Talking to My 1980 Self About the Future

I was excited about the future. How did it work out?

If you are still young – by which I mean approximately 40 or less – you may not relate to this essay as much as those of us how have a half-century+ experience of the present unfolding into the future.

By “the future” I mean the future as it looked during my formative years. Although my formative years started at my year zero, I am thinking primarily of a period around 1969 to 1984 – from when I was 5 years old to when I was 20. The starting date is tricky because I don’t have much memory from earlier years. I pick 1969 because that was when I watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in real time (and went on to watch all the others). I watched the Apollo 11 moon landing during the evening of July 20 and my parents let me stay up for the first moon landing at around 4am the next day (England time). They knew I was a huge space fan and wouldn’t deny me this event.

For younger people presumably the year “2024” does not sound futuristic or special. To me, growing up when Space: 1999 (1975-77) and the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey epitomized the future, 2024 still sometimes sounds fantastical and distant.

My image of the future was influenced by the real space program, by reading science fiction, and from TV shows and movies. There were also magazines such as Future Life, Starlog, and Claustrophobia. The earliest influences are lost to the dim mists of early memory but certainly included lots of rocket and space books for youngsters.

Reading was my main source of future vision. Throughout my teens I read Asimov and Clarke and many others, including novels and short story collections I could find by Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, and Phillip K. Dick (I read dozens of books by these three writers in 1981-82). Just after the 20-year period, I read Vinge’s True Names, one of the more accurate attempts to envisioning the near future.

Television shows and movies I watched in my pre-teens to mid-teens included Timeslip (the second story included AI, cryonics, and intelligence augmentation!), Dr. Who, Joe 90 (The adventures of Joe McClaine, a schoolboy and spy for the World Intelligence Network (WIN) who can have the knowledge of top experts transmitted to his brain by his scientist father), Space: 1999 (1975-1977), Star Trek (The Original Series), Logan’s Run (1977-1978) & the 1976 movie, The Six Million Dollar Man (1973–1978), The Bionic Woman (1976–1978), 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Andromeda Strain (1971 but I saw it later), Mad Max (1979), Alien (1979 – I was legally too young to see it but lied about my age), Westworld (1973), Silent Running (1972), Battlestar Galactica (1978–1979), Blake’s 7 (1978–1981), a British series about a group of rebels fighting against a totalitarian interstellar government, Blade Runner (1982), and of course Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Toward the latter part of that 20-year period, non-fiction I read included Arthur C. Clarke’s Profiles of the Future (1981), Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1982), Durk Pearson & Sandy Shaw’s Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach (1983), Alan Harrington’s The Immortalist: How Science Could Give Humanity Eternal Life (1983), Jerry Pournelle’s A Step Farther Out (1984) and The Endless Frontier (1985), Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett’s The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, Timothy Leary’s Exo-Psychology, Petr Beckman’s The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear (1982), Martin Gardner’s Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus, Hans Kugler’s The Disease of Aging: How Not to Grow Old Before Your Time (1986), Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation (1986), Robert Ettinger’s The Prospect of Immortality and Man Into Superman, Adrian Berry’s The Next Ten Thousand Years: A Vision of Man’s Future in the Universe (1987), John Searle’s Minds, Brains, and Science, and lots of economics and philosophy including Milton and David Friedman, Hayek, Mises, Popper, Nozick, and others.

In some ways, the future appeared to be unfolding rapidly in the second half of the 1990s. There was a feeling that a Singularity really was near. The ramp felt steeper. Economic growth was strong, productivity growth was higher, the stock market reached new highs, the US government achieved a budget surplus (yes, really), computer technology advanced rapidly, the Web came into existence and grew massively, we were decoding the human genome. We cloned a mammal for the first time. Only space travel seemed to lag behind.

But then things fell apart. The number of new drugs approved declined steadily, suffocated by regulation. The stock market stopped booming and Internet stocks crashed. In the USA, life expectancy fell.

