On meeting the first robot of Spring

When do we get signals of the future?

I got such a signal this week. I was travelling for business and, as I walked through the airport terminal, I met a robot. Well, perhaps met is too strong a word. I was looking for the check-in desk and it was cleaning the floor. We weren’t introduced and we didn’t talk to each other. But it was definitely a robot: it was about as high as my waist, it was moving around autonomously, and it had a complicated configuration of wheels and brushes at floor level. I know that vacuuming and cleaning robots have been around for some time, but those little hockey pucks somehow never quite felt worthy of the name robot: they didn’t have the heft and presence of the science fiction robots of my youth. This was a proper robot: big enough that it occupied the same space as humans. I hoped that its collision detection was working properly.

It was one of those moments when the future arrives so clearly and conspicuously that it’s impossible to ignore. I’ve had many other such moments. The first time I configured a Wi-Fi network, and the network changed from being something that came down a cable to something that was in the air around me. The first time I used a dial up modem to connect to the Internet and found that it was already full of people. The first time I tried searching my photo library and found that the software was now able to recognise objects and people.

I think that those moments are special. This is not just because I’m a lifelong enthusiast about technology, who is easily excited by new features and new devices (a robot!). It’s because they are so obvious and inescapable that they prompt us to think about what has just happened and what it might mean. Will meeting robots in an airport terminal become routine? Or meeting robots in the street? Where have the people who used to do those jobs gone? Would Wi-Fi mean that we were always connected - or that we could not escape connection? Who were all these people who had found their way to the Internet, and what were they talking about? What did image recognition mean for privacy?

I also think that there are other moments when we encounter the future, but it is rather less obvious. This is particularly the case for those of us who work in enterprise technology. We meet new developments all the time, but they’re rarely as conspicuous as a robot trundling through our lives. They might be no more than a scrolling line of readout in a terminal session, a query result that comes back in seconds rather than hours, or a silent and invisible transfer of data between two systems that have never talked to each other before.

I know that I have missed at least a few such moments in my career. For example, when I first saw the HTML code for a web page, I wondered why anybody would spend time coding such detail explicitly, rather than building a client application using a palette of objects, like we used to do with tools such as Visual Basic. I didn’t have the understanding or the imagination to realise what a standard protocol which could be interpreted by any browser on any device would enable. I am sure that I have missed many more such moments, without even realising it.

I believe that it is important to keep our eyes, minds and imaginations open enough to spot these moments. This is partly because it makes the job more fun: if we’re going to work in a profession that builds the future, it’s exciting to notice when the future has arrived. But I also think that when we recognise such moments, we have a rare window of reflection, an opportunity to ask questions like those listed above.

Before the future has arrived, those questions may seem impractical and irrelevant. What’s the point in trying to figure out the implications of technology which is still a dream? Yet once the future has been here long enough to become the present, those same questions may seem mundane and irrelevant. What’s the point in wondering what a particular technology will do to us when it’s already everywhere? At the moment when the future is imminent, then our questions demand to be answered, and we may, if we are lucky, have just enough time to intervene. But only if we are paying attention.

All specialists see the world differently from people who don’t share their specialism. A town planner experiences a drive through a busy junction differently from the rest of us. An architect sees a building differently from people with no training in architecture or engineering. And a technologist sees a world that many other people don’t get to see: a world where obscure acronyms and version numbers make sense, where concepts that make others glaze over are engaging and exciting, a world where the movements of code and data are paramount. If we stay alert as we traverse that world, we can spot when we’ve had a metaphorical meeting with a robot and crossed a threshold into the future - and can figure out what we think about it.

(Views in this article are my own.)