The Future is Now
One of the Sci-Fi “what-if’s” I’ve read had power and internet connections on airplanes. Well, Virgin Atlantic is already offerring power and USB connections and now JetBlue is testing out limited email and instant messaging capabilities. It’s only a matter of time before full internet access is made available. It’s an exciting, albeit also scary, thing for fiction to be made real.
Richard Calder’s Cythera visualized PDA’s with full color video and music playback in 1998. And only a year before in Idoru (or here for LibraryThing Fans) is there mention of native power and internet access on airplanes (to what I mentioned above).
In Pat Cadigan’s Synners, there’s even the proliferation of television channels and their shows that the word “porn” took on a slightly different meaning. For example, Food Porn is the term for the overload of food shows and channels.
What’s next? Will we have full 3D holographic communication devices? Pleasure bots? Slices of silicon and circuitry that operate as a personal computer terminal, newspaper and diagnostics tool that recharges off of our body heat while attached to us?
The future is now.
