“Any sufficiently advanced technology is undistinguishable from magic”
Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law of Prediction

I’m walking the corridors of the future and it’s not even 5 o’clock.

The badge that identifies me as part of the press is secretly –and electronically- tagged. As I approach the Hitachi Booth, I get close to their reading station and I’m scanned. Ignorant that I’m bugged, I walk away. So much for my chance to win that nice digital cam.

I head toward other booths where LED’s galore, LCD and Plasma screens claim territory inside my eyes. Goddamn it, it dawns on me hard, the future seems, if nothing else, like it’s gonna be very fast.

And I thought my life was already brutally and chaotically fast.

Wired Magazine –the kabala of IT- sucks you hard in the gut: you’re a creature of the 20th century and you’re oh so far behind… in the mind games of the future, the one that wins is the one that’s more relaxed. Welcome to Next Fest. What’s next is already here now. To quote Mark Knopfler, ‘Boom, like that’.

Must robots are stiff while they attempt to walk: enter Chroino from Kyoto's University Robo-Garage. He's almost able to do the moon walk thanks to his flexible carbon fiber exoskeleton. Almost. Reem-a, a truly advanced robot able to carry out many 'human' activities like: playing chess, holding objects, strolling around & being able to understand questions & commands. Except, it won't accept the command to let you win. Artificially-induced meditation for Western masses? Empty your mind & ace Brainball. Now, do you know how to empty your brain Krishnamurti?  You thought Telekinesis & Psychokinesis were relegated to Uri Geller & Dr Magneto? Thanks to BrainLoop you and I may just be able to operate software & hardware with our minds sooner than we thought possible. No word yet on a technology for bending spoons to impress party guests.  If you think your dual suspension mountain bike with disc brakes is the ultimate toy, WheelSurf may just change your mind. Twins? Nope. Cyborgs? Almost. Xy'an Chaoren Sculpture Research Institute creates 'life-like' sculptures hard to tell apart from their real life cousins. Can you tell which of the two is a fake? Miss Breton, Duchamp & the surrealist provocateurs? Thanks to Paul Notzold's TxtHealing you can create your very own Exquisite Corpse using nothing but your cell phone text messaging service. Perhaps this will be your one & only chance to publicly offend Bush before he leaves office so please make sure you take advantage of it. Scientists often tells us we crawled from the sea to our current habitats. Yea, but how?  Watch EPFL's Salamandra and do your own evolutionary math. With 007's panache, drink casually a martini & then joyously beat all your friends to the water with this FastTrack Amphibian vehicle. They better not sell this baby south of the border or Rio Grande, here we come. Damn those foolish point and click desktop computer schemes & back to the human touch with BumpTop. This nifty program lets you rearrange icons in your desktop using the habitual 'piles'. Be creative and make sure your desk isn't too tidy or no one will ever believe you. Cyber-Shaman & Head Guru. Scanning the future for your reading pleasure, Chris Anderson, Wired's Editor-in-Chief smoothly pilots the Wired ship through the whimsical waters of publishing with a mix of journalistic genius and an eye for ID'ing technologies both inevitable and relevant. Kudos to the Man.

The Jetsons’ ain’t got nothing on us…

If you haven’t read Wired Magazine ever, you probably need to get shot. Almost literally since not knowing what the future entails makes you the inhabitant of a corpse’s bag. Besides their eloquent and often incisive editorial, their eye and penchant for relevant technologies is now almost a matter of myth. You read in their mag what the ‘tech’ news will talk about next year. Definitely a must in this oh so hyped, information-superhighway age.

But why should you care about the future? Well, there are many reasons: one, it’s heading furiously toward you every second. Two, that’s where the rest of your life lies. And while you were watching old-TV reruns, the geniuses & geeks of the world have just about turned the tables on all that’s been thought impossible or unattainable. Wham!

In some shape or another, the fantastic dreams of science fiction are being tackled today by geeks and scientists, one by one: Private investors funding rockets to hit space outside of government’s timelines and ridiculous budgets and political (s)traps.

Supercomputers ran by half a dozen cyclists and plugged to your regular outlet. Yes, the ones you got in each wall in the house. A public supercomputer running off the hot bods at every Crunch Gym in LA anyone?

Grass growing in your roof next to your hidro-veggies all combined to lower your electricity bill, although if you have one of them nice computer-ran wind mills you may have none. You may also have a fully rechargeable solar car parked in the garage. A sporty version available for the more aggressive type.

Remember the One Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman? Well, inside Next Fest, they’re neither fantasy nor the product of some Hollywood creative type. Bionics is real, it works and it’s gearing now to change the quality of life of thousands of people suffering from injuries of all kinds. I see a man with no legs, demonstrating how his prosthetic versions allow him to play basket-ball, to run unimpeded… to joyously jump. In the attending crowd, I notice the eyes of two quadriplegic kids lit up. This isn’t just glitz and PR I realize… it also correlates to life, to how some unfortunate human beings have been waiting desperately for the future to arrive.

 
The dark side of the Moon…

Roger Waters ignores how prophetic his Pink Floyd tune was: “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon…”

Scientists, if not rockers and bohemian poets, are rapidly working to put man back on the moon and in particular, on its dark side. Why or looking for what? This time is about resources: water to be precise. Water in the moon, you ask? I myself was mystified.