At the tail end of 2024, some things are looking up.

Now, we have a bold new push into space. We have AI. We might have a renewal of nuclear energy. Our genetic editing methods are rapidly improving. We have self-driving cars (in some places, including where I live). We have packages being delivered by drones. We may have hyperloop. We have VR/AR (remember Microvision in the ‘90s? Some of you may have had stock in the company, expecting massive growth.) In the USA, life expectancy has reached a new high. The increase in obesity appears to have stopped.

Many things are not going well and are getting worse – the ability to build things quickly and at a reasonable cost being prominent. Importantly, also increasing regulation and risk aversion. Along with optimism, we find pervasive pessimism, whether about climate change, artificial intelligence, or our future demographics. Perpetual trembling under the dire threat of yet another invented existential threat. But enough things are looking promising that it feels like the 2020s could be something like the 1990s.

For those of us in the USA especially, one obvious big coming shift is the change of political administration. I see tremendous uncertainty around how the next four years will play out. But I see quite a few encouraging signs. Compared to the previous Trump administration, the one starting in January 2025 (actually it’s already started) may produce some significant reform and downsizing of the regulatory bureaucratic, pervasive, controlling powers. Trump’s picks for some agencies are questionable but he also has some excellent picks, such as for Chris Wright for Energy Secretary, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at the NIH, and some others.

One of the worst policies of the new administration might not turn out so badly. I’m talking about tariffs. My pretty good understanding of economics says they are a bad idea. However, I’m getting a sense that Trump will use them as a negotiating tactic rather than actually imposing them as widely as he threatens. The other bad policy is shared by the Democrats – a complete failure to address the growing financial crisis involving Social Security and other “entitlements” and the cost of interest on debt. Even those problems will shrink in magnitude at least a little if Trump’s people actually succeed in slashing the dead hand of government and seriously reducing regulations. Major reform of the FDA and the NRC alone would greatly improve life over the coming years and decades.

Overall, I am cautiously optimistic about the next few years, at least for the USA. Europe, and especially my birthplace the United Kingdom are busy destroying their economies with Net Zero idiocy, extremely expensive energy, along with other anti-market policies. I would list the many encouraging factors here but that it not the focus of this piece.

Futuristic headlines

My self of the 1970s and early 80s would find some recent headlines futuristic and science fictional. Other people who grew up when I did – those less immersed in science fiction and optimistic non-fiction – would find the headlines even more amazing. Some examples:

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Successfully Extracts Oxygen on Mars

James Webb Space Telescope Discovers Potential Signs of Life on Exoplanet

Artificial Intelligence Passes Medical Licensing Exam

Lab-Grown Meat Approved for Sale in the United States

China's 'artificial sun' smashes 1000-second fusion world record

First CRISPR Gene-Edited Babies Born in China

Google publishes landmark quantum supremacy claim

Man gets genetically-modified pig heart in world-first transplant

NASA’s DART Mission Hits Asteroid in First-Ever Planetary Defense Test

SpaceX rocket booster successfully 'caught' on first attempt during flight test

When Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock in 1970, his thesis seemed plausible. Things were changing fast and some people were finding it hard to adapt. Half a century later, change is at least as fast in many ways and yet you hardly hear about future shock. If the shock has not gone away, we have at become inured to it. Reading the above headlines you may have shrugged or muttered: “not that big of a deal” or “so what?” I find it fascinating how quickly we become used to something new and impressive or exciting.

Thrilling my young self

“Max, it’s for you,” called Mum. I got up and went to the phone. “Hello?”

“Hello Max. Look, you are going to find this hard to believe but give me a second and I’ll prove it to you”, I (2024) said to Max (1980).

“Uh, who is this?”

“I’m you! But I’m you from the year 2024. Actually we just say “2024.” People pretty much stopped saying ‘the year’ before the numbers after 2001. I’m using a fictional device to communicate with you through time to tell you some things. I know I would have liked to hear what I’ll tell you, so here I am.”

