Back to the Future

This is a very good time to stay at home one night and re-watch Robert Zemeckis’ 1989 movie Back to the Future II. Why? Well, not only is it a very entertaining film (you should actually watch the entire trilogy) but it sees the hero Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox) transported to the year… 2015!

Twenty-six years later we can see whether the filmmaker’s vision of the future was accurate. While he didn’t get everything right – we are not all playing mind-activated video games, riding hoverboards or wearing self-drying jackets and self-lacing shoes – some of his ideas were spot on, such as the videophone and the multi-channel TV screen.

Although the movie made no mention of smartphones, the great science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke wrote in 1959 of a future in which there would be “a personal transceiver, so small and compact that every man carries one.” He also wrote: “The time will come when we will be able to call a person anywhere on Earth merely by dialling a number.” Such a device would also, in Clarke’s vision, include a method for global positioning so that “no one need ever again be lost.”

Clarke, who died in 2008, would definitely have approved of what is happening in today’s world where ‘innovation’ has become a key concept and mainly young entrepreneurs are creating start-ups and producing innovative digital technologies to improve our daily lives. But although it may seem obvious that innovation and change is a good thing, there are plenty of people who oppose it, mainly because they fear that it will work against them.

WHO IS “UBER” ALLES?

I read recently that the number of people interested in becoming a London taxi driver has fallen and new technology is being blamed. Uber is a US firm which allows you to book a taxi using a mobile phone app, paying by debit or credit card rather than cash. Its main selling point is that it is cheaper than taxis hailed in the street. According to the BBC, the number of people studying “The Knowledge” – the geographical training for licensed taxi drivers – fell from 3,326 in 2012, when Uber started in London, to 2,159 last year! Traditionally, would-be drivers spend between two and four years absorbing an encyclopaedic level of detail of the capital’s streets and traffic systems (they learn about 320 routes, 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks and places of interest, such as museums, restaurants, embassies and colleges) so that, once qualified, they can get a passenger home anywhere in London as quickly and safely as possible.

Times have changed! Uber allows drivers to start earning money far more quickly. There’s no equivalent of “The Knowledge” because, Uber claims, its use of GPS technology alleviates the need for such learning today. It’s a model that has proved extremely popular since the company started in San Francisco in 2009, spreading to 57 countries.

As well as protests against Uber in London, there have been demonstrations in cities across Europe. It’s banned in Berlin and Madrid, but despite the criticisms, Uber’s expansion looks set to continue. Earlier this month, London’s Mayor Boris Johnson admitted that he was powerless to stop the company. He also said something very significant: “It is very difficult to fight a huge change in consumer preference.”

Uber has not yet come to Cyprus but it surely will, and you can be certain that there will be loud protests against it from the island’s taxi drivers. This is understandable – they fear for their livelihood – but nobody has yet come up with a convincing argument that competition is a bad thing. If you live in Cyprus, you will doubtless remember the protests from the airport taxi companies in 2008 when the Kapnos Airport Shuttle service started. And yet in its first five years, the service ran 60,000 journeys from Nicosia to Larnaca Airport – a clear case of “consumer preference”.

It is also worth remembering that innovation – from the invention of the printing press in the 15th century to newspapers, paperback books, television and computer games – has always had its critics who have denounced new concepts as threats to our brainpower and moral fibre. But while we may sometimes look back nostalgically to our childhood and teenage years and think that everything was much better then, few of us would want to be without a mobile phone or the Internet, let alone older inventions such as FM radio stations or lead-free petrol.

THE ONLY CONSTANT IS CHANGE

Technology is not going to stop evolving. The secret is for us to evolve with it and to ensure that it benefits the majority. Take the Internet as an example:

• Even though, in certain cases, it has become a vehicle for pornography and cyber-bullying, we cannot overlook all the advantages that the Internet has brought, not least our free access to knowledge on every subject under the sun. We all have a huge library at our fingertips (Google.com), something which previous generations could never have dreamed of.
• Even though the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook is said to have stopped people from having real relationships (and too many people spend their time with friends looking at their smartphone screens), the reality is that people enjoy more relationships and share their lives with friends and family to a much greater extent than their parents ever did.
• Even though there has been a sharp decline in sales of CDs and cinema ticket sales due to illegal downloading, more and more people are signing up to legal services such as iTunes, the Spotify streaming service and Netflix for movies. Most of us are willing to pay what we consider a reasonable amount to enjoy the result of other people’s work.

We should use technology for good and not let it make our lives worse. So if taxi drivers around the world see that, despite their hard-earned knowledge, the Uber method still works better, they should adopt it. It’s a case of “If you can’t beat them, join them”. Similarly, parents should make themselves as Internet-savvy as their children and benefit from what it has to offer. And instead of complaining that they are not making the money they deserve from record sales, singers and bands should follow the example of Lily Allen, The Arctic Monkeys and Justin Bieber, all of whom used the Internet to make themselves known, or of Bruce Springsteen, who started releasing official recordings of his concerts which were otherwise being taped and put online in inferior versions. From Uber to Bruce Springsteen the main thing in common is that they all have got the new technology to work for them and make them money.

When, back in 1959, people read Arthur C. Clarke’s predictions for mobile phones, they probably thought that it was as likely as a man walking on the Moon…but that really happened in 1969. Twenty years later, in Back to the Future II, we saw and smiled at the imagined 2015 in which people were using what, in reality, is today’s Skype. Many people lack the ability to visualise what the world may be like in 10 or 20 years’ time but we can all be sure that, however the world may have developed by 2025 or 2035, it will not have gone backwards. So let’s embrace innovation. It can make our lives easier, more enjoyable and, in many instances, more financially rewarding too!