Future Shrug
Eileene described to me a newly developed tattoo technology designed to make the tattoos erasable. Until recently, methods to “remove” tattoos didn’t work very well at all; you could burn away the inked skin with a laser, but you’d still be left with a tattoo-shaped scar, the tattoo preserved (fuzzily) in pink where once it had been indigo. The new system employs ink that has been suspended in microscopic plastic sacs, tiny enough to be injected directly into the cells, because otherwise they’d just wash away. The ink itself is easily disposed by the body; the plastic sacs are not. So long as the sacs remain intact, the tattoo remains. The sacs, however, are very sensitive to lasers, much more sensitive than the skin itself. If you should change your mind about these new tattoos, shine a laser on the skin. Before the skin burns and scars, the sacs break, releasing the ink, which your body digests and excretes.
I don’t know how the new procedure measures up in price, or whether it has other shortcomings, but all-in-all, it seems pretty clever.
Yet not so clever that it bottles the mind, striking me with future shock, even though it probably should. I have never been particularly prone to future shock in the first place.
Perhaps this is because I read a lot of hard science fiction as a kid, describing, in a manner plausible to an adolescent, all kinds of impossible things. Next to teleportation, a permanent-as-long-as-you-want-it-to-be ink is positively humdrum.
Perhaps I am largely immune to future shock because I have a mind for abstraction. Like a proper mathematician, I consider whether something is possible, not whether it’s feasible. Most technological limitations are ones of feasibility, and especially of economic viability, instead of sheer possibility. The idea of a dye that only breaks down in the presence of a very narrow set of environmental stimuli is easy to conceive; we’ve had them for generations. The trick was finding one that was also non-toxic, and cheap, and otherwise fit the bill. This particular trick was so tricky that an alternate approach found success first, one limited only by how tiny we could make plastic bags. Again, we’ve made plastic beads with liquid inside for a while; it was only a matter of making them small enough and fragile enough, but not too fragile. The technical difficulties may be significant, but conceptually, there’s not much to it.
I think, however, that the absence of shock over something that should be shocking marks a generational trend. The speed of technological advance has been accelerating since our ape ancestors came down out of the trees. The span between stone axes and fire was tens of thousands of years. In ancient history, things stayed pretty much the same for hundreds of years at a stretch. By the Industrial Revolution, the world changed within a lifetime, and kept changing visibly within everyone’s lifetime. Now the world changes regularly not within a lifetime, but within an individual’s youth, while he is still psychologically flexible.
There is nothing new in noting that technology changes the world, or that the change is accelerating, or even that we are growing more aware of change. I think something happens, though, when radical change happens before adulthood: change itself becomes an expected norm, even if the specific nature of the change is unexpected.
To illustrate what I mean, consider William Gibson, who admits to writing his sci fi classic Neuromancer on a typewriter; he could not afford a computer until after the book sold. Curiously, once he got his first computer, he was so worried about the mechanical grinding noise coming from the disk drive that he thought something was broken. He was deeply disappointed with the reality of computers; he was already prepared for computers as they appeared in his ultra-hip novel. It’s a good thing for his readers that his vision of the computer future was not informed by computer reality.
Alvin Toffler’s influential Future Shock described the implications of accelerating technological change, and especially human incapacity to absorb too much change too quickly. But he may have been writing for only one generation, that which had to face too many changes in life, but not so many that perpetual change became the expected norm. The challenge for upcoming generations may be how to live with a rate of change they find too slow for comfort.