“You don’t sound like Nick. This is the kind of prank he would pull. Are you making this call for him?”

“No, it’s really me, I mean you, I mean you from 44 years in the future.”

“Ha ha. Okay, let’s see what you’ve got. Hey, wait a sec, did you say you’re using a fictional communication device?”

“Yes, but don’t worry about that.”

“That’s…. weird. So, you’re me from 2024? Whoa, so you’re 60?”

“That’s right. Crazy isn’t it. It seems crazy to me, too. I know you like weight training so you’ll be glad to know that I have stayed in good shape. But, look, this will be more fun if you believe I am your future self.”

“Okay, Mr. Future-Me, prove it!”

“My memory isn’t great and I didn’t start recording the non-fiction books I read until 1981, but I know that this year you read a lot of SF. Silverberg’s Recalled to Life, and Dying Inside (that was excellent but sad), and Master of Life and Death – quite a Silverberg binge. Also Simak’s Why Bring Them Back from Heaven, Philip K. Dick’s Vulcan’s Hammer, Simak’s Ring Around the Sun, and Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree.”

“…that’s right? How the hell do you know that? Nick wouldn’t know that. Did Julian put you up to this? He might know what I read.”

“There’s a lot of stuff I could say that would be right but which you could try to explain away. So, let’s get this over with, and sorry if this embarrasses or alarms you. Right… when you were 8 or 9 and Dad took you to work with him, you [redacted] but nobody found out. A couple of years ago, Russell did [redacted] and you called the police. I’m not sure what year it was, but it must not have been long ago that you stupidly did what the other boys did and threw stones at the window of that factory at the end of the street. When you were about 9 or 10, you [redacted] and Mum walked in and [redacted].”

“Oh my God! What the hell? How can you possibly know that?”

“Because I did those things and they happened to me. I am you, or I was.”

“This is terrible!”

“No, no, relax. I’m you. I’m sorry some of those things happened but that’s not why I’m calling you from 2024. Um, should I let you digest this a bit and call you back later?”

“…This is crazy. This is nuts. This is impossible! It must be true. Can you call back in two hours? No one else will be home.”

“No problem. I’ll make the adjustment and will call you back in two hours, your time.”

“Hey Max. Feeling better?”

“Uh, I’m still a bit shaky but I’m willing to believe it’s you, I mean me.”

“Good, good. I know you like SF and you think about the future, so I’ll tell you about it. Things are changing faster now that they were in 1980, but I can tell you how things are right now.”

“Okay, wow, tell me. Is there a Moon base? Do we have flying cars? Have scientists beaten aging?”

“Ah, I thought you would ask about those. I was hoping to start off with some cool stuff that has happened. That’s a sore point with me! I’m almost 61 now, obviously, and we have made basically zero progress in extending maximum lifespan. Global life expectancy has increased by 10 years, which is pretty impressive historically, but we haven’t stopped the aging process. There is far more interest in doing this but we aren’t there yet. I’m probably going to need cryonics if I’m to get much further into the future.

“You mean being frozen?”

“Kind of. You’re going to get very interested in that in a few years. I’m running out of time so I can’t get into it but today thousands of people have arranged to go into cryonics when they need it, including me. And my wife.”

“Your wife? Oh, shit, yeah I suppose that makes sense. Wow.”

“Ha! Yes, and two dogs. I know you dislike dogs and I understand why. You’ll change your mind.”

“There kind of are flying cars but they are just demonstrations and not in general usage. We do have a lot of drones, which are sort of like mini helicopters; some are the size of toy planes while others are pretty big.”

“No Moon base, sorry. In fact, we still have never been back to the Moon since Apollo 17. We have sent probes to several planets. Private enterprise is now greatly accelerating the number of rocket launches and it looks like we may send people to Mars in the next four years.”

“That’s disappointing. I really want to go into space.”

