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In the Future Your House Will Nitpick You
An eye-opening visit to the future at Seoul's 'Ubiquitous Dream Hall'
Seoul's "Ubiquitous Dream Center" at the Ministry of Information and
Communication offers visitors a glimpse into life in the future with
all of its conveniences and fussiness. It's the type of future that
some consumers will lap up and enjoy while others may find it a
little disconcerting to have their household furniture telling them
what to do.
It's a future where your bedroom mirror will decide if your tie is
appropriate with your trousers, where your refrigerator will give you
updates on the freshness of the food it contains, where your
television reminds you of appointments then promptly shuts off, where
your car gives you directions, and where you can never escape
communication from the office and time/money-consuming family members.
The Ubiquitous Dream Hall, which uses an odd interpretation of the
word ubiquitous, has set up a model of a futuristic home. It's a home
that manages itself and you. TV screens are everywhere from living
room to bedroom to refrigerator door. These screens serve not only to
show TV programs but still-life photographs and more importantly,
live video calls -- the stock of phone-sex companies will no doubt
offer a bonanza to future investors.
Before visiting the dream home replica, visitors are shown a short
film showing the wonders that will be ... IN THE FUTURE! The Dream
Hall has put together a short feature that depicts a day in the life
of a Korean doctor in the near future and how technology assists him
like a kind, nagging mother.
The film begins with the good doctor watching a TV program when his
TV suddenly informs that he is late for a meeting then it promptly
shuts off. Like a conditioned Pavlov dog, the doctor scurries out to
his car. A few minutes later, he is driving down the road while
listening to his car tell him the current road conditions and the
directions he needs to follow like some backseat driver. His rather
anal car then goes on to inform its driver that his arrival will be
approximately at 10:17.
Language teachers and translators of the future will no doubt hold
the next presented invention with particular disdain as they wait for
their monthly unemployment check and food stamps. At his appointment,
the doctor converses via live video with a Japanese colleague (good
to see tensions will have eased between these two countries by this
time) both in their own languages. Translation is done
simultaneously. Another career and academic discipline made redundant
by the wonders of technology.
After his meeting the doctor is interrupted by a colleague at work.
It seems a patient isn't doing so well and now it's time to operate.
With minutes to go, holograms of hearts and organs begin popping up
as the doctor coaches the surgical team on the right procedures to
follow. It was a good thing he wasn't doing anything else when the
hospital called. I imagine golf courses in the future will be
cluttered with doctors performing hologram surgery while their golf
partners wait in quite desperation to tee off.
To take a break from his hectic schedule of holograms and video
conferences, the doctor decides to let off a little steam by watching
a soccer match on his cell phone. He gets a bit carried away jumping
about all by himself in an empty park. It seemed a bit sad really.
At the end of the day, the doctor helps his daughter who is studying
in America with her homework via the TV screen. Viewers will notice
right away that the age of the two doesn't seem so great. Several of
my fellow viewers mistook the daughter to be the doctor's wife or his
mistress. Either the effects of old age will be greatly lessened or
we'll be having our kids much earlier in life from age 10 or so.
While the two talk, the narrator comforts us by telling us that
physical distance will be meaningless in the future due to these TV
calls. The narrator must have come from a broken home.
After the film, visitors are given a tour of a home of the near
future. The living room was much like the one from the film. Its
large screen made TV and videogame junkies weak in the knees. The
living room screen is hooked into all of the screens within the house
so if one has to go to the kitchen, they can follow their TV shows
and phone calls to the refrigerator door.
The screen on the refrigerator door has another function displaying
the freshness of the food within and its expiration date. No more
sniffing milk to see if its sour or eating semi-rancid pork chops by
mistake. A package of pork was offered as an example of a food item
that had passed its expiration date. Instead of having a porkless
fridge, the owner can order new pork from his refrigerator screen to
replace the expired pork. I should note it was comforting for those
of us meat-eaters in the crowd that the consumption of meat including
pork will still be acceptable in the future.
The bedroom has another large, flat screen TV that can be used to
display images of works of arts and photographs to set the mood for
whatever hologram person you care to seduce for the night.
