Living in the Future

[james_davis_nicoll]

Pohl himself, in an afterword to [Age of the Pussyfoot], made the following statement about the world he foresaw:

"I do not really think it will be that long. Not five centuries. Perhaps not even five decades."

Forty years after the publication of the novel, most people of 2005 will recognise the functions of the Joymaker in the cellphone, laptop computer, and personal digital assistant. Only the medical capabilities are missing from devices carried by people in industrialized nations in the early 21st century. These devices, however usually have far more computing power than the Joymaker as conceived, and more even than the 1960s mainframe computers that provided the inspiration. Some of the actual social effects of portable communication and computing parallel those predicted in the novel.

Age of the Pussyfoot can be found in this bundle of books.

Comments

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

It'd be fairly easy to make an app that did the health function of the jMaker by the sound of it – a basic pulsometer using the microphone or maybe a crude oxygenation sensor by taking a photo of the ears if you shine a light through from the other side.

(Of course the real health usage of mobiles is to use google to find an online hypochondria database and rifle through that for your "symptoms" until you find a suitably fatal complaint to bother a hospital about.)

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I was in a conversation about such things just yesterday. It seems to me that the optimal phone app would not pester the human at all, while making the raw data available to the curious user, and only call attention to itself when the human needed some attention. ("*beep* Your blood sugar is low. How is your insulin supply?") Users who are at-risk or hypochondriacs should be able to choose an emergency call number for particular events, letting the phone text their doctor when they have a heart attack. None of this is particularly tricky, only the biological monitoring stuff doesn't come with a smartphone already, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear about such an app hitting the market any time now.

Although I haven't read Age of the Pussyfoot in years; I should re-read it at some point. With luck it isn't buried in storage.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

There are already radio-linked implantable glucose monitors and insulin pumps. Networked together, these make what amounts to an artificial pancreas (at least, the islet cells).

[asyouknow-bob.livejournal.com]

Age of the Pussyfoot can be found in this bundle of books.


Actually, $50 for e-versions of ten old books strikes me as a little high.

(...Most of these were less than $5 new.)