“Yes, it’s sad. Once the space competition between the USA and the Soviet Union (which doesn’t exist anymore, by the way) was ‘won’, funding and determination dried up. But now commercial efforts are succeeding and creating an economic basis for space.

You must already know that the Space Shuttle will be launched in a few months. It’s a typical government project. The cost per pound or kilo of getting stuff into low Earth orbit will be about 44 times as much as our best current rockets. Actually, the current cost of getting mass into space means that I could afford to do it at the cost of one and a half year’s salary. I wish I could show you some charts. Some people have bought or been given rides into space. Captain Kirk, William Shatner, is one. He’s still alive, by the way. He’s 93 now.

Asteroid mining may not be far off. (Too bad I can’t show you a chart.)

One of the most amazing things happened just a few weeks ago – the leading space company caught a returning rocket between two giant metal arms like chopsticks. As one writer put it, “A skyscraper fell from the sky.” It was incredible. Remember watching the Apollo 11 Moon landing? How incredible and stunning and beautiful that was? That’s how I felt watching this launch and crazy rocket catch. I cried.”

“Oh, right, we have discovered an awful lot of moons that weren’t known in your time. In 1980, scientists knew of only 31 moons. Now we have found 293! Saturn is ridiculous – it has at least 146 moons.”

“Wow! Seriously?”

“Yep. But even more amazing is that we have been able to discover planets around other solar systems. We are continually finding more but right now there are… let me check with my artificial intelligence here… 5,788 exoplanets (as they’re called) across 4,341 planetary systems.”

“That’s crazy! Wait, did you say “artificial intelligence? Like in 2001?”

“Yeah, but I’ll get to that.”

“But I want to hear about it! And robots! Do you have robots?”

“Yep, there are several million robots working in factories, and a bunch of others. We have only recently started to see prototypes of humanoid robots, although lots of people have simple ones that will dust the floor. Just in the last few years, some places have self-driving cars. I’ve taken a couple of rides in one. It’s fun. It was an electric car, by the way. That part’s probably not too exciting. The first electric car was invented about a century before your time and you’re used to the milk delivery vans being electric. (We don’t have milk delivered anymore.)

“You were in a car with no driver? Cool. Are they safe?”

“They are still improving and not yet allowed on the freeways, uh, motorways, but they are already safer than humans driving.”

“Okay, but I want to know about computers and AI.”

“Of course. It’s a bit complicated because computers in some form are everywhere these days. Our fridge, oven, and washing machine all contain computers. Regular cars have computers. What you think of as a telephone is a powerful computer that does way more than let you talk to people. Hey, I remember I, we, saw a demonstration videophone at Bristol Museum. It took a while, but now we talk via video a lot of time, either on our mobile phones or on our personal computer.

Phones are much smaller than yours. They can do hundreds of things: Tell you the weather, guide you to your destination, check your bank account or manage your investments, play music with an almost unlimited choice, play games, set alarms, chat with people with text or by video, take photos and record videos, ask questions of an AI, search for information, shop for anything and have it delivered (the first delivery by flying drone has just started near where I live), use a calculator, book flights, read books (comics too), watch movies or TV shows, use as a flashlight, get the news, translate text in foreign languages, track your fitness, do a guided meditation, study a course, many of which are free, and more. All that in something much smaller than you landline phone.

“Uh, you’re joking, right? The Star Trek communicator doesn’t do any of that, hardly, and that’s supposed to be the 23^rd century.

“No, I’m serious.”

“These must only be for a few rich people, though, right?”

“The poorest people in developed countries have them. In fact there are more mobile phones than there are people.

“Even people in poor countries have been adopting cellphones rapidly. By the way, next year you will buy your first computer.”

“What, that Tandy TRS thing?”

“No, it will be a Sinclair ZX-81. It will have one kilobyte of memory, expandable to 12.

