My abilities to forecast the future are very limited. When I was in high school, I imagined we’d all have TiVo by now. On-demand streaming never occurred to me (probably because dial-up was still a recent memory). Nor did the iPad, which is now my primary screen for consuming television. Here we are, 8 or so years later, and we still have cable TV, and we still have network TV (and I watch it more than ever). The models that were supposed to be disrupted are still around. Perhaps people think they will inevitably die, but some of those prognosticators have been saying the same thing for years.

The Smart Home was inevitable back then. All our appliances would talk to each other and regulate themselves. Nonetheless, my fridge isn’t hooked up to the internet, and I still must manually open it to check what’s in there. And despite the plethora of electronic list keeping options, I mostly use pen and paper for a grocery list. I’m curious to how inevitable it really is because I don’t want my home to rely on my fickle internet connection to function. There are more security concerns. The home becomes more fragile because unconnected devices have been replaced with connected ones. So many disadvantages. Plus, if I don’t need internet in my fridge, and I won’t pay for it, then why should anyone manufacture it on a ubiquitous scale? The inevitable seems less inevitable.

One of my favorite jokes is how instead of our wrist watches becoming phones, our phones became pocket watches. It so delightfully captures our inability to predict the future. There are some wrist watches that emulate phones, but they’re less easy to use and they do less stuff. The technology exists; sadly, no one uses it. Part of the problem, as I mentioned, is usability. Tiny-ass buttons. And who wants to shout into their wrist? One, it’s not the most ergonomic option, and two, voice commands aren’t as good as touch. I don’t think this is merely because of the limitations of voice technology. Touch interfaces are inherently more usable. (This is something I’d have to do more arguing to back up, but that’s another conversation for another day.)

When we imagine the future, we tend not to envision how it’d really work if we used it everyday. Usability requires testing, but our ideas of the future tend to be untestable. They sit in our minds as Platonic ideals, untested by the real world. So, in movies, we see a “Minority Report” interface as the future. We’ll be waving our arms around, swishing them through thin air. Of course, the keyboard and mouse already fuck us up with RSI. Let’s now use our imaginations to think about how terrible our arms would feel if we had to do that all day everyday just to make a fucking spreadsheet.

Ebooks are inevitable, as well. They’ll replace our heavy textbooks. Books themselves will because artifacts only for collectors. And yet… Students will often prefer the hard copy when they use it to study. We can’t encode ebook information spatially, as we do with books. Thus, it becomes harder to keep the information in one’s memory. It’s harder to flip back and forth between multiple pages. Ebooks have their own inherent limitations. Cui bono? The companies that make devices that read ebooks, and the publishing companies that have decreased margins but still put a ridiculous markup on the ebooks. Not necessarily the students. Ebooks may replace so many books, but that may not be because they were superior. VHS wasn’t better than Betamax either.

Google Glass may be as inevitable as the flying car, or maybe it’s as inevitable as ebooks. Maybe it’s a terrible idea that’ll never happen. Perhaps it’ll never overcome the inherent limitations of voice interfaces, and so it’ll stay a niche product. Or, perhaps it’s not even that great a product. It’ll lessen our human interactions because of the barriers between us. It’ll Hulk smash our 20th/21st century concept of privacy, giving over more information to governments and corporations. Yet, there will be some benefits and it’ll become ubiquitous despite the obvious flaws. I don’t know.

I do not know the future, but I still have an opinion on Google Glass: I hate it. And I’m allowed to hate it beyond merely being curmudgeonly because Google Glass is not inevitable, as far as we know for now. I think it looks stupid. I think a phone is just a way better computing device. I would never play games on Glass. (There’s a reason we still have consoles and not the inevitable immersive helmets that wrap around our entire heads.) I think the way it takes pictures and videos is sometimes stupid. First person POV can be useful sometimes, but I’d hate to see it all the time. Imagine if every movie looked like a first person shooter. Ugh. I hate the idea of augmented reality. I don’t want a fucking overlay when I take a walk; that’d defeat the purpose of clearing my mind with a walk. I don’t want reminders popping up when I’m trying to have a conversation. And most of all, I don’t want assholes walking around taking videos of everything and being completely distracted.

Perhaps that’s a bit harsh for a product I’ve never tried. I’m exaggerating some things. Still, I’d think we’d all be worse off if everyone wore it all the time. Luckily, that future is not necessarily inevitable. Facephone isn’t anymore inevitable than wristphone. Let’s keep our computers in our pockets and off our faces.