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The remains of tomorrow
What will the future look like? In Colorado, they plan to collect its artefacts. Rose George talks to the creator of the Museum of Future Inventions
The other week, the future turned up. It took the form of a Swiss man called Yves Rossy, who strapped himself to a jet-pack and flew across the Channel.
"The thing about visions of the future," says Thomas Frey, "is that when it arrives, it feels a little different." Frey, executive director of the DaVinci Institute in Colorado and full-time futurist, spends his days wondering about the future. He has even created – in concept – a Museum of Future Inventions.
Named after Frey's favourite visionary, the Institute now runs a popular blog, a round-up of interesting technologies, and sets up events where inventors and visionaries can meet people who can help them and whom they wouldn't otherwise meet. This is not about blue-sky thinking, but providing an on-the ground, crucial service. Inventors need it, says Frey. "The media portrays inventors as these crackpots in their garages ... It's not like that. These are serious and dedicated people."
This may sound like mere gadgetry, but Frey has big ideas too. He thinks income tax is doomed, for a start, because of the "exponential nature of complexity". Societies set up systems that become so complex, they become unmanageable. Viz: the current global financial crisis. The same goes for technology. He cites the "video-conferencing room" installed at great expense by IBM in the 1980s. "It was flashy but it took so long to scroll down the screen, it took ages before you could see anyone you were talking to." The technology could have died out, but instead it evolved. "It's like GM crops: I don't think you can say the technology is entirely bad."
In fact, he's deliberately optimistic. "I'm not one of those futurists who are all doom and gloom. Despite all this financial mess, I think we have a bright future." This goes for global warming, too. "We have difficulty predicting the weather 10 days from now; how can we predict the weather 50 years from now?"
Critics of futurists accuse them of a zero-sum mentality; that they assume new technologies must replace old ones, when in fact we're still merrily using the telephone and bicycle, and reading books on real paper. For Frey, the answer is a bit of both. "The revolutionary patents are never new. They're always 25 years old. The next big thing is already out there."
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"Every age is a golden age to think about the future. I remember growing up in the Sixties and seeing the covers of Popular Science magazine and being so excited. I couldn't wait for the future to arrive."
His plan is to hurry it along with a Museum of Future Inventions. On the DaVinci Institute website, the Museum looks an impressive place. There will be pavilions heralding various innovations, including a Transportation Pavilion exploring a traffic system based on flying cars. The exhibits in the Robotics Pavilion would give visitors glimpses of a future where "flying robots dock with our homes, pick up our trash, and carry it off. The Genetic Engineering Pavilion, meanwhile, would give visitors "a sense of our yet untapped genetic engineering potential with such things as human cloning, re-growing severed limbs, giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and fixing the age old problem of human aging."
It sounds a fascinating museum, but it remains, for now, stuck in the future. Five years after it was announced, not a brick has been laid. Instead, the DaVinci Institute is moving into prizes. "Each pavilion will be linked to a prize of at least $10m (£5.7m)." A prize management committee has put together four proposals in preparation for seeking sponsorship money, he says, though no money has been raised. It's easy to be sceptical, when neither building nor financing are yet real. But Frey is determined.
The fruition of these grand plans may still be in the future, but that is where Frey likes to be. "My brain is always turned to the future. Some people think it's a disease. We're a backward-looking society. That's human nature... We don't have good tools for looking at the future, even though we will all live there... Essentially, we are walking to the future backwards."
