Future primitive?

What will bicycles look like in twenty years time? I ask this because the (now defunct) British Standard applicable to bikes (BS6102 pt 1-3 if you were wondering) was concieved in 1992 and if you take a Mountain Bike from 1992 and compare it to one from 2012, it's a wildly different beast - sprouting hydraulic disc brakes and suspension forks with finely honed geometry born out of the requirements of todays descerning off road riders. Road bikes are not immune to this change either with disc brakes beng touted as 'the next big thing' by a few manufacturers and electronic shifting that has been widely embraced by todays marketplace.

Would we have looked at these technical developments with scorn twenty years ago? I guess yes if you look at peoples perception of suspension back in the early '90's "It'll never work" "It'll be too heavy" I must admit to being sceptical myself, my fully rigid MTB with it's 1.9" tyres was more than enough for the riding I was doing back then, but I can't imagine hitting the trails with anything less than 140mm of suspension and 2.2" tyres nowadays...

These current times I can see this sort of negative backlash garnered to things like the 29" and 650B wheel size on the MTB front and disc brakes on the road scene. "It'll never work" "It'll be too heavy" See the similarity?

Perhaps we are right to be suspicious of change. After all, it isn't always for the best and anything which doesn't work well or is too heavy will be weedled out as unnecessary chaff from the corn of the crop and rightly so, the bicycle is beautiful because of it's simplicity, it's mechanical 'feel' the satisfying thunk of a gear change made by your thumb of forfinger moving a length of cable just enough to snick a higher or lower gear, you feel somehow connected to the machine you are operating, it's an extension of you, reacting to your inputs and movements and going where you decide it to. It's a feeling that I think has been a bit lost in the electronic shifting market where the press of a button actuates a servo driven motor that shifts the gear 'for' you (although the new Campag EPS does seem to have retained some of the feel from it's cable driven ancestors)

I watched a video from Parlee Bicycles who have wirelessly linked Shimanos Di2 electronic system to an I-phone and a basic thought control device to allow you to shift gears just by thinking http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWzdWMapJ-c which is an amazing concept, but does that go against why we ride bicycles? Isn't the pleasure of riding a bicycle that we DON'T think about shifting and braking? Imagine having to think about getting that harder gear in the heat of a sprint - I can only liken it to Clint Eastwood having to think in Russian to get the missiles to fire in the film 'Firefox'

But let's not be too hasty, where would Mountain Biking be if it weren't for Disc Brakes and Suspension? or Road bikes without the advent of Carbon Fibre? As easy as it is to say "If it ain't broke don't fix it" that very attitude may be stemmying the future growth of the bicycle and ideas that may revolutionise your cycling world for the better. So keep the ideas coming I say, I'll make up my own mind if I like it or not, but it's nice to have the options out there to choose from.