The good people at the Pew Research Centre in the United States and the equally good people at Elon University, also in the United States, organised a think tank of technology experts. Invitations to tank went out to CEOs from Silicon Valley and to microchip makers from Seoul, to the world's foremost computer programmers, to internet gamers, to app designers and to I don't know who else.
OPINION: The tech-wizards flocked, 1600 of them in the one huge room, eager to take part in the hi-tech think-fest. Then the organisers opened the curtains. The exposure to sunlight killed several instantaneously.
No, I'm sorry, that was a cheap and feeble joke. It tells you nothing about tech-wizards and everything about the Luddite who is writing this, whose prejudice makes him try to belittle the people who are increasingly running the world.
What happened at the think tank was that the organisers issued a challenge. They asked the wearers of Google Glass, the people for whom the internet is umbilical, the ones who would climb a tree to find a wireless network if the sedentary years spent staring at a screen hadn't rendered them incapable of climbing anything taller than a pizza box (enough; I know; I'm sorry), to look into the future. What technological changes did they envisage, asked the organisers, in the next 10 years?
"Yeeha," exclaimed the technophiles, and went at it with a will. For to them the future is exciting territory. Indeed if happiness is having something to look forward to, then techies must be the happiest people on earth because according to Moore's Law, which is not in fact a law but which has held true for the last 50 years and looks likely to continue to hold true for a while yet, the speed of computer processing doubles every two years.
A famous consequence is that there is now more computing power in your cellphone than there was in Apollo 11.
A less famous consequence is that we Luddites who have not kept up are being left behind at an exponentially increasing rate. The gulf is already so wide that it's effectively unbridgeable. And the obvious consequence is that more and more power is being transferred into the hands of the technologically capable. So, into the tank went the 1600, and out dripped their thoughts about the decade ahead and these have now been published and I've just read the highlights. They make 1984 look like a children's picnic.
The 1600 all foresaw "the often invisible spread of the Internet of Things". Currently there are 13 billion internet-connected devices. That's two for every person on the planet. By 2020 that number will have quadrupled. And those 50 billion or so devices will spend less and less time being operated by us and more and more time chatting among themselves. And the main thing they'll be chatting about is us. According to one of the think-tankers, Laurel Papworth, who describes herself as a social media educator, whatever that might be, "every part of our life will be quantifiable and eternal". By that I presume she means that everything that can be measured will be measured. And once it's been measured the measurements will be hanging around in cyberspace forever.
"For example," continues Ms Papworth, and if the following words don't shiver your spine then your spine is made of sturdier stuff than mine, "skipping the gym will have your gym shoes auto-tweet to the peer-to-peer health insurance network that will decide to degrade your premiums."
Though I have no idea what the second half of the sentence means in detail I have a very clear idea of what the whole sentence means in general. And it does not make me laugh.
Note the moral orthodoxy lurking behind the words. Gym-skipping bad; gym-going good. Self-indulgence bad; narcissism good. Where that orthodoxy derives from is not stated. What matters is that you adhere to it. For those who do, fine. For those who don't, look out.
Information is power. Informants, therefore, have always been among the world's most hated people.
Cockroaches they called them in East Germany. Snitches we called them in school. But tomorrow's authorities won't need informants.
The Internet of Things will be a whole army of endlessly vigilant snitches. Sensors, timers, probes, cameras will oversee our everything, and privacy will be as much of as dream for us as it was for Winston Smith in 1984.
Most things are never meant, said Philip Larkin, and I have no doubt that most tech-wizards have only good intentions. But good intentions are best known for their qualities as paving.
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