It's sort of a neat coincidence (or cosmic luck,) that tonight I was talking to my older brother (57 year-old hippie who tunes pianos in Wisconsin - I could write a book), and we were comparing some futuristic 50's predictions, and how things actually turned out.
I loved how my brother put it - "We didn't get robots like we expected - we just got smarter appliances."
Instead of a robot to answer your phone, the phone became an answering machine - then cordless - then wireless. To clean your house, we didn't envision Dustbusters, bagless vacuums, carpet washers. In fact, wall-to-wall carpeting wasn't common until what, the 60's?
The Internet - Issac Asimov's "Multivac" in 1956; iPhone to a Star Trek communicator; H.G. Wells described portable television.. this was in 1899, folks.
If you were able to view the future in, say 1956 (year of my birth - yes, when dinosaurs roamed the earth), how would you describe these to the cavemen who lived back then?
- An iPod? DVDs?- Electronic voting? (Well, at least when it works correctly; I'm still miffed that Gore lost in Florida back in 2000)
- How you could file your taxes on the Internet?
- How we use debit cards?- ATMs - man, how did we live when you had to go the actual bank BEFORE 4 p.m. to get cash? Hmm... maybe that's why we are all so badly in debt - another topic for another time.
- Having closed-caption television (a necessity of life for me-of-limited-hearing)
- Using automatic sliding doors every time you go into the mall.... heck, what about MALLS?
And for goodness sake, a BLOG?
Now, granted, there are some things we all thought would have by now.
We would all be a heck of a lot smarter - we would have eliminated wars, disease, and have communities on the moon and Mars... and certainly better late-night television.
But hey, I'm very happy about the things I do have.
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