Washing machines liberated women to get soul-crushing jobs that ate up their free time. Social media gave the world one revolution – before it destabilised democracies everywhere else. Now AI is here, and its main job seems to be replacing screenwriters. It’s easy to fall into techno-pessimism, but new documentary Seeing into the Future (Sunday 23 November, 8pm, BBC Two) has a different angle. For disabled people, tech has already brought about life-changing advancements. And we haven’t seen anything yet.
It is presented by comedian and Strictly winner Chris McCausland, who is blind. Some of the most casually astonishing scenes occur early on, showing how he uses his phone – essentially, an eye with a mouth. “What T-shirt is this?” he asks, holding up a garment. “A grey T-shirt with a graphic logo of Deftones,” his phone obliges. It can even tell him if the shirt needs ironing. But it’s where all this is going that fascinates McCausland, so he heads to the US, to see what’s in development at the houses of our tech overlords.
He swings by a facility belonging to Meta to try out some smart glasses. To my mind, he may as well be entering the lair of the White Worm, or popping round for macarons at Dracula’s castle. But that’s partly because I’m not in direct need of such technology, and the documentary’s job is to highlight possibility not jump on pitfalls. It’s not like Zuckerberg is personally in the lab, stroking a cat and spinning round on an egg chair.
I love having my perspective shaken up. A glass screen with no buttons sounds like the most excluding device imaginable, McCausland acknowledges, yet his phone became the most accessible tool he’s ever used. He’s similarly excited by the Meta Specs – I don’t think that’s what they’re actually called – which are always on and offer live video interpretation, telling you what you’re looking at. Like a phone but, crucially, wearable. “The one thing blind people never have is two hands free,” he observes.
McCausland with Maxine Williams, VP of accessibility and engagement at Meta, trying out their smart glasses. Photograph: BBC/Open Mike Productions
At MIT, a nanotechnologist tells him how molecular devices could repair cells inside our bodies. He tries bionic gait assistance – a device that straps on to the calf, giving the wearer added power. It looks like the knee brace Bruce Wayne uses in The Dark Knight Rises to kick through a brick wall when he learns he’s got no cartilage in his knee. Most moving, in every sense, he takes a trip in a driverless car. It’s the first time McCausland has taken a car journey alone.
Driverless cars will arrive in the UK next spring. (That’s a long journey.) They are what I would call an instinctive NOPE. But “It’s not massively different to trusting a driver I don’t know,” McCausland reflects. They are extraordinary: mounted with spinning radars, making calculations involving the speed of light to 3D-model the environment in real time. They may as well have gullwing doors. The fact the steering wheel moves on its own is McCausland’s favourite thing about them, which is charming. Coolness is certainly the second best thing technologists can pursue, after equality of access to lives of dignity and independence. In my defence, it’s not just that I don’t trust technology. It’s that I don’t trust profit-driven Big Tech companies to behave for the public good, or with any accountability.
There’s a parallel pleasure in the documentary – transatlantic cultural difference. These are not just Americans, remember. These are San Franciscan Futurists. The inadvertent comedy is amplified by the addition of the dry McCausland. A man so British that, even when he’s interviewing a nanotechnologist about blood-borne computers that could potentially restore his sight, he sounds as if he’d hand you thirty English notes right now if you could teleport him to the pub instead.
Even the tech is unmistakably American. “I can hear a plane?” prompts McCausland, trialling Zuckerberg’s glasses. “Yes, a plane is visible in the clear blue sky,” responds the earnest spectacles. Later, our presenter wryly looks back toward his own camera crew. “Do they look like they know what they’re doing?” he provokes. “Judging by their equipment, yes, they are professionals.” Go-go-gadget-missing-the-joke. Computers may increasingly be able to play God, but irony remains a step beyond. Even with a Batman leg brace.
