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Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years by Bruce Sterling. Random House. 2002. 320 pages. Check price/order book.Beyond the Conventional View of the Human Future
Science-fiction author Bruce Sterling challenges conventional thinking of man's future relationships with commerce, technology, and nature in Tomorrow Now.
Reviewed by Lane JenningsFirst the bad news: Tomorrow Now, the new book of speculative essays by award-winning science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, does not fulfill the promise of its subtitle by providing concrete visions of life in the next 50 years. But there’s good news, too: Sterling’s comments on developments under way or likely in such areas as genetic engineering, lifelong learning, human---machine relationships, and the conquest of death are well worth serious attention, whatever future humans actually face in the decades ahead.
Adopting a framework based loosely on the "Ages of Man" speech from Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It, Sterling focuses on human concerns related to seven successive stages of life: infant, student, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon (i.e., retiree consumer), and "mere oblivion." But instead of following one typical individual through life, or addressing the issues you might expect (such as babyhood, education, romance, war, law, commerce, and elder care), the author follows a more winding path, swinging through broader issues that shape politics and economics on a global scale, as well as personal priorities.
With each topic he considers, Sterling quickly challenges conventional wisdom. For example, his essay on genetic engineering argues that modern norms of cleanliness--sterile operating rooms in hospitals, frequent bathing, and the use of sprays and shots to kill germs everywhere--will disappear once humans learn to control the world of microbes. Rather than killing germs, we will instead cultivate and develop new strains that help wounds heal, keep us from smelling bad, and fight or prevent diseases everywhere in the environment. In Sterling’s view, the current battle raging over clones completely misses the real potential of biotechnology. Cloning human babies or even higher mammals are merely crude publicity stunts compared with designing, raising, and employing one-celled creatures by the billions for business, agriculture, medicine, and engineering.
Sterling’s take on the so-called "learning society" is similarly offbeat. He interprets lifelong learning as another way of saying that there are no more "safe places"--no line of work where one can master a body of knowledge or develop skill at using proven tools and expect to use these to earn a comfortable living throughout one’s career. Machines and knowledge both grow obsolete, and no longer can preparation relieve us of the need to learn and relearn our trade on the job. Even for those who do not work, there are no "safe" investments any longer, no sure way to protect existing wealth or make money with confidence over time. About the best we can do, Sterling suggests, is to stay patient and flexible--be willing at short notice to change our plans and expectations as changing circumstances bring new opportunities and established certainties disappear.
A recurring theme throughout Tomorrow Now is "ubiquitous computing," or "ubicomp"--smart chips embedded everywhere in buildings, appliances, vehicles, clothing, and even surgically implanted in human beings. These built-in, portable, wearable, capability-extending prosthetic devices offer endless possibilities for creating new products, services, and problem-solving mechanisms. To take just one example, the same tiny chip that might enable a clothing manufacturer to pinpoint the location of one particular coat at every stage of shipment, from production line to department store, would also allow the final purchaser to find the garment quickly in a closet, on a dry cleaner’s rack, or inside a piece of lost or stolen luggage.
One of Sterling’s more-disturbing claims is that today’s manufacturers of electronic gear, software programs, and many other consumables purposely market items they know will not work simply, reliably, or easily. They want users to enter a demanding "relationship" with products whose built-in quirks assure that they can never become dependable "old pals." A level of mild frustration, anxiety, and confusion leads users to decide more quickly to scrap an old product and buy the new "improved" model. As a result, Sterling notes, we spend more and more of our lives with blobjects--"rounded humpy, bumpy plastic creations [that] tend to be fleshy, pseudo-alive, and seductive . . . intimate and disposable," like the Oral-B ergonomic toothbrush--and gizmos--"small, faddish, buzzy machines with a brief life span."
While he offers no specific proof to back his accusations, Sterling’s charge that hardware and software manufacturers deliberately cripple the cheaper versions of their products merely to justify higher price tags for their top of the line models is easy to believe in this age of corporate scandals.
Unlike many futurists, who keep their readers focused optimistically on tomorrow’s endless possibilities, Sterling sees no shortage of deadly dangers ahead. One madman with the right equipment and a lucky break or two could end the world; but so could collision with an uncharted asteroid, the supernova explosion of a relatively nearby star, or continued human neglect and reckless destruction of the environment.
There have been five major die-offs of plant and animal species in the course of geologic history; and Sterling views the rise of human civilization over the past 250,000 years as major die-off number six. Insisting that "humans have never lived in any state of balance with nature," Sterling cites evidence that Homo sapiens "severely disrupted nature long before we invented written history," not by any conscious moral choice, but simply by being more efficient at doing what animals and plants all strive to do: maximize their own offspring and reshape their surroundings to benefit themselves at every other species’ expense. As Sterling puts it: "The inhumanity of animal to animal deserves more respect than it gets."
Such musings could promote despair, but Sterling refuses to allow such an escape into inaction. He ends his book with a suicide note addressed to those who may come after him: the posthuman race, for whom accomplishments of physical and mental ability that we would consider awesome are routine. Ultimately, Sterling argues, people will be given what they want. "Tomorrow’s end users/consumers will not be given what their doctors or their pastors think is good for them. . . . Instead, people will be gratified." But, he warns, "to get what you want means the end of what you were." This is the end of life as we know or can know it, for to be posthuman must necessarily redefine what it means to be alive.
Bruce Sterling’s Tomorrow Now is a friendly book, less like a lecture than an extended conversation with a bright, articulate mind. Though parts of the text digress into lists and discussions of topics firmly stuck in concerns of the present day, this is still a book about futures--serious futures treated with imagination but never trivialized into mere entertainment. I recommend it.
About the Reviewer
Lane Jennings is research director of THE FUTURIST and production editor of Future Survey.[Reviewed in THE FUTURIST July-August 2003]
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