Living with the Future（在线收听）

The early vision of disposability was that somehow it just melted into the atmosphere. They didn’t really think about the ⁴⁾garbage component with all this disposability.

Disposability goes along with the whole idea of everything being very clean and neat and ordered.

The scientific house is most scientific in the kitchen where this ⁵⁾unique ⁶⁾stove is able to cook a meal in mid-air. ⁷⁾Magnetic ⁸⁾coils ⁹⁾underneath the stove-top keep the pan hot enough to fry a mouth-watering meal while the top of the stove remains cold and safe to touch. When the stove is turned off, the pan drops and ¹⁰⁾presto ¹¹⁾electromagnetic ¹²⁾bacon and eggs!

I remember as a kid getting these wonderful books, Popular Science or Popular Mechanics, that were full of ¹³⁾fanciful and wonderful ideas, and one of the images shows a housewife with a garden hose in her living room and she’s ¹⁴⁾hosing down her couch. Plastic for furniture, why not? Metal for clothing. Sure. If we can do it, let’s try it.

A perfect example of how you just had to ignore human ¹⁵⁾nature to see that part of the future. You know how many times has AT&T tried to introduce picture phones just to have people go, “No, I don”t want them to see me!”

“The place where electronic wonders ¹⁶⁾abound a marriage of sight through the drama of sound. A wonderful coupling of vision and speech, and a ride to the future and a past within reach.”

The role of electronics was wildly underestimated. But that was because they were looking at the future from a ¹⁷⁾standpoint where computers were huge things that took whole rooms full and spinning wheels of magnetic tape.

It’s partly because we always ¹⁸⁾envisioned the future in terms of what we have now only a lot better, so that people in the year 1900 didn”t think of computers, they thought of ¹⁹⁾pneumatic tubes that went real, real, real, real fast. They thought by now you’d be spending your vacations certainly in ²⁰⁾Mars or ²¹⁾Jupiter or some place, maybe a little bit cooler.

I really would like to take that vacation in space now and I’m not sure it’s going to be ready in time.

And the fact that we can fly into space or communicate instantly with one another over vast distances, even the fact that we’ve been able to extend our lives by decades, none of that has really changed who we are. It is in fact the one ²²⁾prediction you can confidently make about the future, be it a hundred or another 1,000 years from now. The standards by which we measure a person’s goodness or evil will be the same as they are today. No matter what our kitchens look like or how we travel the highways of the universe, the essential ²³⁾ingredients of a moral man or woman will be unchanged. CE

10、一百年前的幻想未来世界

快捷午餐、各色便利碗碟——这些全是未来快节奏的社会的内容。

最早人们只期望便利无处不在。他们却没有真正想过怎样处理废弃的便利用品。

便利在总体含义上要求一切东西干净、整齐、有条有理。

科学住宅的科学性体现在厨房，独特的炉子能悬在半空中做饭。炉底的磁圈能使菜锅变温，烹出令人垂涎欲滴的美味佳肴。而炉顶是凉的，可以安全触碰。当炉子熄灭，菜锅会降下，一道快捷的电磁熏肉鸡蛋就做成了。

我记得在孩童时代就看过《通俗科学》或《通俗力学》，这些奇妙的书里充满富有想像力的奇妙想法，其中一张插图画的是一个女主人正在她的客厅里用软管冲洗她的长沙发。塑料家具——怎么不行？金属衣服——当然好了。如果我们能做出来，尽管试一下吧。

脱离人类天性去想像未来，有一个最佳例子：你们是否知道，美国电信公司实验了多少次才实现可视通话，结果人们却说：“不，我不想别人看到我！”

“这是电子产品的奇迹，是影像与声音的神奇结合。可视通话双重功用，连接过去与未来。”

电子的作用被极大低估了。但那是因为过去人们展望未来时，计算机还是旋着磁带的庞然大物。

还有部分原因是我们总根据现有的一切来设想将来它们变得更好，因此在1900年，没人去想计算机，他们只想有气艇，飞得非常、非常快的气艇。他们还以为现在人类肯定能到火星或土星或其它可能更凉爽的地方度假呢。

我确实很想到太空度假，可我不能确定这想法是否能按时实现。

尽管我们已经做到了飞入太空以及进行远距离的即时交流，甚至我们也延长了人类几十年的寿命，但这些并没有改变人类的真正本质。但关于未来——不管是100年后还是1000年后——你尽管可以放心地预测：我们评价一个人善恶的标准不会变。不论厨房会变成怎样，不论我们将在太空中如何高速畅游，一个品德高尚的人所具备的本质不会改变。CE