In 2001, the home VCR/DVD player was the third most stolen item in NSW. By 2011, it had fallen to 18th place. The trend is only likely to accelerate. By 2021, future burglars are as likely to target videocassette recorders as they are phonographs.
No matter how deeply it’s penetrated the market, time is a fickle mistress when it comes to technology du jour. It’s also worth appreciating how long a gadget’s essential moment may have been in coming.
From iPads to helper robots, from video phones to self-driving cars, much of today’s essential technology was envisioned by science fiction long before it became reality.
Take the videocassette recorder. (Unless you’re a burglar.)
The first prototype VCRs were developed in the 1950s. The world’s first commercially successful device was released in 1956 – the same year that television made its debut in Australia. By then, the USA had boasted a full prime-time network schedule for eight years. The Ampex VRX-1000 cost US$50,000 (around A$620K in today’s terms), and was only viable for major TV networks.
Innovation continued apace and by 2002, almost 90 percent of Australian households had at least one VHS machine. But a similar device was first described by HG Wells, more than a century earlier.
Wells’ dystopian 1899 novel, The Sleeper Awakes, features an unfortunate Englishman, an insomniac called Graham, who takes a sleeping pill in Victorian London, only to fall into a rather deeper slumber than he’d expected. He eventually wakes in 2100, unaged – a little like Fry from a steampunk Futurama. Two-hundred-and-three years have passed.
Graham finds himself in a strange sort of video library, slipping a “peculiar cylinder” – not quite a video tape – into a proto-futuristic VCR. With a screen. “On the flat surface was now a little picture, very vividly coloured, and in this picture were figures that moved” Wells wrote.
HG Wells – like his fellow ‘fathers of science fiction’, Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback (after whom the World Science Fiction Awards, the ‘Hugos’, are named) – proposed an avalanche of future technology.
Over the course of novels such as War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, Wells predicted everything from biological warfare, lasers, automatic doors and, er, antigravity metals. Gersback – really more of a publisher than a writer – wrote about machine translation and bone conduction hearing devices in 1911 (66 years before bone-anchored hearing aids – known as osseointegration – were released). Jules Verne, perhaps the real sci-fi OG, invented the concept of videophones and Tasers, and predicted weightlessness during space flight.
Science fiction’s unique license for imaginatively impractical practicality is liberating. Innovation requires the rejection of accepted ideas and or the disruption of accepted methods. But – like Wells’ antigravity metals – not every suggestion bears close examination.
For example, Verne’s 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon, proposes firing a manned spaceship to the moon via an enormous cannon.
More modern authors have struck closer to the mark. In Neuromancer, published in 1984, William Gibson popularised the term ‘cyberspace’ as “consensual hallucination” created by millions of interlinked computers. It had already been two decades since British sci-fi writer, Arthur C Clarke, declared that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
Clarke’s 1962 collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey prefaced Neuromancer with such internet-of-everything standards as reading newspapers via digital tablet, and communicating with machinery for your every need via the prototypical (albeit eventually malevolent) A.I.
The first iPad was released in 2010. Artificial intelligence already speaks to us via our smartphones, in our homes, and when we’re in transit – in our cars, if not our spaceships. Indeed, clever systems, such as MINI Connected, can perform the role of a mobile concierge, finding us late-night dining options, checking flight info or booking a hotel, even as we drive. (And with none of HAL’s eventual… drawbacks).
One piece of Arthur C Clarke’s ‘magic’ that has been realised is the driverless car.
In 1976’s Imperial Earth, Clarke imagined a future in which piloted driving was ubiquitous – and so safe that manually steering your own vehicle, at least on a public highway, had been outlawed for a century.
Leaving the spaceport (obviously), the novel’s hero, Duncan Makenzie, is carried by a large autonomous sedan. “The big car was slowing down, it’s computer brain sensing an exit ahead,” Clarke writes. Later, when the car enters a driveway, there is “a gentle beeping from the control panel, and a sign flashes from beneath the steering handle: SWITCH TO MANUAL.”
Apart from the size of his ride, Makenzie might have been in a VISION NEXT 100 – MINI’s futuristic concept car, which was previewed in 2016, and is designed with precisely that functionality Except with a MINI twist: a personal assistant with a personality designed to suit the brand’s playful character.
Only Clarke sets his tale in 2276. On Earth, today, that technology is expected to be available in the next decade. And you’ll be able to watch as many videos as you want along the way.
Although probably not by VCR.
See for yourself how MINI Connected can help make your life better, easier with next-level connectivity.
