“honorable exceptions,” but I don’t really think that.)
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: How often have fans, friends, or co-workers tried to “save” you from Atheism?
DNA: Absolutely never. We just don’t have that kind of fundamentalism in England. Well, maybe that’s not absolutely true. But (and I’m going to be horribly arrogant here) I guess I just tend not to come across such people, just as I tend not to come across people who watch daytime soaps or read the National Enquirer. And how do you usually respond? I wouldn’t bother. AMERICAN ATHEISTS: Have you faced any obstacles in your professional life because of your Atheism (bigotry against Atheists), and how did you handle it? How often does this happen?
DNA: Not even remotely. It’s an inconceivable idea.
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: What message would you like to send to your Atheist fans?
DNA: Hello! How are you?
From The American Atheist 37, No. 1
(interview conducted by David Silverman)
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What are the benefits of speaking to your fans via e-mail?
It’s quicker, easier, and involves less licking.
Predicting the Future Trying to predict the future is a mug’s game. But increasingly it’s a game we all have to play because the world is changing so fast and we need to have some sort of idea of what the future’s actually going to be like because we are going to have to live there, probably next week.
Oddly, the industry that is the primary engine of this incredible pace of change—the computer industry—turns out to be rather bad at predicting the future itself. There are two thing in particular that it failed to foresee: one was the coming of the Internet, which, in an astonishingly short time, has become what the computer industry is now all about; the other was the fact that the century would end.
So, as we stand on the brink of a new millennium, peering up at the shiny cliff face of change that confronts us, like Kubrick apes gibbering in front of the great black monolith, how can we possibly hope to guess what’s to come? Molecular computers, quantum computers—what can we dare to say about them? We were wrong about trains, we were wrong about planes, we were wrong about radio, we were wrong about phones, we wrong about ... well, for a voluminous list of the things have been wrong about, you could do worse than dig out a copy of a book called The Experts Speak by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky. It’s a compendium of authoritative predictions made in the past that turned out to be wonderfully wrong, usually almost immediately. You know the kind of thing. Irving Fisher, professor of economics at Yale University, said on October 17, 1929, that “stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Then there was the Decca record executive who said of the Beatles in 1962,
“We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out,” and so on. Ah, here’s another one:
“Bill Clinton will lose to any Republican who doesn’t drool on stage,” said The Wall Street Journal, in
1995. It’s a very fat book you can read happily in the loo for hours.
The odd thing is that we don’t get any better at it. We smile indulgently when we hear that Lord Kelvin said in 1897, “Radio has no future.” But it’s more surprising to discover that Ken Olsen, the president of the Digital Equipment Corporation, said in 1977, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.” Even Bill Gates, who specifically set out to prove him completely and utterly wrong, famously said that he couldn’t conceive of anybody needing more than 640k of memory in their computers. Try running Word in even twenty times that.
At least—that’s what I predict. I could, of course, be wildly wrong. Stewart Brand, in his excellent book The Clock of the Long Now, proposes keeping a record of society’s predictions and arguments in a ten-thousand-year library, but it would also be interesting to see how things work out in the short term.
At the beginning of each new year the media tend to be full of predictions of what is going to happen over the course of the following year. Two days later, of course, they’re forgotten and we never get to test them. So I’d like to invite readers to submit their own predictions—or any others they come across in print—of what is going to happen in the next five years, and when. Will we set off to Mars? Will we get peace in Ireland or the Middle East? Will the e-commerce bubble burst?
We’ll put them up on the Web, where they will stay for that whole period, so we can track them against what actually happens. Predicting the future is a mug’s game, but any game is improved when you can actually keep the score.
The Independent on Sunday, NOVEMBER 1999
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There’s now a new generation of smarter office chair beginning to arrive that makes a virtue of doing away with all the knobs and levers. All the springing and bracing we learned about is still there, but it adjusts to your posture and movement automatically, without your having to tell it how to. All right, here is a prediction for you: when we have software that works like that, the world will truly be a better and happier place.
The Little Computer That Could My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Bronte, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done.
This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.
However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Bronte piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky.
Having nowhere else to go, I am standing up, leaning against a mantelpiece. Well, a kind of mantelpiece.
I don’t know what it is, in fact. It’s made of brass and some kind of plastic and was probably drawn in by the architect after a nasty night on the town. That reminds me of another favourite piece of information: there is a large kink in the Trans-Siberian Railway because when the tsar (I don’t know which tsar it was because I am not in my study at home, I’m leaning against something shamefully ugly in Michigan and there are no books) decreed that the Trans-Siberian railway should be built, he drew a line on a map with a ruler. The ruler had a nick in it.
I’m writing this article leaning against some nameless architectural mistake, and I am not writing the article on a Mac. I would, but my PowerBook is fresh out of power (funny notion, to name the thing after its only major shortcoming; it’s rather like Greenland in that respect). I have the power cable with me but I can’t plug it in anywhere. Though the power cable very cleverly has a universal power supply, it doesn’t have a universal plug. It has a large, clunky, British-style three-pin plug built right into it, which means that if you forget to buy an adapter plug before you leave Heathrow, you are completely and utterly screwed.
You cannot buy an adapter for British plugs outside Britain. I know. I tried that when I ran into a similar problem with the old Mac Portable. (I am not going to make any Mac Portable jokes. Apple made quite enough of them to be getting on with. Damn. I said I wasn’t going to do that.) In the end I had to buy a U.S. power cable. Or rather, I had to try to buy one. Couldn’t be done. They only came with new Mac Portables. I heaved a dead Mac Portable around with me for ten days and occasionally ate my sandwiches off it because it was slightly lighter than carrying a table. (Damn, there goes another one.)