The Future Is So Yesterday

On a stage in the Innoventions building in Tomorrowland, Honda regularly presents a 15-minute showing of Asimo, its dwarf humanoid robot that trots around in a slight hunch, like the bottom of its little feet are sunburned. The climax of the big show is -- are you ready? -- Asimo walking down five steps! All by himself! His human companion calls for a big round of applause for this miracle. He gets a tepid smattering.

Sometimes it takes guts, trying to dazzle people with the current future. Especially in a Disneyland that has been making Audio-Animatronic birds, flowers and South Sea carvings sing and dance for more than 40 years.

Arturo Leyva, 36, a firefighting instructor from Monterrey, Mexico, is spending part of his vacation in the Innoventions building watching a patch of carpet about half the size of a tennis court, on which tourists drive Segways more cautiously than than they do on the Mall. The future he actually has in his hands is his tiny, talented Motorola Nextel phone. Which future would you rather have, he is asked, your phone or the Segway? "The phone," he says, his eyes going wide at the preposterous question. "It is my life."

"It's much harder to astound people today, " says Marty Sklar, the former principal creative executive of Walt Disney Imagineering, who in 2001 was named a "Disney Legend" for his work going all the way back to Walt's era in the '50s. "They see the speed of change all around them."

Yet it's not like there's any lack of head-scratching, what-do-we-make-of-this material.

In the real world, sequencing the first human genome in 2000 cost billions. It is rapidly dropping to the $1,000-per-person range. Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft, expects it to drop to $10. Some serious scientists at the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda bet that the first human to robustly and vigorously live to the age of 150 is alive today. Single cellphones have more computing power than did the entire North American Air Defense Command when Walt died.

Keeping up is a problem. A major Disney attraction has to last a long time to recoup its investment. To be serious about the future in Tomorrowland, one would have to be constantly vigilant for change, lest you wake up one day and whoops, what's that rotary-dial phone doing on the set? That's one of the reasons Orlando's Tomorrowland has dropped back to the last resort: irony. It's inspired by a change-proof 1920s and '30s Buck Rogers-Flash Gordon nostalgia future. Tomorrowland in Paris -- called Discoveryland -- is a tribute to European seers of previous centuries, like Jules Verne. The antidote to rapid change in Hong Kong -- one of the most futuristic cities on Earth -- is for much of Tomorrowland to be set in an intergalactic space port.

"Tomorrowland was supposed to be . . . a place where Walt could try to articulate a future so compelling that his guests and their children would want to go home and make it all come true, down to the moving sidewalks and the dancing fountains," historian Marling says.

And yet, and yet.

Tomorrowland still features Autopia, just as it did in 1955. The future is cars?

Tomorrowland still features Space Mountain. The future is astronauts?

Tomorrowland still features an attraction by Kodak (the future is Kodak?) called "Honey, I Shrunk the Audience." Its main character is a Gyro Gearloose-Nutty Professor sort. Its message: Scientists can't be trusted. Technology can run amok.