There’s a scene in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age in which a young hat-thief is being tried in the court of Judge Fang. The judge’s assistant enters the room at the start of the trial and ceremoniously unrolls a meter-by-meter square of paper on a low black table, and it becomes the center of action in the trial. The piece of paper is actually a display device that can access government cameras, graphs, and text, and can receive input from the user via finger-touch or a stylus. It is a most remarkable device and frankly, I’ve wanted one ever since.
It’s now looking like I might get one sooner than you’d think.
We seem to be striding toward that particular future with impressive speed. One could make the case that laptops represent our first faltering steps in that direction, but I say Amazon’s Kindle represents the next leap forward. Wafer thin and with its low battery consumption and low-eye-strain reflective surface, it marks a huge leap toward blending the benefits of paper with those of computers. But that’s only the beginning of what’s happening out there in Science Land.
