeks.

My mother finds the technology of a toaster too complex for her needs, and I grew up without ever having a microwave in the house. As I proceeded into adulthood, I was forced to acknowledge the value of these devices, even though I remain suspicious of their functionality. Who can trust food that`s been heated by electromagnetic radiation? Chucking frozen food into a little cold box and then having it emerge, fully cooked and piping hot a few minutes later, is a mind-boggling experience. The first microwave was invented in 1946, when Dr Percy Spencer, testing a new vacuum tube called a magnetron, discovered that the sweets in his pocket had melted.

I recently visited friends who still have a really ancient black and white television set. I was particularly amused to note their remote control; a device that communicated with their television from the sofa down a long wire that was actually plugged into the TV set. I am forced to admit that the television, with its first contentious patent registered in 1923, has had a massive impact on this planet`s population. It is, however, the remote control, which followed it in the 1950s, that brought about the social phenomenon of the couch potato, who regards the energy required to stand up and change the channel as too strenuous.

No device has had a greater impact on the way we work than the personal computer, invented in the 1970s. Until then, computers which had been around since 1946 as calculating devices, had been the domain of powerful organisations, occupying entire rooms. Today, most affluent households have PCs and Internet access, connecting all of us to a world of information and interaction at the touch of a button.

So while watching movies like Minority Report might yield some sort of yearning to live in a future world, sometimes it`s worth stopping to think about the technologies that make our lives an exercise in futurism, right now.