NASA, that venerable cathedral of engineering and ingenuity, was proudly showing off their myriad prototypes: rovers for lunar and martian landscapes, the James Webb telescope, 3D graphics of the geography of Mars. If Fed-Ex can lose your package between NY and LA, imagine the nightmare of tracking goods destined for inter-planetary docks. What do you mean the Sneakers bar for captain Spitsnovko wasn’t in the box? Thanks to a new tracking technology being developed, just about every item will be tracked. Nothing worse than arriving to Mars after 18 months of traveling just to find out that your I-Pod Nano was a 'payload victim' and therefore, left behind.

Other goodies from the folks at NASA and JPL: Cliffbot –a daredevil mechanical contraption able to climb and descend very steep terrain. Lemur, the first mason robot. Kidding, the first robot ever designed to build, assemble and maintain key space infrastructure too dangerous for humans.

Can we learn something by blasting a polar crater full of dust on the dark side of the moon? Northrop Grumman hopes we do. Their LCROSS satellite (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) will blast the floor of one of the moon’s polar craters early in 2009 to try and find out if there’s any ancient ice buried there. The explosion, according to their theory will cause a cloud of debris that can be analyzed via sensors in the satellite itself for water, hydrocarbons and hydrated materials, in other words, the raw components of ice. And you thought heading to the local convenience store for a bag of ice was far.

Why does the future blink so much?

It’s the bandwidth mate. Bytes blink as they race by. Or it could be simply that some of the future’s LED’s have gone bad. Advantages of the future, however, abound: thanks to some virtual hodgepodge from the folks at Yahoo, you may one day –thank God- do away with those annoying and stiff news anchors yapping away during the boring News at Nine. OK, granted, the Yahoo virtual newscaster doesn’t look a hundred percent human but for that matter almost nobody in that business does.

Musician at heart? The future might just turn you into a prodigious Mozart while you move and dance. The Sonic Jumper, an immersive Body-Centric-Controllers device, is a body suit that translates your body movements into MIDI sounds. This is when you do the spacewalk just to compose like Bach.

You’re more into POI dancing? Great, order your Body Bug and throw your POI chains away. The only problem is that these little buggers have personality and may dislike what you like. And you thought robots for sure would be your friends no matter what.

In need of a low-budget, low-fi gadget to entertain the crowd? Meme, by two very clever boys from the Royal College of Art, might just be the ticket. A simple motor rotates and swirls an illuminated piece of string. You sit on a bench, touch with your fingers two metal discs and watch your sweat's 'resistance' send the rotating strings on a wild spin. “The play we made this for really, really sucked but the technology itself is rather cool, don’t you think?” says Adrian, one of the inventors and a magician at heart.

To The Hounds Cage:

I head toward the Press room after walking the entire exhibit floor at least twice. My feet are pounding harder than my heart. I still need to grab literature for products I intend to write about… it’s now past 5 o’clock. The room is semi-deserted, a few journalists glued to their laptops. I turn around and look for something to drink. The entire food table is empty except for a few dozen tea bags.

I pick up folders from key exhibitors, a couple dozen folders to be exact. As I walk outside the Convention Center and head for the second block, I realize all this literature is going to seriously weight me down. I have 6 blocks to get back to my car and never even thought of grabbing a plastic bag. Like those women in Namibia or Oaxaca, I pile my shiny stack of glossy folders and put them on top of my head and continue walking back to the car.

The future would be nice now. How about some teleportation here? How about disappearing that nasty looking cop -pen and pad in hand- heading toward my car? Suddenly, his radio spurts out gibberish and he turns back. I’m relieved. Ouija 2.0 or just plain luck?

I get inside my vehicle. I quickly browse the latest Wired mag i just got. It talks about Ethanol, switchgrass and corn stalks. Well, in part. It discusses how someday we may actually replace our need for fossil fuels with renewable types. Of how somehow, we may be able to go from grass to gas and kiss the middle east turmoil goodbye.

Suddenly, the science gets to be too much. I realize I want to get high. I floor the accelerator as I enter the North on-ramp on the 101. I hope the editorial powers at Wired don’t get mad at me but I’m now definitely reversing their Ethanol formula: as I cruise at over 70mph I'm using my car's gas to get me back to my grass.

 

Postdata As I walk around the Google’s Lunar Challenge booth, I noticed some literature has fallen to the floor. I bend over to pick it up and among the papers, an Avery 5309 Laser & Ink Jet Tent Card. I turn it over. It reads X Prize Foundation - Chris Anderson on both sides. This must have fallen after the Google lunar race conference I realize. My fascination with Wired magazine just turned out a prize. I will save this tent card and lie to my friends: “Oh yea, me and Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine hooked up during Next Fest and we did this and that…aha... look, I ain't b*s*ing you, he gave me as a memento his conference table card... check it out”

• Like The Future Will Be: Wired Science On PBS
  PBS picks up first season of “Wired Science,” a KCET/LA & Wired Magazine production set to premiere nationwide Oct. 3 at 8 p.m.