Thanks to the bedroom mirror, fashion faux pas will be a thing of the
past. No more overweight people in stretching spandex, no more middle-
aged husbands in tacky golf pants and poorly color-designed ties, no
more teenage fashion causalities from bored nihilistic youth. The
bedroom mirror will immediately alert the fashion police in the event
of any person who dares to flaunt its fashion authority. Like a
computerized eye for the live guy, the mirror sizes up body size (and
probably ugliness as well) to determine what style of clothing would
be best for you.
With all these talking, nagging, nitpicking machines from
televisions, cars and mirrors I think people of a more Luddite-like
nature will spend much of their time telling their appliances just
where to go.
I imagine the following conversation will likely to be heard on roads
in the future:
Car: Turn right at the light.
Driver: I know, I know...
Car: The turn is coming up. I think you should get ready to turn.
Driver: Thank you! It's not like I haven't done this a million times
before!
Car: Turn on your right turn signal.
Driver: Look! I'm not an idiot, alright!
Car: We will be approaching the turn in approximately 35 seconds.
Move to your right.
Driver: I'm doing it! I'm doing it! Get off my back, will ya?
Car: I sense stress levels are rising.
Driver: Damn straight they're rising! Shut up already!
Car: For safety and legal precautions I am not allowed to be silent.
Driver: Lucky me!
Car: I should inform you that you have just missed your turn.
Driver: I know I missed my turn! I meant to miss my turn!
Car: That does not make sense. Now you will be approximately 43
seconds late for work.
Driver: Can I drive us into a river?
Car: I sense stress levels are still rising...
From the futuristic home replica, we were taken to a futuristic
store and cafe. Even in the future, junk food will apparently still
be available. No worries if you forgot your wallet or purse (though
your front door would probably have reminded you anyway). As long as
you have your retinas you don't need to fool around with cash and
credit cards to purchase items. I fear the criminal element in the
future will switch from purse snatching to eyeball plucking thanks to
devices that identify purchasers by their eye patterns.
At the cafe, a squat unattractive little robot brings you your food
and drinks. No more waiters and waitress to flirt or argue with. I
hope we won't be expected to tip this little R2-D2 rip-off.
The robotic waiter brought home to me the problem that had been
itching at me at the back of my mind since the end of the demo film:
the lack of human contact. In both the film and the tour of the home,
store, and cafe I saw very little in actual human contact save that
which was done through a TV screen. Despite the assurance of the
film's narrator that such communication will compensate for physical
distance, I feel this will further alienate and isolate people from
each other. TV screens and the Internet are not enough, in my
opinion, to replace actual physical human interaction.
Our dependency on machines and computers in this future does not bode
well if the power should ever go out. In the event of some
catastrophe which knocks out the power, we're likely to have
thousands of people die from eating moldy bread because the
refrigerator wasn't working in order to tell them the bread had gone
bad. Others will wander lost in their vehicles until their fuel runs
out or they starve to death because they can't remember how to get to
the store.
Eventually -- and, of course, barring any disasters -- our computers
will turn on us and use our pasty soft flesh as gear lubrication and
our brains as batteries. Science Fiction has long predicted computers
and robots rebelling against mankind but scientists continue to plug
away at creating better robots that can mimic human movement and even
feeling -- all the better to hunt us down and kill us.
What the inventors of the future need to keep in mind is that
ultimately humanity not convenience is the most important thing. We
need inconvenience. We need the leeway to make mistakes. Trying to
control our every waking moment to steer us from mistakes, from
accidents is wrong. I want mistakes, I want accidents, I want those
lovable moments of sheer frustration when I get lost and find
something else I never would have found if I followed some car's
advice. Creativity thrives in chaos and stagnates in order. Orson
Wells once stated in "The Third Man" that:
"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare,
terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo
da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love,
they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that
produce? The cuckoo clock."
In short I don't want a perfect convenient future. I want an
imperfect human future.
A native Tennesseean, David M. Weber is currently at the grammatical
grindstone cranking out gerunds, dangling modifiers and perfecting
tenses as an English teacher in Japan. In his travels, he has hiked
the Inca Trail, been mugged in Mexico City, broke his leg in
Switzerland, attempted to bike through Mexico and failed, climbed
Pyramids in Egypt and Mexico, drank great quantities of beer at
Oktoberfest and gambled at Monte Carlo.
2005/06/30 오후 8:46
© 2005 Ohmynews
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