The man who created cyberspace

William Gibson on the future of tech, and the failure of virtual reality

Canadian novelist William Gibson has authored or co-authored nine novels, won most of the major awards in his field and been called “one of North America’s most highly acclaimed science fiction writers” by The Literary Encyclopedia. Gibson also gave the world the term “cyberspace,” coined in his debut novel Neuromancer. Gibson discussed the current state of technology with Mark Wolfe at this year’s Word Fest in Calgary.

Backbone: What is your take on today’s tech landscape?

William Gibson: One of the things I find particularly interesting is the idea that most of the change human beings have experienced has been the result of emergent technology—like all the way back to the growing of cereal. But...we don’t legislate technologies into emergence. The things that actually drive change in society at sort of macro levels—global warming, for instance—nobody decides. Nobody voted for cellular telephony, nobody voted for the Internet. Those are huge things that we don’t consciously choose.

Backbone: Neuromancer posited a dehumanized world filled with cheap and ubiquitous technology. How has that prediction played out?

Gibson: What people do with cyberspace in the universe of Neuromancer is really nothing much like what people do with cyberspace in 2007. One of the things I wasn’t able to get right was a sense of the absolute ubiquity of computing. It seems to me [now] that the optimal interface evolves toward transparency...where you’re not even aware that you’re interfacing. I was on my American tour and I saw this older gentleman who could have been in his 90s...and he was totally Bluetoothed. He had this really expensive headset and I thought, “That’s the future of old people: to be massively augmented,” with Google on all the time because they can’t remember what anything is, but Google can.

Backbone: So is “cyberspace” already passé?

Gibson: I’m inclined to think people won’t be using that word much in the future for the same reason that when you buy an iPod it doesn’t say “Electric iPod” on the box. And that’s going to be a different world where the thing that might most define poverty would be a lack of connectivity. It’s something I’ve noticed in the last five years in the number of apparently homeless people I see using cellphones. To me, that’s ubiquitous computing. But I actually find it difficult to imagine...what a much more ubiquitously digital world might be like.

Backbone: What about the ultimate interface: a computer or network connectivity in our brains?

Gibson: I think that’s a very ‘80s idea. The virtual reality with the helmet and the gloves [is] one of those things that just never happened. It became a quaint retro-future image like the flying car or the food pills or your personal jetpack and the reason it never happened is that we had absolutely no need for it, because if the content on a screen is sufficiently engrossing you have no need for the helmet.