Guys, guys. Slow the hell down!

Today I've realised something profound, scary and exciting all in one go.  We're living in the future!  First I stumbled across this video on Facebook.



Then I read this article.

Electronics breakthrough that paves the way for disposable e-readers made from paper, Daily Mail, today.

I mean, come on, guys!  Commercially available products that allow you to move a cursor with enough precision to draw stuff in Paint?  I can't even do that with a real pen and paper.  I realise they're waving their arms around quite a lot for comparatively little reward, but let's face it, this is pretty much the same as those screens the police have in films like I, Robot and Minority Report.  Seeing them rotate the three-dimensional cityscapes Google Earth sports, insanely futuristic in themselves, is really mind-blowing when you think that my parents in the 1960s and '70s still spent their maths lessons poring over logarithm tables because calculators were a rich luxury.

And the idea that the trope of electronic paper might come true is even more fascinating.  You can scrunch it up and put it in a bin.  You can scrunch up a paper-thin electronic device, which has freaking videos playing on it, and throw it away.  Do I need to stress the awesomeness of this more?

What's even scarier is that this kind of thing was seen as 'the future' ten years ago or less.  The anime The Time of Eve shows electronic newspapers as part of 'the future', and that was only made a scant year or two ago.  I believe everyone is aware of the reality of exponential technological growth: every eighteen months, or whatever it is, storage capabilities will tend to double, and so forth.   But few really understand what this means.  I can remember reading Fahrenheit 451, where Bradbury, a penniless author tapping on a coin-op typewriter, made his blind prediction of

"the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning."

The next day when I saw the people walking around town in bubbles provided them by their own Seashells, I was unnerved with fear and excitement.  From iPhones to Internet banking, the future tends to grow up all around us like blades of grass.  And we accept it as 'it is what it is'; we never make the connection between the reality and the utopian predictions that futurists of the atomic age made.

Is the technological singularity truly an approaching reality, and is it something to fear or celebrate?