NOT too long ago, everyone knew what the next millennium would look like. It would be a clean and brightly lit place. People would wear indestructible Star Trek uniforms while zipping along streamlined moving sidewalks. Nothing would be out of reach of a switch. The late 20th-century technologies of clear plastic, television, electric motors and pills pointed towards a future as smooth, grey, efficient and secure as stainless steel.
However it's not yet 1999 and already we know we have got it wrong. The future is not glass and steel but kids in black leather with tattoos and pierced nose rings roaming the vast wilds of cyberspace. Educated adults employ the latest technology not to calculate the thrust of portable backpack rockets, but to construct on-line societies of druids, wiccas and dragonslayers.
The old and rotten structures of yesteryear were not completely replaced by a new sterile plastic version; the two exist side by side in a lopsided organic present. Science-fiction writer William Gibson said the future seems to be 'unevenly distrib-uted'. Rather than fancy hi-tech dominating our horizon, the most powerful things we make are forever shrinking in size and submerging themselves into the background of our lives.
In the future, biology wasn't supposed to matter, but our vulnerability to AIDS showed that biology may soon be the only thing that counts. We are glimpsing a future with a different aesthetic.
The next millennium looks to be one of multi-coloured fringes, spirals and non-linearity, machines that grow, products built on chaos, cows with chips in them, cars that mutate, tribal ethics, software that literally evolves, goats that produce medicine (bio-tech 'pharms' they're called), and 100 agents representing you which collide in a free-market bazaar with other people's agents.
All the skills we thought we were going to need will probably prove to be extraneous. We don't need linear extrapolations or control to the tenth digit of perfection. We don't need obedience and centralised authority or maximisation of efficiency. What we do need, instead, are gardener's skills as we create a neo-biological future.