It won’t have a hard drive and will have a funky membrane keyboard. The display will be a puny 24 lines × 32 characters or 64 × 48 pixels graphics mode. Today, my smart watch has vastly more computing power. So do smart rings that you can wear around your finger. The best supercomputers run at almost 2 exaflops – that’s one quintillion floating point operations per second.

“The internet already exists, connecting computers around the world, but it is used by only a few dozen connected sites, mainly universities and research centers. You won’t write letters and mail them anymore. You’ll do practically everything electronically. Over two-thirds of the world’s 8+ billion people will use the internet and there are around 20 billion devices connected.”

“That’s… that’s insane! Science fiction has missed on most of that. What about artificial intelligence, like HAL 9000?”

“AI was slow to develop but recently has taken off dramatically. The currently most popular AI, called ChatGPT, had a million users within five days of its late 2022 release. This year it reached 300 million weekly users. In my time, I use several AI assistants, mostly for research and as a writing tool. AI is as good or nearly as good as the best humans at various tasks and has been improving rapidly. It’s still not good at some things. Actually, it’s the opposite of what most people, including the experts, expected. AI is really good at generating illustrations – even photorealistic – and now is doing well with video. It can translate between languages with no delay. It’s not very good at doing math or at coming up with genuinely new ideas. Some people expect it to do that soon but I think we will need a different approach to AI. In the last few years, lots of people have been worrying that AI will take over and dominate or destroy humanity!”

“What do you think?”

“Nah. Not the current systems or any plausible extensions of them. It’s complicated.”

“What about robots? They’ve got to be pretty good.”

“There are millions of industrial robots. I suppose you can count the self-driving cars. Humanoid robots that can do humanlike tasks are here in small numbers but getting better pretty fast.”

“Wow. Technology is really going to advance, just as I hoped. But what about poverty and hunger? In the 1970s on TV I saw a lot of famine and starvation. Like in Bangladesh, parts of Africa, other places.”

“We still have that but less of it every decade. It is practically all preventable but still happens because of bad government and wars. There’s been nothing like the state-caused Chinese famine not long before we were born but the 1970s were bad. Still, the total number of people starving or food deprived has gone down even as world population has grown – there are almost twice as many people today.”

“I keep reading about overpopulation. I was just writing something about it…”

“Don’t worry about it. Global fertility peaked in the 1960s and has been falling since. You will be among the first people to realize that overpopulation isn’t a problem, although most people won’t believe it. Not even today, although in the last few years, more people are seeing the problem with population stagnation and decline.”

“There’s so much more I want to know!”

“Unfortunately, we’re almost out of time. The signal’s weakening. Let me cover more stuff quickly: People will get much fatter – you will be appalled! But now new drugs look like they will help. Don’t worry, you won’t need them. I know you’re into bodybuilding. You will keep it up, not always consistently. Mr. Olympia will become much larger than Arnold Schwarzenegger or Lou Ferrigno. Runners are getting really close to running a marathon in two hours. Sports performance continues to improve.

“I’ve been really worried about nuclear war. But you’re there so it can’t have happened.”

“Not yet. I know it looked very worrying in your time. It got better, especially with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the world situation has become more volatile. But, yes, nobody has used a nuclear weapon (except for testing) since 1945. In fact, deaths from war have continued to decline, not that there aren’t some horrible, violent places in the world. Unfortunately, the good use of nuclear – for energy – has been far slower than it should have been. That may finally be changing. You will be on the right side of that fight all your life. There are major social changes. Oh, crap, the signal’s dropping off… Homosexuality will be decriminalized in many countries and gay people, as they are called these days, will be able to marry and adopt children.”

“What about…”

“Sorry. Gotta go. I’ll try to reach you again but probably won’t be able to. Enjoy your life! Contribute to the future. Help create a better one. Things are good but could be better. I could be better. You can be better than me. This is only one possible future from your perspective. Bye!”

So much more I want to tell young Max, especially about his life and decisions. Ah well. I wonder if I’ll hear from my 104 year old self? How much of a clue do we have today about life in 2064?”